German rejection of nuclear might go down as one of the most self destructive non war related choice by any government.
Even if you are gone say not to build anything new, just maintaining what they had would have resulted in significantly more energy then all energy they are getting from LNG now.
You clearly have no understanding of German energy consumption. Natgas is being used by the industry and for domestic heating. Nuclear power plants were used for electricity generation. Even if we had 100% in spare nuclear capacity above baseline consumption, we would still be building these LNG terminals. Absolutely nothing would have changed regarding the current gas and oil situation.
> Natgas is being used by the industry and for domestic heating. Nuclear power plants were used for electricity generation.
Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.
Why are you still burning fossil fuel to heat houses? If you had stable electricity you could use heat pumps instead. Seems like fossil gas has been too cheap for too long, which have incentivized dependency on it despite the CO2 external cost.
Are there any plans on using waste heat from industry combined with district heating anywhere? Biofuels? Subsidized insulation retrofitting?
Looking at electricity maps: Currently burning 28GW of very dirty coal, 46% of demand, 72% of emissions. 12GW of gas, 19% of demand, 17% of emissions. Wind+Solar combined is only supplying 7% of demand.
They decommissioned ~20GW of clean nuclear power over the past 20 years. Whatever way you cut it that’s a huge mistake for the climate (not to mention economy). That replaces most of the coal in that picture. Or replaces all of the gas and then some in that picture.
gas plants are used for short term electricity generation. If there is more demand than production can sustain the transmission operator will buy the extremely expensive electricity from gas sources. This price will be shared by everyone.. https://clouglobal.com/european-merit-order-energy-trading-o...
Heating could have been switched to heat pumps (and will need to anyway at some point), had they not bathed in natgas for tens of years (thanks Schröder!).
Running an electrical space heater would maybe not cost more than a flight to a warm country if we had any kind of (long term) cheap electricity generation like nuclear. I'm German and I visited Russia recently, and their energy is dirt cheap due to it all being nuclear—it's crazy how you can just run a space heater and now worry about being bankrupted by it.
Nope, there never was that much nuclear in Germany and most of that is gone now. Maintaining what is there was never going to matter a whole lot. And building new nuclear plants takes way too long for that to be relevant as well. The problem is now, not in a decade from now. Nuclear power is just not very useful when you need it in a hurry. And there are plenty of cheaper alternatives if you have a few decades to spare. All of which are being considered right now.
The issue with gas in Germany is not generating electricity but using it for heating and industry. Nuclear cannot really help with that. There were a only a few GW of nuclear left at the beginning of the year. I believe some of that is being kept online a bit longer. Or they are considering to. But it's just a few GW. All little bits help of course but accelerating the tens of GW of wind coming online in the next few years is much more productive to obsess about keeping the few GW of nuclear power. Not actually against that but it's just not enough to matter much at all.
This is untrue. 20GW of nuclear shut down over the past 20 years. That is almost as much as the coal that is being burned at the moment. Coal and gas are currently providing 66% of demand (40GW). Wind+solar only 7%. If that 20GW of nuclear were still available it would replace half of the coal and gas currently burning at this very moment. You can follow along at electricity maps anytime you’re curious to see just how dirty and broken the German grid is in reality.
Who called Trump an idiot for his criticism of German energy policy? He's not even the first US president to criticize German reliance on Russian gas--both Obama and Bush before him were critics of it. And there's been a lot of criticism even within Europe about the policy. By the time you get to Nord Stream 2, basically even not named Germany or Russia was screaming at the top of their lungs "this is a bad idea" (and Poland, not the US, being the loudest of all).
I will grant you that Trump did get this right... but it was by no means a policy that he was an architect of, and the degree to which he was invested in this policy was questionable (US sanctions were driven largely by Congress, not the president).
Eh, we have to look at what rationale was behind a call, not just that they got the result right. And in Trump's case, I doubt there was much consideration of it beyond it being a good rhetorical jab in line with his general contrarian antics.
This isn't really a German thing although Germany has some peculiar domestic reasons for its nuclear distaste that go back many decades. The nuclear energy industry collapsing is a secular trend globally with share of energy production steadily falling. The one country somewhat buckling that trend is China, but only due to heavy state intervention and even in China the industry is in slow decline. The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
""Nuclear energy's share of global gross electricity generation continues its slow but steady decline from a peak of 17.5% in 1996 with a share of 10.1% in 2020," states the report.
The comparatively cheap cost of renewables is at the heart of the problem. The WNISR confirms that new renewable electricity investment was above $300 billion (€256 billion) in 2020, which is 17 times higher than the reported global investment commitments to nuclear power."
