the german green party recently won their biggest share of votes. they're now part of a coalition government. one of their core pledges was to kill off nuclear, something that was set in motion by the previous government after the tsunami induced fukushima nuclear accident.
The rejection of nuclear power is so rooted into German society that there's no meaningful time frame to re-educate "concerned population".
Energiewende is failing every day more and more, burning hundreds of billions of Euros, while kissing Putin's chocolate starfish in the process
>There is also no doubt that the German Energiewende, at first sight, does not serve as an encouraging example in this respect: The cost bill - in the sense of the direct, perceptible financial effects - has already run up to almost € 500 billion, and the German private households as well as many businesses pay significantly more for electricity than in most other OECD-countries.
To keep this discussion grounded with some numeric facts, it's worth looking at the trend in Germany's electricity generation capacity over the past 20 years[0]. For example, fossil and nuclear capacity are both down from their peak in 2010, and their nuclear capacity is currently less than even that of biomass. Other charts are available on the same page[1].
By that metric if you produce lots of electricity at the exact times when no one needs it, you are a hero because lots of MWh for some small build cost.
That metric ignores how much real world economy is being enabled by the power that you generated, roughly the price for which you could sell your energy in a free market.
My point would be that energy is much more important when the sun is not shining, etc. that makes e.g. solar not as good as a naive calculation would say. That sould be accounted for right?
> if you produce lots of electricity at the exact times when no one needs it, you are a hero
I think that currently if you are capable of producing electricity but no one needs it, you get curtailed, and your "theoretical production" doesn't get counted towards your levelized cost.
What really needs to happen is for there to be good ways to store that otherwise-wasted energy (opportunity). Flow batteries are a promising technology for grid energy storage, as are power-to-gas and power-to-ammonia systems.
That's a great point. Also, the more renewable capacity is installed, the less often fossil and nuclear plants need to run at full capacity, which means they generate less energy (and less RoI) over their design life, which pushes up their "levelized" costs further.
As you say, the inflection point for that economic effect was probably years ago in a lot of places, although if the world had made an economically rational coordinated response to climate change 40 years ago, it could well have made sense to mass-produce nuclear power stations and use the excess energy for atmospheric carbon capture.
"which pushes up their "levelized" costs further."
To me that means that the "levelized cost" metric punishes controllable energy sources unfairly for the "issues" that are caused by volatile energy sources right?
On the one hand it would be wrong to punish controllable energy sources for not being useful when renewable energy is abundant, but on the other hand it would be foolish to refuse to use renewables when they produce energy more cheaply.
Perhaps a better way to look at it is that there are two markets: one where providers compete to offer the cheapest power, and one where providers offer guaranteed amounts of power.
Once inter-day storage is deployed at scale, the providers in that second market might only be called upon 20% of the time (to pick an arbitrary number), but even if that means their costs are 5x higher than renewables, that might still be a price worth paying to ensure people continue to have electric heating during cold still winter nights.
I think the real outstanding questions are how far energy storage and over-provisioning of renewables can take us. For some people, charging a battery in their car or home during the day and half-draining it over night will mean they are self-sufficient in terms of storage for most of the year. On a wider scale, at certain prices it might even make sense to extract CO2 from the air and use renewable energy to make renewable natural gas.
Last I checked, nuclear power is, indeed, dangerous. It may be a danger we have gotten good at controlling. Or we may think that. But a can of gasoline is a dangerous good even if you have a fire extinguisher pointing at it at all times.
Also: the reaction is motivated more by the simultaneous labeling of natural gas as a "green technology", because the ridiculousness of a fossil fuel being subsidized to achieve climate goals is rather obvious.
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EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document (reuters.com)
482 points by accountinhn 9 months ago | 552 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464
Nuclear should be considered part of clean energy standard, White House says (arstechnica.com)
425 points by nixass 9 months ago | 356 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987
See also: https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-n...