Do you honestly believe that is a fair summary of the article?
The decision to shut them down happened long ago. They voted against a proposal from the opposition to revert that. The plants were planned to shut down since a long time, there is a lot of unsolved issues around keeping them running, like fuel and personnel. The plants also would impact gas usage only by 1% and electricity isn't a great replacement short term for all the gas used.
In hindsight I think the decision to get out of nuclear was wrong, especially before getting out of coal. But keeping the last 3 running for some more months isn't really a solution for anything.
It seems irrational because that's not what's happening.
Those power plants can't be run next winter.
Contracts have been terminated, replacement parts with long lead times haven't been ordered, maintenance windows have been shifted in anticipation of the shutdown. It's possible to write new contracts and order new parts, so they could be back in operation, maybe sometime late in 2023.
But that would still leave them them down precisely in the period that matters most: Next winter.
I'd be way more worried about the general populations ability to buy groceries and keep the house warm in the winter.
Globally a lot of harvests are falling through because of floods and heat waves. Combined with the inflation that's just starting to take off... Paying for life's necessities will be challenging for a lot of employed workers
A government is a law unto themselves. They have power to do what they need in times of war. Germany shouldn't be pulling a Chamberlain moment while Russia is hot to commit genocide in Europe and roll over whoever they want.
The first person who said words like yours was probably a chieftain long ago who went to his smiths and said "I need my new sword NOW, hurry up with that hardening!"
> Contracts have been terminated, replacement parts with long lead times haven't been ordered, maintenance windows have been shifted in anticipation of the shutdown.
"Excuses"? If you know that your company shuts down one year from now, why would you be ordering spare parts for five years into the future? Especially if you've known that date for twenty years like Germans did?
Sure, sure, but I find difficult to believe that an industrial superpower such as Germany can't find a solution in a couple of months.
The the usual politicians' way of speaking. If there was the political will of having the nuclear power plants works, they would go and find the spare parts in a second. There's no political will (thank you Greens!) so they make up excuses.
Germany is an industrial superpower without military industrial complex and command vertical, meaning that the government is not set up to do such things quickly (in fact, I don’t think even China would be able to move that fast).
Germany's shutting those down because of the Fukushima disaster.
A lot of Germans believe (rightly or wrongly) that Japanese are as quality-conscious and dependable as they themselves. Corollary: if the Japanese can fuck up in the ways that led to Fukushima, then the German operators can fuck up in similar ways.
Now, these people may be wrong. But they made the decision. Until Fukushima, there was a net pro-nuclear vote, after, against, because these people switched.
If you want to argue about safety, I think you might do well do focus on the safety issue that made the significant voter segment change their opinion.
Well, people were evacuated in time. The big question is: can they come back, like ever? The threat isn't so much people dying from radiation if evacuated in time, it is that large regions of densely populated central Europe can become uninhabitable and not usable for agriculture.
AFAIK, the Union/FDP government reversed that decision, made new contract with the plants, changed their opinion again after Fukushima and we now have to pay breach-of-contract fines to the nuclear power plants.
If twenty years ago it was decided in law that X would shut down about now, and X is shutting down now, then I don't see a reason to not say that the decision to shut down X now comes from a law twenty years ago.
Mine is that the decision to stop was taken by a government with a parliamentary majority in general, but narrow popular backing in this specific case. So the law at risk of revision if the right/wrong parties won an election. Some politicians thought revising it might be a good campaign issue.
The reacter lifetimes were extended after such an election, and I think it was a first step. If that had gone well, one of the parties in the coalition would've proposed revising the law before the next election. But it did not go well: "Fukushima ändert alles", said Merkel, and I think she was right. From that point on, the law aligned well with a broad majority of voters. Noone proposed a revision as a campaign issue after that point.
Right. There is no dispute that the Bavarian forests are still strongly contaminated from the Chernobyl disaster and will be for many decades. You still have somewhat to be careful to eat mushrooms from there and especially wild boar.
The problem with nuclear is simply that it is irrelevant to the current situation. Won’t add enough energy to the grid, won’t solve the problem of gas demand at all, so it really doesn’t matter if Germany was right or wrong about it.
No, nobody will admit to that or change their minds, the end of nuclear in Germany will be celebrated as a success for the environment.
No, changing the opinion now would not matter. Germany killed its nuclear industry decades ago. Being right about this would have mattered in the 80s and 90s. You don't get the CO2 or methane that has been emitted back into the ground or the people that died out of the ground by being right in 2022.
It very much matters over the timespan of several decades. That is enough time in which many more nuclear power plants could have been brought online. Just because Germany made the gross error of not building out enough nuclear power to provide for their needs doesn’t mean it is impossible.
No, it doesn't. The nuclear plants were never a substitute for residential gas heaters and the chemical industry consuming copious amounts of natural gas. Any shortfall from the nuclear shutdown can be covered by the underutilized coal plants. It's temporarily inconvenient but doesn't necessitate gas imports in any way.
Uh...are we still talking about Germany? Because in Germany they clearly weren't, unlike in case of France. And Norway's absolutely prodigious consumption of electricity (quadruple amount per capita) even underlines it: electrical heating is absolutely not the way to go forward -- efficient building codes are.
They weren't because of Germany's energy policy, not because nuclear is a bad fit for residential heating. We're talking about "[nuclear on] the timespan of several decades".