> This isn't really a German thing although Germany has some peculiar domestic reasons for its nuclear distaste that go back many decades.
Believe me, I know. Having lived in Berlin the amount of anti-nuclear propaganda there is just mind blowing.
> but only due to heavy state intervention
And no state intervention was used in any of the other sectors of energy. Solar for example was just this totally market driving thing where no state intervention was needed.
To talk about the energy market in Europe and Asia as 'heavy state intervention' is ridiculous, its simply totally driven by states. Its states that decide what they want to build, its states that lay out their long term strategy.
> The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
Nuclear declined because governments decided they didn't want nuclear, solar and wind were successful because governments bet all out on solar and wind even before they made financial sense. They had good arguments like, yes its more expensive now but prices will come down once we produce more and it will make our grid green. And this was correct, but its just as correct for nuclear. Its not difficult to understand.
Had Europe spend the last 20 years collectively embracing nuclear and deployed a few 100GW hours of nuclear building 100s of plants, investing 300 billion $ in it, with a well trained workforce for and the same few models over and over again it would also very also be very cheap.
To act like this has anything to do with markets is silly.
And this is without even mentioning all the 100s of nuclear research projects that were killed up, all the nuclear plants that were scheduled to build that were prevented by protestors. In France an insane Swiss politician from the Green party literally crossed the border to shot the nuclear reactor with an RPG. All the nuclear research and education that was removed from universities as well.
There is no reason, non what so ever that we could be deploying 10 new GenIV nuclear reactors every year in Europe, had this been our policy for the last 20 years.
"The most destructive non war related choice by any government"(in the history of human civilization, presumably).
I am genuinely baffled when I read such histrionic statements.
Can you explain what has been destroyed?
Nuclear was never a big part of power generation and the shutdown has been compensated by renewable. LNG is compensating for the shutdown of Russian pipelines.
Prices for energy have gone up in Germany, but they are going up everywhere. There have been no power blackouts or bankruptcy of major industries. And I don't believe for minute that Russia somehow would not have invaded if Germany had more nuclear.
Nuclear was 30% of the electricity generation back in 2000.
The Nordstream projects were conceived to allow Russia to exert force on Eastern European countries without endangering supply of gas to Germany.
Our energy policy has been incredibly short-sighted, focused on maximizing certain sector's economic interests at the expense of national security and EU security.
France had clean energy for 40 years but somehow nobody cares about that. In reality CO2 saved then is far more valuable then saved now.
So people over and over bring up this one year where France has some maintenance problem but somehow 40 years of brown coal in Germany is just considers unimportant, not to mention the still extensive use of coal now in Germany.
So how about instead of constantly shitting on France and Nuclear we look at the basic facts of what was actually good for humanity and what was a disaster.
Also, most nuclear plants should be back by then, some already, they are 'bracing' themselves in case of emergency and because anti-nuclear people have hyped this issue to a frenzy on social media.
And the French problems with nuclear now are 95% related to the last 20 years of anti-nuclear politics and specially the outright attack on nuclear by the Holland government where critical maintenance was ignored because they lived in a fantasy world where renwables were just gone do everything. This has been well documented.
Even before that France just stopped building new plants and started to use more and more LNG because of the opposition to nuclear and now they are eating the fruits of that.
Not to mention canceling amazing projects like the Superphénix reactor.
France is still living of the glory days of nuclear from the 70/80s. Its ridiculous, 20 years of sensible energy policy with 1960s tech is all that is required and yet most governments can't figure it out.
The ship has sailed on nuclear for Germany no matter where you stand on the topic and there’s not a lot of valuable discussion left to warrant trotting this point out at every opportunity.
Ships aren't autonomous vehicles; they don't passively "sail". A ship has a captain who makes an active decision to depart from port. It is non-serious to use the passive form here.
Also, more importantly: if we can agree that nuclear shutdown was a bad decision, then we can work backwards from that and conclude that the people responsible for it shouldn't be trusted with anything more complex than digging ditches.
Whatever the merits, the most salient point on the issue is that nuclear power, by and large, doesn't matter. It's below 5 % of total now and was at about 15 % at its highest.
Well yes, Germany maintained the reactors they had until they reached the end of their useful lifetime (the three reactors that are still in use have been built in the late 1980s, so are currently a bit more than 30 years old), and now they're shutting them down. It's not like you can use a nuclear power plant considerably past its designed lifespan, so even with an extension, we would be talking about a few years max.
> Well yes, Germany maintained the reactors they had until they reached the end of their useful lifetime
Except that is simply a lie that anti-nuclear people spread.
