Germany to switch off last remaining nuclear power plants

https://www.ft.com/content/24247417-2a69-47ab-bab3-b81befad8335

by SongofEarth • 3 years ago

54 187 3 years ago

ft.com

spyke112• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/Fefhs

ChuckNorris896• 3 years ago

And the coal plants?

Mashimo12• 3 years ago

https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/klimaschutz/ko...

Bis spätestens im Jahr 2038 soll das letzte Kohlekraftwerk in Deutschland stillgelegt werden.

toomanyrichies• 3 years ago

Google Translate results, for those who don't speak German:

"The last coal-fired power plant in Germany is to be shut down by 2038 at the latest."

hutzlibu11• 3 years ago

They are burning greatly and recently there was supposedly the last village demolished, to get more coal. Also, you can buy coal in the supermarket and use it in your unfiltered stove at home. So not everything is green here, despite a green government.

mvdwoord• 3 years ago

Let them eat yellowcake.

waynenilsen• 3 years ago

Is there any rational basis for this that makes any sense? I honestly want to understand the anti-nuclear position but I can't seem to find anything that really is convincing.

josteink2• 3 years ago

There isn't. But existing nuclear-power (where the environmental cost is already paid) isn't perceived "green", even though we can get stable "free" power for years and years and years.

The "Green shift" is fundamentally not scientific, but driven by emotions and buzzwords, and hand-wavey things which can appear to be environmentally friendly or in some cases, just pure environmental accounting cheating/fraud (like moving your emissions to another country instead).

What all professional politicians really care most about though is their own personal reelection, and you can't get reelected without appealing to a wide enough audience. Doing "green" things is their current strategy to appeal to (non-rational perceptions held by) younger demographics.

JanSt17• 3 years ago

It‘s basically fear. The Green Party was founded with the mission to stop nuclear power in Germany. The media repeated their talking points for years and years. It sounds so good and we have dozens of „experts“ who tell us how expensive and dangerous nuclear power is.

civilized3• 3 years ago

As an American, it's so interesting to look at the intra-European differences we normally ignore.

France managed to scale nuclear power with the consent of the population, and it's gone fine, but for some reason countries right next door don't see anything worth learning.

I guess you could say the same about America and Canada, but some of us are accustomed to seeing Europeans as more enlightened than us politically. I suppose people around the world are not that different in the end.

hutzlibu11• 3 years ago

"how expensive and dangerous nuclear power is"

Well, it is dangerous and therefore expensive. Mining Uranium is dirty. Handling the waste is expensive. And handling a big accident is very expensive.

The alternatives are just expensive as well and not without risk either.

So sure, big parts of those fears are definitely irrational. The risks of the invisible dangers of things people do not understand. This is always hard, especially coupled with the fear of a nuclear war. It should probably have been propagated more, that radiation is a very natural thing and without nuclear energy, there likely would be no life on earth, as the earth would be way colder, without fission inside the crust (and core?) warming the earth.

hutzlibu11• 3 years ago

It is a cultural thing, the green party defined and bound their identity with the anti nuclear movement in the 80s/90s and now they rose to power.

And that movement was strong back then, because chernobyl happened, the clouds came over here and to this day, it is recommended against eating mushrooms from the forest regulary.

Then Fukoshima revitalisied that traumata and in the heat of the moment, the decision was made.

bayesian_horse28• 3 years ago

Bullshit. The "Green" party is hovering around 20%, at best. Stop using them as scapegoats for bashing of opinions you don't like.

Nuclear power is very unpopular in Germany. People don't like nuclear infrastructure in their back yards. And it's far from an irrational fear. And yes, there is a part about "We don't want nuclear weapons", so there is one less incentive to stomach the cost and issues and bulldoze over concerns.

At the moment we can have political arguments about keeping one or two online. Don't mistake that for a desire or ability to build new ones...

hans_castorp• 3 years ago

Basically all major incidents involving nuclear power plants fueled that position.

It started with Chernobyl but Fukujima was essentially the event that made the government speed up the whole plan.

