German Chancellor Scholz speaks out against new nuclear power

Redditors are unbelievably brainwashed in this topic, and a lot of Redditors moved over to Lemmy. I have dragged this metaphor to water countless times before, and when I suggest that they could consider drinking, they just arrogantly declare that I don't understand the facts around liquids, that I don't have any basis for my claims that they should drink it, and that by arguing that people should drink more water, I somehow supporting Coca-Cola.

It's also common knowledge that the more often you build something, the lower its price tends to go as that knowledge spreads. It's part of the reason it's so expensive to build trains in the US and so cheap in South Korea and Spain.

The astroturf campaign from reddit obviously has arrived on lemmy lately

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by these. Can you expand on that? (I mostly mean the centralization, but also looking for clarity on what you mean by security)

You can have this copy/paste from like 5 minutes of googling. You can also run your own study yourself by just googling "average kwh price nuclear" and "average kwh price wind" and see how it looks. You can also google "average co2 eq emissions total lifetime nuclear" and likewise for wind/solar PV. This is extremely simple stuff, guys. I am basically saying, "lentils are cheaper than steak" and you're asking for citations.

2022 Electricity ATB Technologies and Data Overview, annual technology baseline:

https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315

Wow look isn't it crazy how nuclear is the most expensive one?

Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report: "Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build. When you factor it all in, you're looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant."

Differences in carbon emissions reduction between countries pursuing renewable electricity versus nuclear power, published in nature energy: "We find that larger-scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to associate with significantly lower carbon emissions while renewables do. "

The difference between my comment and a COVID denial comment is that if you googled covid denial arguments you’d find that 99.999% of results refute their claims. If you do the same for my claims, you’ll find the exact same sources that I used to make my arguments on the top page of the search results. It’s not the same.

Also solar panel manufacturing is a very intense process with a lot of carbon impact

The carbon impact mostly is energy used in production. So it's high when you produce solar panels powered by shitty coal plants and basically non-existent when you have build them once and are constructing replacements with solar energy. (The same is true for nuclear btw and also often completely misrepresented in discussion. Nuclear plants in a country full of nuclear plants have a much lower carbon footprint. That's not some technological or scaling effect as often claimed but the simple fact of building the reactor and enriching the fuel with energy already green)

A 100% renewable grid would need a lot of batteries and that too could drive the price up

Actually no. The grid would need batteries (but also alternatives like capacitors or fly-wheels) for short-term stabilisation, but the amount is limited. The grid also need long-term storage but here batteries are completely inadequate. Also the requirements for batteries are usually misrepresented. No, we don't neen some bullshit Lithium-ion batteries or similar stuff requiring rare earths and other rare ressources. Those are used in handhelds where energy density is the main concern. I can perfectly build a stationary grid battery cheaply and without rare ressources as nobody cares if that building-sized installation is 5% bigger and 30% heavier than a build with lithium-ion batteries and also gets 20° hotter in operation... because it's not a handheld.

Case in point: One of the very first things that happened in Germany the moment the new government was sworn in and long before they could actually do anything: energy companies started installing the first battery-based storage units as they now were no longer intentionally sabotaged in creating storage infrastructure for renewables. What did they use? Car battereis. Used ones that were already deposed. Dirt cheap for costs barely above the recycling value. Because the requirements in grid stabilisation and short-term storage are indeed completely different that in cars (again: energy densitiy vs. low price and car batteries with only 60% of their capacity left were completely okay for that job).

Let's not forget distributed grids reliant on wind can't tolerate local drops in energy output so you need to set up a zillion little LNG plants that are even less efficient than big ones

Edit: or I guess batteries that haven't been invented yet but that's sure not how the problem is solved most places these days

Demand sheduling.

The current grid is run on the idea that we ramp up power plants until the current demand is met.

The future will be to make the demand flexible and follow the availability. Typical example is when to charge a car battery, but it also goes for heating and cooling applications, using power to x converters, like hydrogen production, sheduling household appliances like washing machines and industrial processes.

