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dispat0r

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Yeah, as a German, I can say it works flawlessly. Cough France with its old, neglected reactor fleet is constantly more green(less co2) than Germany.

On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. On paper maybe, most people are actually using electricity generated from conventional power plants most of the time, and we are paying the highest energy prices in the world for that.

On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint. Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint.

We don't Electrolyse Hydrogen in Germany there is not one large-scale installation. You can't pump 100% hydrogen in the natural gas infrastructure, and the gas plants need to support hydrogen burning. You also need a surplus of energy, which Germany obviously not has.

Germany doesn't have the infrastructure to import from other sources. The LNG terminals don't work yet, and the capacity is too low and LNG is much more expansive than the Russian pipeline gas. And even if we have the LNG infrastructure, we have to buy a big chunk of the world market, which screws poorer countries. Our home insulation is already pretty good and renovating all old buildings is expansive, and we don't have enough craftsman to do that. Renewables brought us this mess the plan was to use natural gas, this is now over. We need to go back to coal and build new nuclear plants to phase out coal, but this will never happen under the current government, at least until the winter.

Germany will just no longer have the fourth-largest economy in the world. There is no way to substitute gas short term, long term you can replace it with electric alternatives. But these electric alternatives do not run on a grid with just wind and solar. I live in Germany and I have no hope. Our heating bills for the next winter can already exceed $900 per month for a 4-person household, electric costs also at $200 per month. The whole economy will just collapse.

No, you can't maintain them forever. The EDF is mismanaged, in Germany we never had this kind of problems with nuclear plants. South Korea also has an excellent track record with building new plants.

Germany already has nuclear waste, we have to deal with it one way or another. I think permanent storage is a bad solution, most of the energy is still in there and further utilization will also reduce the danger of the waste.

If you mean nuclear with clean energy, yes, but you can't run a power grid with renewables you always need a backup gas is out so what is left?

Is This Peak Gas? 5 years ago

I guess people need to experience a full blown blackout to get over their fear of nuclear power.

Fully agree but this will not happen and it's also too late building nuclear plants takes decades and the know how to construct them is also gone in Germany. We will try to shut off coal plants until we get a huge blackout then we go back to coal.