Plus: the still unclear situation on how and where all the nuclear waste will be stored for the next thousands of years.

Note that nuclear plants only contributed to about 5% of all the electrical power in Germany.

0xDEF3• 3 years ago

thousands of years

After a few decades most of it will have decaded into low radioactivity industrial waste.

doktrin2• 3 years ago

Fukujima was essentially the event that made the government speed up the whole plan.

It's wild to me that Fukushima was held up as a reasonable justification to accelerate nuclear decommissioning in Germany. Even ignoring the extent to which the disaster in question could have been mitigated, was anyone expecting a tsunami to suddenly manifest over Bavaria?

JanSt17• 3 years ago

In 2021 the remaining (!) 6 power plants produced more electricity than all installed solar capacity.

The nuclear waste storage is not solved because it is a policy not to solve it.

On all metrics coal is more damaging and dangerous than nuclear.

josteink2• 3 years ago

Note that nuclear plants only contributed to about 5% of all the electrical power in Germany.

And how much of that is coal?

Nuclear power plants provides stable power regardless of weather, wind and climate, and serves as a necessary baseline which can be complimented by renewables.

Eliminating this without having any replacement, any stable baseline power is knowingly making the power-grid and power-supply of your nation unstable. In lack of better words, I would call it malicious.

adrianN6• 3 years ago

Nuclear power is pretty expensive and doesn't do well in a grid with a high percentage of renewables.

Cardinal71672• 3 years ago

Citation needed

ohyes2• 3 years ago

Expensive compared to what? It’s only expensive if you ignore the negative externalities of literally everything else.

yodelshady• 3 years ago

We've spent in excess of 900 euros per MWh this year on fossil sources to back up renewables this last year, Europe-wide, because there IS NO OPTION to sacrifice reliable power - if there is shortfall, society collapses, quickly. There is no even vaguely credible plan to replace those sources. At this point, the European "market" is so stuffed with subsidies out of wholly predictable "temporary necessity" the whole god-damn concept of a "market price" is a lie.

Germany chose coal and gas. They should be held accountable for that.

JanSt17• 3 years ago

Works really good for France and Sweden.

janmarsal• 3 years ago

Germany has a lot of brown coal and desire to use it. However, it's not politically trendy. By heavily investing in renewables while closing down nuclear power plants they know they'll have to be relying on coal for decades into the future out of "necessity" and thus they ensure the survival of their brown coal mining business.

Kind of the same how oil companies shill for windmills and solar while telling everyone that nuclear power is very, very dangerous, because they know that windmills and solar aren't a solution and all countries that rely on such tech will be dependent on oil and gas.

Renewables aren't really seen as a threat to fossil fuels, unlike nuclear power.

bayesian_horse28• 3 years ago

Actually no, coal will be phased out much sooner than "decades".

Mashimo12• 3 years ago

Look into Asse II.

West Germany was looking for a nuclear waste site. I think long to medium term? Not sure. Anyhow, they had like about a dozen potential sites. But then East Germany places a nuclear waste site very close to the border.

Politicians do what they do best, step over the suggestion of the scientist and place all the nuclear waste into Asse II, which is close to the border. Just to fuck with East Germany. No, Asse II was not on the list of potential sites :)))

Now we are combined again with a nuclear waste site smack in the middle of Germany. Groundwater leaks in and we have to dig up the old rusting barrels again.

They have to dig a whole new tunnel just to get to them. It's insane. Oh, and before that we and a few other countries just throw the barrels into the ocean.

This was a long time ago, so you might think we found a new site. No :) NIMBY is strong.

France and Finnland have some decent long term storage.

Combine the bad government track record with that Germany is the birth place of homeopathy and 50% of the population believes in angels. Sprinkle in a bit of Fukushima and Chernobyl. My mother sometimes talks about how she was scared and my sister could not play outside.

Sure, a large part of it is not rational.

captainmuon• 3 years ago

Well the final storage problem for nuclear waste is not solved, and will likely never be solved. Second, nuclear power is not as competitive as everybody thinks without hefty subsidies. And what became important more recently, the Uranium is mostly imported from Russia and former USSR states.

