Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back
Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back
The past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide.
The article is badly researched.
This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022
The red-green coalition did not announce the 2022 date. They (Greens/SPD) announced a soft phase-out between 2015-2020 in conjunction with building renewables. This planned shift from nuclear to renewables was reverted by Merkel (CDU = conservatives) in 2010. They (CDU) changed their mind one year later in 2011 and announced the 2022 date; but without the emphasis on replacing it with renewables. This back and forth was also quite the expensive mistake by the CDU on multiple levels, because energy corporations were now entitled financial compensation for their old reactors.
IMO a lot of this had to do with Schroeder's and Merkel's connections with Russia and running the country's manufacturing base on cheap gas and oil.
As I suspected. Conservatism is the reason we can't have nice things. Again.
What do you mean? Don't you think transitioning to mostly renewables while coal and gas go down are good things?
What the fuck are you talking about? Did you even bother to read the article?
"The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.
This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party—today the world’s most influential—which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats. This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022, and passed a raft of legislation supporting renewable energy.
That, in turn, turbocharged the national deployment of renewables, which ballooned from 6.3 percent of gross domestic electricity consumption in 2000 to 51.8 percent in 2023"
Ah yes, the arch-conservatives, the Greens and Social Democrats.
When I was a kid, Chernobyl happened. We weren't that far away and although I was very little I still remember the fear and uncertainty in my parent's faces. The following years were marked by research about what we can no longer eat, where our food comes from, etc
I also remember the fights about where to store nuclear waste.
I don't want to burn coal. I am pretty upset about what happened to our clean energy plans. But I will also never trust nuclear again. And I think, so do many in my generation.
which is funny because fossil fuels are everywhere poisoning the air and environment in general, not different from the nuclear radiation bogeyman
The best thing to do when you fall off a horse, is climb straight back up on it. Rejecting almost limitless power because of an accident almost 40 years ago is foolish to me. Luckily research didn't completely stop and modern plants are a lot safer with a lot of medical applications for the waste.
But the horse still has a broken leg (End-Storage) and noone really knows how to fix that at the moment. Maybe give the horse some drugs to make the leg stronger (Transmutate the materials from long to moderately-long half-lifes), but we still need to support it in the end.
The move to coal was absolutely stupid, the CDU (which is currently gaining some traction.. again), dialed back on renewables which should have replaced some of the capacities lost to nucelar.. and then decided a new coal plant was a great idea too.
Probably some corruption.. sorry "Lobbying"-work behind that.. its not like the Experts (which were paid pretty well) told them that was a bad idea..Maybe some more modern nucelar plants might work.. but its unprofitable (probably always was, considering the hidden costs on the tax payers already), so needs to be heavily state-funded, same with storage (plus getting all the stuff out of the butchered storage Asse, putting it somewhere else)
I am open to it, but dont see it happening. And storage.. no hopeful thoughts about that either, i dont think the current politic structures are well suited to oversee something like that from what we have seen from other storage-locations that are or were in use.I'd also love some more plans for big energy storage aswell as new subsidies for the energy grid and renewables. The famous german bureaucracy is obviously also not helping any of this.
You forgot the latest one at Fukushima just 13 years ago. The costs of this catastrophe are estimated twice as high (~0.5T USD).
God dam people are fucking stupid nuclear is safer then coal wind and solar and better for the planet https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU here is my source and if you want his ask him
The problem is the waste. Germany has radioactive waste and it couldn't find a suitable place to deposit it for over 30 years. I think it's still somewhere on rails or in temporary storages. It's horrible and they don't want to collect more of it.
Here is more about the problem that no one talks about: https://youtu.be/uU3kLBo_ruo
Nuclear waste is a potential issue. Fossil fuel waste is a major issue right now.
The fact that the waste for nuclear is entirely contained is very good. It allows us to place it in permanent storage location like the one in Finland from your video, and perhaps even launch it off the planet in one or two centuries. There is no containing co2, only reducing.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/uU3kLBo_ruo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This safety comes at a cost, literally. It's fucking insanely expensive to keep it safe. Yet it can and has failed. Also, fissile material needs to come from somewhere. Guess where that is? Also, how much of it is still available? Nah, fuck nuclear power.