Nuclear plants can reach 80 or 100 years and we honestly don't even know the max lifespan. Almost the German plants could have continued to run. 30 year is nothing for a nuclear plant.
Yes, it requires maintenance and partial replacement of subsystems, but that's just the reality. We are talking about replacing fucking coal, I just don't understand why people don't care about that.
and how does frances choice of going all in on nuclear but having higher electricity prices than germany go down?
It really doesn't make much sense of speaking is superlatives, sure Germany did a mistake here with relying on russian gas and so did most of europe. Problem is, you have to rely on someone, is russia better than saudi-arabia? Irak? You have to rely on something and europe sees now the consequences
I'm so fucking sick of this argument. Read my other comments where I already explain that.
France had clean energy for 40 years so how are they doing, fantastic compared to all the coal the Germans have been breathing.
They had a few maintenance issue because in the last 10 years anti-nuclear energy ministers deferred maintenance. Most of these issues however should be fixed before winter.
We are seriously comparing one year of a few maintenance issue with 50 years of clean energy production. How can anybody be critical of that?
> It really doesn't make much sense of speaking is superlatives
I think 40 years of breathing incredibly dirty coal smoke is kind of big deal.
> Problem is, you have to rely on someone
You can source uranium from Australia or a number of other countries. Or mine it in Europe if you want to. You can actually have a number of suppliers, so there really isn't a problem.
In fact, a really clever policy for Europe would have been to invest in nuclear for electricity. Then go a step further and invest in high-temperature reactors for the next generation and also use them to produce methanol and mix that into fuel supply and eventually mostly replacing it.
This is likely no longer necessary because we are switching to electric cars now, but still, would have been a good policy back then.
That was the logical next step for the DeGaul policy in France but they gave up on it and sadly by the time the EU happened France had largely turned its back on nuclear.
Sorry, I don't agree. Nuclear is not the magic solution. Look at France. A big part of Germanys problems are the nuclear power plants there - they simply don't work and France needs to import terawatts of power. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
In fact:
"Germany was the second largest net exporter at 15.4 TWh, double the levels recorded halfway through 2021, as power generation in the country responded to the import demand from France, the data showed."
And no, building new powerplants is not the solution. None of these plants were constructed on time or within the budget. They need room, they need to be connected, they need trained workers, they need massive oversight (because the owners will do just enough around security to fulfill the letters of the law, never the spirit of the law).
Nuclear reactors are also not fit for the coming climate change, especially not the ones now being turned off. Almost all of them needed to be shut down in the last summers, because the water intake from rivers was either to warm or there was simply not enough water available.
In addition, nuclear is only viable, because it gets supported by tax money. Nobody will ensure these things against accidents, the companies are not responsible for transport/storage of the waste and get price guarantees. '
And despite all of that, the price for nuclear power rises - while the prices for all others forms of energy drop. From a market standpoint, it makes no sense to invest billions (face it, it will be billions, even if companies responsible tell you it will "only be millions") into a technology that is more expensive than others, harder to control, and not flexible enough. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...)
Investing these billions into decentralization of the power grid and renewable energies (Wind, Solar, Hydro, Storage capacities) will yield a way better return with less complications and more stability.
But, what I will agree with you is that exit plan for nuclear by Merkel and her CDU/CSU was shitty done. They did not have a strategy and, in parallel, they destroyed the German solar industry (which could have been a powerhouse now but was basically sold do China by the CDU). And yes, it would have made more sense to first bring down coal and then nuclear. Or that the grid needed to be meshed more to support distributed energy generation. But nuclear was never a (good) option in a country so densely populated.
You mean the nation that in 15 years decaronized most of the grid? Yeah how horrible to have 40 years of clean power.
The reason France has problems and has to import, is because since the early 1990s France has stopped building new nuclear reactors.
Even worse, since then leftist governments, specially after 2014 when they basically wanted to copy Germany and get ride of all nuclear. They essentially stopped with vital maintenance.
Unfortunately, they built so many plants in the same period, and those are getting in to their mid years and need maintenance. Because they have largely stopped building new plants, some of the knowlage is now lacking.
Overall, the issue in France is not enough nuclear, not nuclear itself.
France even had really awesome advanced nuclear projects, that were all killed off often by Green/Left governments.
Don't you think its kind of funny to point at the only large industrial nation with a green grid and say 'look at the issues those people have'. If I was German I wish we had those kinds of problems.
> And no, building new powerplants is not the solution. None of these plants were constructed on time or within the budget. They need room, they need to be connected, they need trained workers, they need massive oversight (because the owners will do just enough around security to fulfill the letters of the law, never the spirit of the law).
Actually new plants is the solution. Yes, they need time, that's why building shouldn't have been stopped.