Switching off the nuclear power plants is a concious descision of the German society to go without from nuclear power. The descision is not between nuclear and fossil. The decision is between nuclear, and using less energy (when renewable cannot fill the gap).

I find it surprising that the proponents of nuclear power, who are often free-market libertarians, have so little faith in the market. If we produce less power, prices will go up at first. But only marginally, because it will become more lucrative to build new (renewable) power plants. And energy-intensive industry will be scaled back in times where not much is generated. The economy works basically like a buffered solution. That's why I'm confident, when we turn off the last nuclear plant, nothing will happen.

bayesian_horse28• 3 years ago

Actually, quite a bit of capacity was made up by not exporting so much capacity to France and other nations.

Yes, before the nuclear transition, Germany exported quite a lot of energy to France, the supposed smart nuclear country.

wokwokwok• 3 years ago

It’s maybe not as stupid as it seems.

Nuclear power makes sense in stable peaceful societies where long term planning and maintenance mitigate the risks associated with it.

Europe is perhaps, not currently a stable peaceful place where that makes sense.

In other circumstances I’d be all for nuclear power… but, maybe some solar panels that won’t fuck anything up if the conflict in Ukraine gets out of hand or global warming / ai / banking crisis causes a society collapse isn’t such a bad call in the short term, eh?

cryptonym4• 3 years ago

Solar panels are not a replacement for nuclear power. Controllable energy sources as Gas and Coal are.

doktrin2• 3 years ago

These decisions were taken years before the conflict in Ukraine, and German energy policy at the time was largely predicated on Russian imports. Hence, peace and stability in Europe seems to have been an underlying assumption rather than something that was being hedged against.

quonn6• 3 years ago

No company wants to run the plants, they are very old, expensive and only ever provided 5% of the energy anyway. The population overwhelmingly rejects it (rightfully so) and nobody wants the fuel dumped in their backyard later. And the locations we had planned for that is broken.

JanSt17• 3 years ago

1) they are some of the most modern plants on this planet, upgraded very regualary

2)The companies do want to run them, just bot under the imposed conditions and constant exit threat. Preussen Elektra lobbied to keep them running constantly

3)They provided vastly more in the past but got axed piece by piece

4) around 80% currently want to keep them running, especially younger people

5) in other news, no one wants climate change. And no garden was requested as waste storage yet.

moek• 3 years ago

there are many reasons of course :)

for example, germany does not have much space for radioactive waste and the people do not want to live near radioactive waste. so politicians can't decide where to put all the waste.

also the performance of nuclear plants are not convincing: if you look to france where many nuclear plants have to shut down because there is not enough water to cool down the plants.

bayesian_horse28• 3 years ago

It won't make sense to you. I don't believe you a tiny bit when you say you want to understand it. But yes, there are rational arguments. It is entirely rational not to believe "scientific" risk estimates after a couple too many impossible accidents happened. Estimation risk is real, fat tail risks are a problem, especially with the potential of radioactive fallout. The total projected cost of the Fukushima cleanup is going up year by year btw.

Other rational arguments: The infrastructure is unwieldy and extremely unpopular at best. Germany has no path to solving the nuclear waste issue, partly for political reasons: Nobody wants that (or other parts of nuclear infrastructure, really) in their backyard, and backyards are spaced pretty closely in the old world, and when every citizen has the same voting weight, tough luck. It just doesn't work.

Ukraine is teaching us another point: Nuclear power plants are weak points in the national security, and extremely so in wartime. Even when the enemy shows restraint (Russia strangely does, in that regard) there is an awkward element of hostage taking. Nuclear power is a bet on multiple decades of peace and everything going just right. And if you were really that interested, you could easily find lots more arguments.

elif5• 3 years ago

Germany has the 6th largest coal reserve in the world. It makes (economic) sense for them to protect their natural resource value by extending its relevancy as long as possible.

Just like it makes (economic) sense for Germany to use its ECB role to put struggling economies into debt agreements that, for instance, transfer control of national infrastructure like airports to German corporations.