Doing so we can close the gap between real baseload and available renewable supply, which in turns reduces the amount of storage needed.

Here a paper on the base load.

Also solar panels power amortization time is around a year, depending on cell chemistry, production and installation location.

Wind tends to be higher at night (at least here in Texas), so solar and wind are good complements. The biggest issue here is in the summer right after the sun sets, but that just means having enough battery storage for a couple hours for temps to start dropping. But wind/solar are still cheaper after including storage for that amount of time by far compared to new nuclear or new fossil fuels. Only existing facilities have a comparable per kWh cost when compared to new solar/wind + storage. Even if you quadrupled the storage, it would still be cheaper than new nuclear and comparable to existing nuclear iirc. Granted cost of storage partly depends on what storage options are viable locally for small grids.

Is PV common at commercial scale solar?

I wrote a larger comment addressing this, but honestly, you’d be better just googling it. It’s eminently plausible, it’s the industry consensus. Here’s a Wikipedia link for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

I wrote a larger comment addressing this, but honestly, you’d be better just googling it. It’s eminently plausible, it’s the industry consensus. Here’s a Wikipedia link for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

Thanks for the question. Firstly, most places have a power grid which is far larger than their locality. For example, the southeastern United States is connected to a single big grid which connects every smaller sub-grid east of the Rocky Mountains. This means that a home in Florida can be powered all the way from the Bath County pumped-storage facility in Virginia, the second largest such facility in the US.

Hydroelectricity can also be generated by rivers, which are commonly used in lowland areas, and geothermal is also viable at any time of the day. Biomass is also an option, though it’s the last resort really, although as long as it’s responsibly managed, it can be nearly carbon neutral.

There are also alternatives to pumped storage, lots of them. Compressed air, thermal storage, and hydrogen are a few examples just off the top of my head, though I’m sure there are many more. Pumped storage is just very efficient and cheap, so if we can plausibly do it, it should be the first choice. And if it can’t be done somewhere, then we should connect that place to somewhere which can!

I’m really glad to hear it, thanks for being open to changing your perspective when you are presented with new information. It’s a quality which is sadly rare these days it seems!

…which is hugely worse for nuclear? What is your point?

Nuclear power plants require eye watering amounts of concrete.

They require continuous (and ever-increasing) extraction of fissile matter such as uranium ore (a limited resource, by the way - if we used nuclear power instead of fossil fuels we would run out pretty quickly, too, all things considered).

Nuclear power also consumes (and irradiates) vast quantities of water.

They are huge nightmares for biodiversity as they are massive projects usually flattening large swathes of land.

They produce waste which is not only irradiated and hazardous but also a major security risk, so it has to be safeguarded… and/or sealed into a hole in the ground where it will remain a risk for years to come.

The building projects themselves are astronomical in scale and require huge quantities of materials to be shipped by fleets and fleets of trucks followed by a lot of industrial work. Then in a couple of decades the site has to be decommissioned which is even more work.

Estimates for the lifetime emissions (extraction, commission, operation, etc.) CO2EQ of nuclear power are commonly thought to be between 60-100g per kWh. Solar power is somewhere in the region of 20-40g per kWh, and wind is somewhere around 10-20g per kWh.

So again, no, nuclear energy is not what we want. Support ONLY renewables. Nuclear power is wasteful.

That's a really bad take. Funds should be focused where they're most effective at transitioning to clean energy.

Would you like to elaborate? Renewables are a much better power source than nuclear in every single way that matters. They’re better for the environment, cheaper, lower emissions and are faster to commission. Every $1 spent on nuclear power is $1 stolen from renewables.

I’m on my phone, dude, I’m not gonna juggle a dozen sources on this tiny screen and crappy keyboard just to prove you wrong, you’re more than capable of using Google to find the facts yourself. I challenge you to prove me wrong. You can even cite some hilariously biased source like World Forum of Nuclear Investor Funds or something, those ones are always fun because they’re like “oh with our super cool advanced new nuclear reactor that doesn’t exist, it’s as good as solar or wind for almost 150% of the cost!! :)”

Germany literally just shut down their existing nuclear plants and replaced them with fossil fuels.