Germany has neither a nuclear military-industrial complex like the French do nor the opportunity to waste copious amounts of energy the way Norwegians do, so I fail to see how references to those countries are in any way relevant for Germans' situation. No amount of energy policy will compensate for their different circumstances to the extent of turning Germany into a second France or a second Norway.
Even if you think that's insurmountable problem there's an easy solution: Pay the French to build and operate them, they already do that for other foreign customers.
But look at France's portion of nuclear at the start of the 70s, then the 90s. There's no reason except political will that Germany couldn't do the same.
Perhaps. But saying with 20/20 hindsight of the 2020s that people of the 1970s should have made momentously different decisions for the future of whole national industries for decades to come doesn't feel any less arrogant to me. And that's even assuming that the international situation decades ago was the same as one of today, which it wasn't either.
I'm talking about what should be done today, not crying over the milk spilt in the 70s. I only mentioned the 70s to show how rapidly nuclear could be built to replace other energy sources.
If you look at any longer term projections on the German or EU energy mix in the next 10-30 years, natural gas will still be critical to the energy mix in 2050 if current plans continue. E.g. [1] shows a nice summary of that.
Thus arguments like "efficient building codes" are a red herring. You'll still need to heat your efficiently insulated buildings.
The current plans for doing that are fundamentally still those spearheaded by Germany and others before 2014. If the EU has a serious commitment to longer term sanctions on Russia those plans need to change.
I don't think they will. I think we'll still be buying Russian gas then, and that Germany et al will find some way to sell out Ukraine in the next couple of years. But one can always hope for better.
If you're suggesting a reaction today, then I need to point out that globally, over the past decade, new renewable generation was being installed roughly 15x faster than new nuclear generation. So even that is yet another difference from the situation from the 1970s that makes the experience of 1970s inapplicable: we have choices today that we didn't have back then.
> natural gas will still be critical to the energy mix in 2050 if current plans continue. E.g. [1] shows a nice summary of that.
Being critical and being a large component are two different things -- and it's not that difficult to source smaller amounts of natural gas than what Germany uses today. As far as predictions for distant future are concerned...well, we know how e.g. IEA was able to botch those. So I really wouldn't take any predictions about 2050 for granted.
> Thus arguments like "efficient building codes" are a red herring. You'll still need to heat your efficiently insulated buildings.
Decreasing the energy required by a factor of five or so is not "a red herring". That's a massive change. Likewise, there's apparently a chance that by 2030, this will have been amended to require zero-energy buildings in the future.
What is "enough"? If any solution has to solve all the problems to be considered at all, you're going to have trouble noticing solutions that chip away at the problem until it's solved.
The answer for the war is coal and this is exactly what Germany is doing. It is simpler and cheaper to run the existing coal plants at the full capacity or even increase it than try to maintain the nuclear plants long past the original design lifespan and that were planned to be stopped for years.
In retrospect it would be better if Germany did not decide to shutdown the nuclear, but presently this is a rational decision.
It “really goes wrong” only because we've set a really high bar for safety when talking about nuclear risks compared to most other carcinogenic risks: air pollution, pesticides, alcohol, tobacco, etc. If people where living in Prypiat right now, most of their cancer would come from other sources.
Because of the cultural stigma associated with radiations (which itself comes from the very real fear of a world-ending nuclear war during the early cold war) most smokers would refused to live around a nuclear accident site, even though it's quickly (after the most radioactive elements, namely iodine, has decayed away) much less dangerous than the cigarette they knowingly smoke all day.
Fun fact: did you know that in Germany alone the area of what has been destroyed by coal mining is comparable in size to the exclusion zone of Fukushima. This is when things go alright with coal: https://nitter.42l.fr/autommen/status/1538496930262704128#m
And yet we’re all still here and given the number of nuclear power plants and how long we’ve been using them compared to the tiny number of accidents it shows that it is truly the safest form of large scale power generation.
It is also a lot safer today if new reactors are built. The problem are the old reactors need to be shut down because they're based on older designs. We need to start building Pebble Beach reactors where even if there is a containment break, safe small carbon balls with a thin sliver of fissile material just spill out on the floor. These spread out and reduce their combined temperate averting a meltdown. Individually the balls themselves are not dangerous, they're lukewarm and could be held in the hand (not that you would). I think there are some even newer designs that go beyond this in safety. The problem with the anti-nuclear argument is that it is based on the old rod reactors like the one that failed in Fukushima prefect, Chernobyl or 3 mile island. Of course we shouldn't run those older models anymore. You need to start building the new safer reactors before you begin shutting down the old ones so you can logistically switch, however. Instead we're unfortunately heading for a future where we eventually just shut down these old reactors for safety without a real plan for replacing them. Or, we keep running the old models until they become the very cautionary tale that makes everyone nervous about nuclear.
At the moment it seems that the CO2 problem is more pressing and of greater magnitude than the problem of nuclear waste. It sounds like a relevant tradeoff.
You are misjudging the mood regarding nuclear power in Germany completely. You would have to expend so much political capital to keep those running, it‘s simply not worth it. Not for the benefit they provide, not for any communication goals you might have.
The decision to shut them down happened long ago. They voted against a proposal from the opposition to revert that. The plants were planned to shut down since a long time, there is a lot of unsolved issues around keeping them running, like fuel and personnel. The plants also would impact gas usage only by 1% and electricity isn't a great replacement short term for all the gas used.
In hindsight I think the decision to get out of nuclear was wrong, especially before getting out of coal. But keeping the last 3 running for some more months isn't really a solution for anything.