Of course, in both cases, the superficial reasons given are bright fairytales of benevolence, and the German economic benefits are cast as convenient but coincidental externalities.

quonn6• 3 years ago

What is this magical role that Germany supposedly has in the ECB?

Name the struggling country that was supposedly put in a debt agreement. Is this Greece? Did Greece not _choose_ in a popular vote to remain in the Eurozone? Did they not enter the Eurozone by using fraudulent accounting in the first place? Let us know what Germany then supposedly did exactly during that crisis.

Regarding coal your argument makes zero sense. Either nuclear is cheaper and could cover all needs, then it doesn't matter how much coal there is, it could be left alone. Or it isn't, then there is no need to shut down nuclear to expand coal.

In reality German coal mining has not been economical for decades and has been heavily subsidised to safe some jobs. The German policy is to change everything to renewables and to phase out coal until 2030.

tfourb2• 3 years ago

The origin of the German discourse about nuclear power is linked to a) nuclear proliferation and b) Chernobyl

The generation born after WWII developed a deep desire to not repeat the slaughter of WWII and many felt that their parents essentially lied to them about their experiences during the Nazi era and their responsibility for it. This mistrust transferred to government policies that would rebuilt the German armed forces, join NATO and by extension come under the "nuclear umbrella" of the US. Nuclear power was seen by many of these people as a bridge technology into nuclear weapons.

Regarding Chernobyl, it might be difficult for Americans to understand how scary and personal that crisis felt for many Germans. I personally can't remember the incident, but our parents shaved our heads and kept us indoors for days and weeks out of fear of potential nuclear fallout. It is comparable to the psychological impact of the COVID-epidemic for many of that generation. My wife is from Eastern Bavaria and forest mushrooms and wild boars over there still have elevated radiation levels and are not recommended to be eaten in many cases.

The phaseout of the last nuclear power plants was essentially decided more than two decades ago under a green-left government. A bit more than ten years ago, a center-liberal government came to power and would have been able to reverse the decision (many politicians in the two parties would have liked to) but Fukushima happened and this became politically untenable. To remove the topic from the political discourse, Angela Merkel pushed through an acceleration of the phaseout schedule.

Today, even the companies running the power plants have lost interest. Re-certification was not done in recent years and would take the remaining power stations offline for months or years, anyway. All of them are many decades old now, beyond their original life span.

So is all of this "rational"? Maybe not in hindsight, but I would argue it was for many people at the time and given that nuclear power never contributed more than roughly 25% to Germanys power production (I think), renewables are growing rapidly and no nuclear power station has been built without massive government subsidies, I personally think that re-entering the nuclear arena does not make any sense for Germany at the moment.

wuming2• 3 years ago

https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-un...

The number of nuclear reactors in operation in the EU peaked in 1989. More than thirty years of decline demonstrate low political, taxpayers and eventually industrial support. There are only so many years you can invest at training and financing without returns.

Only nations with a nuclear deterrent still moderately invest in nuclear power. Industry and society in general moved on.

PurpleRamen10• 3 years ago

The plants are old, they must shut down anyway. And it doesn't make much sense to invest in a harmful technology, when you can also invest in something better. Especially if you are already on the way, because you are forced to go down that road.

polotics9• 3 years ago

All plants that are kept in operation have every single component in need of replacement replaced well in advance, so none of the European plants is old in any way a car could be considered old.

_hypx• 3 years ago

British environmental campaigner George Monbiot last year compared Germany’s nuclear shutdown to Brexit, describing it “as a needless act of self-harm, driven by misinformation and the irrational allocation of blame”.

That says it best. Germany will probably see a dramatic increase in fossil fuel consumption. They will also likely see higher energy prices.

LargoLasskhyfv6• 3 years ago

Will? WILL!?

Have I got news for you...

mcv2• 3 years ago

But when are they switching off their last remaining coal power plants?

That is far more urgent. Please leave some nuclear power plants operational if doing so helps you to turn of coal power plants.

dschuetz• 3 years ago

Yeah, that's the real question here.