This claim is patently false.

Sorry, but this comment is so full of false information.

If you are able to read German or use a translator I can recommend this interview where the expert explains everything and goes into the the details.

https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Deutschland-ist-kein-Strombettler-erklaert-Bruno-Burger-von-Energy-Charts-im-Klima-Labor-article24357979.html

Claiming that Germany is fucked after shutting down nuclear for good is repeating the talking points from the far right here. Don't be that guy.

Germany literally just shut down their existing nuclear plants and replaced them with fossil fuels.

That's completely false.

responsible for like 1/8 of Germany's electrical production

More like 2-3%

it wasn't a cost decision

Not exclusively, but the high price of nuclear is one of the main points in the decision

the graph at the top shows the growth in Germany's installed wind capacity in Germany leveling off

Because the graph stops in 2022. The growth now is accelerating and even more so for solar power which OP conveniently does not show us

https://strom-report.com/photovoltaik/

Given this thread is about new nuclear, I'm not sure why you are making up beliefs about what someone else in the thread believes. Personally a fan of old nuclear plants since their biggest expense (financial and likely ecological) is making them, so keeping them running is good as long as we are relying on fossil fuels.

is it possible they're running into some limits on how much they can generate efficiently that way?

Why just speculate on it while insinuation someone is wrong about something when you could look it up? From what I can gather, it looks like administration/licensing delays, court cases, and rules limiting how close they can be to residential buildings (apparently 10 times the height of the turbine) are the main contributors to the slowdown.

Also, solar is still growing more quickly and 2023 is having quicker growth in wind than last year (which was itself an increase from the previous year), so the trend being shown may already be outdated. Granted, inflation apparently are an issue now (not when the slowdown happened, but now as the rate of wind installation is increasing). And the rate of increase isn't enough imo, but building new nuclear instead of using the same resources to build solar or wind at this point means relying more on fossil fuels.

I’d happily sit here and punch holes in it if I thought you were actually open to an argument

If you had just said this and stopped writing then you'd have saved yourself time and embarrassment. I can dunk anytime, anywhere on whatever arguments you dream up, because definitionally if you're arguing with me about this then you have no idea what you're talking about. It's a fool-in-a-barrel type of situation, really.

Anyways, enough merry-making, to the meat of your comment:

Germany literally just shut down their existing nuclear plants... it wasn’t a cost decision, it was a bullshit anti-nuclear one

Nuclear power has huge cost implications, economically and politically, which make it less viable. If Germany had built renewables instead of nuclear, would they have turned off the renewables that were producing the cheapest, cleanest energy ever known, with zero fuel costs and minimal maintenance costs? You make my argument for me.

The decommissioning of the german nuclear power plants was planned in 2011 because nuclear is a waste of resources. German scientists know this as well as I do. You're the one arguing with them.

"Nuclear energy is also often more expensive than wind and solar power, there are no longer any real advantages with nuclear energy.” - Volker Quaschning, a professor of renewable energy at the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin. “Nuclear power plants are a hindrance to the energy transition. They are not able to run in stop-and-go mode and cannot really compensate for power fluctuations that arise when using solar and wind energy. With Germany looking to expand solar and wind power very rapidly over the next few years, now is a good time to shut down nuclear reactors to make way for renewable energy,” he said.

“In the German context, the phase-out of nuclear energy is good for the climate in the long term. It provides investment certainty for renewable energy; renewables will be much faster, cheaper and safer than expansion of nuclear energy,” - Niklas Höhne, a professor the mitigation of greenhouse gases at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

...and replaced them with fossil fuels

I think you're referring to the emergency recommissioning of German coal power plants in response to Russian gas being held hostage over the Ukraine war? It's not like they went "meh fuck the climate lol lets just turn off nuclear and put on the old coal burner for old time's sake".

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/d80WT/4/