Yup. A significant amount of the fissile material in Europe used to come out of Russia. France, who is commonly held up as the arch-defender of nuclear power, is now fighting basically colonial wars in Africa for this stuff. There's a finite amount of it, it's costly to extract, costly to refine, costly to transport. Even before you've generated a single kilowatt of power, you've already done a lot of damage to the environment just for the fuel.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/lhHHbgIy9jU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The author is wrong. It is only a matter of time before Germany goes back to nuclear. Physics won't change regardless of short-term opinion.
You sure gobbled up that Putin propaganda pre-war. But now it’s 2023 and Germany still stands. How much time will have to pass until you people realize the extend of Germany‘s energy dependency was vastly overestimated? France with their nuclear grid is now importing more energy from Germany than the other way around. And if you think that‘s only temporarily you should take a closer look.
Not only is Germany not exporting more power than France, but they have dropped down to fourth in the EU behand Spain and Sweden as well. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-07/france-is-europe-s-top-power-exporter-as-germany-turns-importer
Yes France imports cheep renewable energy from Germany when they have a glut of it they cant use, but that just means they sell on their nuclear power at a profit to places like Italy and the UK, and then when Germany doesnt have excess renewable production they sell to them at a profit too.
What does this have to do with their comment...?
I’m not going to pretend I know what Germans are thinking but I thought the author made a strong case about why they’d dislike nuclear. Doesn’t matter how great it is when it’s unpopular.
I'm from Germany and I'm pretty sure we won't go back. I do think that the decision was populistic and blindly actionistic in the light of Fukushima (like almost all political decisions in the last decades) and we'll reap the rewards of that in the coming years.
Predictions that the nuclear exit would leave Germany forced to use more coal and facing rising prices and supply problems, meanwhile, have not transpired. In March 2023—the month before the phaseout—the distribution of German electricity generation was 53 percent renewable, 25 percent coal, 17 percent gas, and 5 percent nuclear. In March 2024, it was 60 percent renewable, 24 percent coal, and 16 percent gas.
Overall, the past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide, a 60-year low in coal use, sizeable emissions cuts, and decreasing energy prices.
This is my biggest take away from this article.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Instead, activists championed what they regarded as safer, greener, and more accessible renewable alternatives like solar and wind, embracing their promise of greater self-sufficiency, community participation, and citizen empowerment (“energy democracy”).
This support for renewables was less about CO₂ and more aimed at resetting power relations (through decentralised, bottom-up generation rather than top-down production and distribution), protecting local ecosystems, and promoting peace in the context of the Cold War.
The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.
This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party—today the world’s most influential—which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats.
Indeed, the very book credited with coining the term Energiewende in 1980 was, significantly, titled Energie-Wende: Growth and Prosperity Without Oil and Uranium and published by a think tank founded by anti-nuclear activists.
That lasted until the 2011 Fukushima disaster, after which mass protests of 250,000 and a shock state election loss to the Greens forced that administration, too, to revert to the 2022 phaseout plan.
The original article contains 651 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
You see, it's so much safer for Germans that Germany has been slowly poisoning itself by burning coal for the last few decades breathing in radioactive nuclei from the combustion of ionized compounds in the coal. By slowly breathing in lethal doses of carcinogens, they've completely avoided a nuclear meltdown.
Obviously this was the safer route than a potential failure of a reactor. You know those things that are exceedingly governed or regulated and managed. Because Germany is such an active seismic zone with so many natural disasters that are constantly a present threat to its reactors.
Now tell me again about this oceanfront property in Colorado you have for sale.
The tldr bot summarized only page one of a two-page article. That summary is missing a lot of context.
Missed opportunity to put solaire on the dinosaur.
ITT the church of nuclear energy strikes again.
Let's skip renewables, pretend there's enough fissionable material and start a straw man discussion about coal my brothers in nuclear. Atom.
Might I add a point on the cost from MMT perspective. So long as there's enough people and materials to build nuclear plants so that we aren't competing for them with other industries to any significant extent, we can print the money needed to build the plants without any significant effect on inflation. This of course is also true for any other plants or installations.