Nuclear plants don't need that much room, and there are already train lines most places, adding a branch line isn't that hard.
Yes, training workers for those jobs is actually good.
Energy is mostly government driven anyway, and so it is in France.
> Nuclear reactors are also not fit for the coming climate change, especially not the ones now being turned off. Almost all of them needed to be shut down in the last summers, because the water intake from rivers was either to warm or there was simply not enough water available.
Saying all of them need to shut down because of water is just wrong. Most nuclear reactors continued to operate in most places in Europe.
The hardest energy problems are in winter, all you need to make sure is that you build new plants in places where you can cool them even under worst case assumptions for future climate and it will be fine.
> In addition, nuclear is only viable, because it gets supported by tax money. Nobody will ensure these things against accidents, the companies are not responsible for transport/storage of the waste and get price guarantees. '
In the European context saying only because tax money is nonsense. The 'markets' are so strongly regulated and often lots of it is state owned. Wind and Solar were only made viable by tax money. Massive government projects to push these drove the economics of scale.
The same could have been done for nuclear for the same price. Had Europe built 100 new nuclear reactors in the last 30 years, the economics of nuclear would be way better. Had Europe not invested massively in wind and solar, the economics there wouldn't be as good.
Even going back to 1970, Jimmy Carter killed nuclear project and focused research on solar. And many of the same trends were happening in Europe. If you prioritize one group of technologies and demonize another you can't then act supersized decades later with the results you get.
And even those project just use the grid as balance, if base load and intermittency were correctly priced, a lot of those economics aren't as good. But governments didn't want to do that, because they wanted more solar/wind even at the cost of later dealing with intermittency.
> And despite all of that, the price for nuclear power rises - while the prices for all others forms of energy drop. From a market standpoint, it makes no sense to invest billions (face it, it will be billions, even if companies responsible tell you it will "only be millions") into a technology that is more expensive than others, harder to control, and not flexible enough. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...) Investing these billions into decentralization of the power grid and renewable energies (Wind, Solar, Hydro, Storage capacities) will yield a way better return with less complications and more stability.
The economics are not nearly as clear as you make it out to be.
If you build large nuclear project with many of the same reactors multiple times it look pretty good. It also requires far less investment in terms of updating the grid, because usually you can just locate reactors where coal plants were before.
Nuclear build cost are dominated by learning cost, if you build many then they get massively cheaper and you can built them far faster. Look at France in the 70/80s as a good example.
You also solve the intermittency issue because nuclear don't have that. So had we just invested in nuclear, rather then wind and solar, we wouldn't have to do all those investments into intermittency mitigation a problem that still remains unsolved.
Even worse, because intermittency was not price correctly, the base load had to suffer and that made their economics worse. Often nuclear also didn't receive the same subsidies as solar and wind. There are many examples of that.
And this is before we even talk about GenIV reactors. Because all research and development was stopped and often made borderline impossible, we have not progressed. Newer reactor designs have massive amount of potential to be cheaper. They can also solve problem such as heat production for industrial heat. But over the last 30 years there was comically little investment in that.
So what you see as 'economics' and 'market' I see as governments 30 years ago deciding that solar/wind were the future and simply going with it. Had the EU fixed on a single reactor design, even Gen3 design, and had said we will de-carbonize by nuclear it would have been far cheaper and we would be further along by now.
In fact, such a standard nuclear plant would have been an amazing thing to export to other nations as well.
And then have a GenIV reactor in the pipeline after that.
Nuclear isn't the future because 'we' didn't want it to be the future. But it could have been, and it would have been far better future then what we have now.
P.S: Let me give you an example. France had the GenIV Superphénix. They had finally worked out all the issues (including somebody shooting an RPG at it) and could have started to seriously think about building then in larger numbers but by that point they had little interest in building new reactors and the left/green govenrment wanted to kill as soon as possible.
Had France simply started building 5-10 of a next generation of these in the 2000s they would now be a net energy exporter with reactor that had super low fuel cost (because of breeder) and the per plant cost would likely be a fraction of the PWR designs they are currently planning.
You can see how small this reactor is compared to PWRs. So the overall cost when in production at scale would be amazing.
"In March, the German government asked energy companies to weigh a seemingly impossible engineering task. Could a new liquefied natural gas import terminal, which normally takes at least five years to build, be erected in this port town by year’s end?"
Germany didn’t build a complete LNG terminal. Instead, they built docks for floating LNG terminals which itself are going to be rented from other countries.
They solved the problem still. Germany doesn't care about having a LNG terminal per se, they care about being able to import enough LNG without relying on russian pipelines.