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

Coal plants should be gone by 2038. Though the current government coalition is still trying to speed this up to 2030. This seems not entirely feasible though they'll probably get quite far with it. Anyway, some time between 2030 and 2038 most of these plants should be gone. Lignite should be gone sooner than that.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-coal-region-brin...

JanSt17• 3 years ago

As a German you get accustomed to carzy fear-led policies like these.

FYI our „experts“ and think-tanks (DIW, Agora Energiewende, Öko-Ibstitut) are sure renewables are basically free and nuclear is blocking the RE build-up. Plus, nuclear is so dangerous and produces so much waste, it is a non-starter. The only thing they hate more than Co2 is nuclear power, thus we keep runnung brown coal power plants at 1kg/Co2 per kwh.

Thanks I guess.

TheLoafOfBread3• 3 years ago

And additionally spraying yourself with radioactive material which is naturally contained in coal.

IceHegel• 3 years ago

This seems completely irrational and emotionally driven.

If a single person was responsible it would be easier to show this, but one of the perks of a large organization is that no one is responsible for anything.

Mashimo12• 3 years ago

This seems completely irrational and emotionally driven

No, not completely.

Even after decades of search and committee, Germany still does not have a long term nuclear waste site. And with a history of the government fucking those up in Germany it's understandable no one wants them. Emotional yes, irrational not.

rallyforthesun2• 3 years ago

if you ask for the logic of this action: There is still no one in the world, who would like to store the remaining nuclear waste which this technology produces.

Cardinal71672• 3 years ago

Nuclear waste is a solved problem that only fear mongers bring up anymore.

Mashimo12• 3 years ago

Going to be difficult in Germany. History of fucking those storage sites up, high population density and strong NIMBY movement.

This ain't Finland.

Edit: Reality: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/suche-nach-ato... (Maybe they have a decision for a possible location in 2046, maybe 2068)

lnsru2• 3 years ago

Germany also left research of future energy technology and research of own weapons.

Basically US must save Germany again and again for another hundreds of years keeping nuclear weapons in Germany.

Also Germany went all-in in buying ship-wise solar panels from China constructing another dependency. Stupid thing is that sun does not shine in the night. Also batteries will be bought container-wise from China.

I don’t know if it was clever decision to replace nuclear with coal. Kinda of back to the 60s.

sva_• 3 years ago

Pretty sure the US didn't allow Germany to have their own nukes after WWII

lnsru2• 3 years ago

Sure that was the case. But now there is a strategy “America first”. Sounds reasonable to me to think about German nukes.

tfourb2• 3 years ago

A country like Germany could expand its current electricity production by about 50% while simultaneously phasing out nuclear and fossil fuels at a whole sale price for electricity below current market rates and with current technology.

In case of Germany, a 2015 study compared various scenarios for how electricity demand will develop by 2050. The most expansive scenario assumes a yearly demand of 800 TWh, compared to roughly 500 TWh in 2021. [1] The additional demand comes from electrifying cars and heating, etc.

Demand does of course vary by time of day, but is virtually stable from month to month. Variability of renewable production is quite high, so let's assume that you'd need long-term grid-scale electricity buffers for about 30% of yearly demand. The most basic approach to this would be the transformation of electricity and water into Hydrogen when an excess of electricity is available and the reverse when demand outstrips supply. The combined efficiency of that process (electricity->Hydrogen->electricity) is roughly 50%. I'm actually pretty sure that by 2050 we'll have much better solutions available, but this approach is doable with current tech and has the added bonus of being able to be combined with a hydrogen infrastructure similar to how natural gas is currently used, i.e. for industrial processes and heating.

That would put total yearly demand at 1,040 TWh, which based on the efficiency of currently available PV and wind turbines [2] would require a total nominal installed capacity of about 1.040 GW (based on real world data from Germany, 1 GW in installed renewable capacity is roughly equal to a yearly production of 1 TWh. This will vary based on local circumstances, but Germany is not particularly bountiful in its renewable potential compared to other countries).

Currently, Germany has a total installed capacity of solar, wind and water power generation of about 125GW but I will assume that all these installations will reach their end of life before 2050 and will need to be replaced as part of this project.

At current prices for the installation of new PV (700,000 €/MW) and wind onshore/offshore (3,000,000 €/MW) and assuming a 50/50 split in installed capacity, the total investment for the required 1,040 MW would come to roughly 2 Trillion Euros over 30 years, or about 66 Billion Euros per year.

Divided by 800 TWh of yearly demand, this comes out to 8.3 cents (Euro) per KWh. This is comfortably below the 2021 average whole sale price of roughly 10 cents/KWh and in Germany would come out to about 20 cents/KWh for private consumers, compared to the current market average of roughly 30 cents/KWh.

Of course current energy production is quite heavily subsidized by the German government. If subsidies continue (or taxes on electricity are lowered), price per KWh could be reduced substantially.

This is of course only a very rough and simplified calculation. But it is straightforward and based on real world data, a pessimistic energy consumption scenario and current technologies. It ignores the potential for geothermal energy, biomass, imported hydrogen, long-distance imports of solar energy from the Sahara, or hydro power from Northern Europe, as well as likely technological improvement for generating and storing renewable energy. Looking at this, I find it hard to believe that absent a complete revolution of reactor design and cost-effectiveness, nuclear power will have any serious role to play in this, given its regulatory challenges, capital expenditure requirements, construction times and unsolved waste management issues.

[1] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin/Projekte/2015/St... [2] https://www.smard.de/home/marktdaten

rallyforthesun2• 3 years ago

We as germans would like to keep our nuclear powerplants running as long as possible, but the question of how to store the nuclear waste for the little timespan of hundreds of thousand years has not been answered in a satisfying way. The issue of nuclear waste storage is a complex and difficult one, as nuclear waste can remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and requires specialized storage facilities that are secure and environmentally safe. Despite ongoing research and development into new storage technologies, no country has yet come up with a completely satisfactory solution to this problem.

0xDEF3• 3 years ago

as nuclear waste can remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands

Why does the German government and anti-nuclear activists insist on pushing this falsehood? After a few decades most of it will have decayed into low-radioactive isotopes. It will then just be the usual chemically toxic industrial waste.

Mashimo12• 3 years ago

no country has yet come up with a completely satisfactory solution to this problem.

France and Finland have a decent solution.

Germany was really really really bad at storing nuclear waste. Which is why I'm also against nuclear power plants in Germany.

ohyes2• 3 years ago

You’ve been misled and misinformed. The majority of Nuclear “waste” can be reprocessed and reused and the lifespan is not “hundreds of thousands of years.” Ironically the biggest issue ends up being the radioactive reactor components that you end up having to deal with when decommissioning.

honeybadger1• 3 years ago

History will point to Germany when class starts to discuss regressive energy policy.

Mashimo12• 3 years ago

Probably. But also mixed in are some progressive policies. For example recent changes that allow Balkonkraftwerke.

But what we know for sure is that history already now points at Germany on how to not store Nuclear waste.

scanny• 3 years ago

Just a note ‚ the decision was made around 2011 and now they were faced with getting new fuel rods (decades of use) or running with the legislated phase-out. There isn’t an in between option it seems

ttul• 3 years ago

Although it is sad that Germany has chosen the path of fear, consider that its neighbors are free to step in with additional nuclear power capacity and seem to be doing so. Since the European grid is connected across borders, Germans will continue using nuclear power regardless. It just won’t be provided by plants inside Germany’s borders.

devdude1337• 3 years ago

While there are lots of fear-driven opponents here in germany, we also know our math - and you can be sure if there was a huge ecological and economical benefit from nuclear power we would build reactors like crazy. But it turns out that it’s not cheap enough and building and maintaining those plants doesn’t save much greenhouse gases. If we built them en masse many years ago the numbers could be better maybe. Anyway renewables are our way to go and until we get there we keep the coal so we don’t end up in the middle ages.

Germany to switch off last remaining nuclear power plants

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