Unfortunately, Germany's currently problems are self-inflicted and were entirely predictable. They were encouraged to build LNG terminals and reduce their reliance on Russian gas back in 2014:
Following the 2014 February coup in Ukraine and Crimea's reunification with Russia, the administration of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, called upon the EU member states to cut their reliance on Russian gas, citing "security" reasons.
Speaking at the March 2014 EU-US Summit in Brussels, Obama urged the US' European allies to hurry up with the conclusion of the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), offering US liquefied natural gas (LNG) in exchange.
https://sputniknews.com/20180331/obama-trump-lng-europe-china-1063093406.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-eu-summit-idUSBREA2P0W220140326
As a German i agree with your point, but also agree with the point of the grandparent. It was predictable and the people responsible for Germany's heavy reliance on Russian gas unsurprisingly are getting paid through intermediaries by Russia.
There have been an abundance of coverage on it, even from state media... but nothing ever changes. Heck, the current head of the government was/is involved in the biggest financially scandal of Germany's history and got away with it by "forgetting" everything.
> The Revolution of dignity has absolutely no signs of a coup. It resulted in presidential and parlimentary elections.
This is a non-sequitur; the transfer of power was extra-constitutional, so it can't be ruled out by this fact alone.
> Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia.
This is a circular argument. It was illegal insofar as it violated Ukrainian law, sure, but whether Ukrainian law should apply in Crimea in the first place is literally the whole point of contention!
LNG is pretty fascinating technology. A real product of our times. Have you ever seen the inside of an LNG tanker pressure vessel? Allow me to show you!
Propane is much easier to use than LNG (which is mostly methane) as it remains liquid at ordinary outdoor temperatures with relatively moderate pressure.
Propane is a refined, and somewhat synthesized molecule. LNG is rather raw, and contains a lot of free hydrogen, methane, and sometimes other contaminants like sulphur (though that is mostly lower grades).
Think of the difference between 91 octane gas at a pump vs slightly filtered crude oil.
Propane is a completely different molecule from LNG which is mostly methane. Methane is not liquid at normal surface temperatures even at high pressure; propane is.
Congrats to Germany for this one, I wish we could do the same in the UK.
It has seemed to me that the planning system in its current state is actually badly damaging our economy and posperity. We don't build enough houses, and when we do, the infrastructure that's needed to support them takes decades to build. I've been hearing about another heathrow runway, and new trainline, etc for years and yet it seems we're no closer to having these built. Now we're stuck paying most of our income into a 30 year mortgage rather than anything useful/productive. That money could have gone into the productive economy.
Ireland is similar, though notably better or worse on various specifics. Unsurprising to most, probably. I feel it's important to recall that these are not new tendencies. Both countries (and many of our neighbors) have a history of being suck at this particular general thing.
Housing prices is, perhaps, a separate question. I think we could probably do infrastructure really well and still have increasing house prices. The way to test that theory is to do infrastructure well, so I suppose my point is moot. Availability in either case, is undeniably bottlenecked by infrastructure.
The question why our authorities aren't better at building runways, train lines or hospitals. Nominal costs, as well as execution times and other overt signs point to serious underperformance. I think that one of the big problems is that any answer to this question is inevitably high politics. Any big success case represents a loss to a relevant political side, a major political interest or whatever. Emergencies tend to give one interest dominion, while also limiting options due to time constraints. That is a recipe for getting things done. It is an excellent lesson in true feasibility. Emergency isn't a solution though.
While a lot of the focus tends to be on corruption, bad faith, and such... I think much of the reasons discussed in "Sucking at Infrastructure: Visionary subtitle about societal stuff" should be focused on innocent enough reasons. For example, I think environmental interest interest groups, parties & institutions are essential. Without this lobby, the environment gets systematically short sticked to devastating cumulative effect. Infrastructure is also a vital interest. So is housing. Monetary stability, economic prosperity etc. These are at tension with each other. Tension is inevitable. How tension is routed isn't. I think that as these tensions mature, pathways stiffen. New pathways become impossible to pave.
The main point here was to remove certain blocking rights of environmentalists, that normally block such projects for years. They still can go to court but this is not blocking anything anymore. If someone brings real issues up, they now can be handled while building, nit in the planning phase as before.
That honestly completely insane that the legal process makes up for the vast majority of time in infrastructure projects like this. I'm all for environmental concerns, taking in complaint from future neighbors, all that stuff, but allowing it to drag out important projects years is problematic.
Sometimes I feel like listing to possible complains from people living around affected areas is a waste of time. Denmark pretty much can't build windmills anymore, because they will: "Ruin my view". Seriously, the city I live in wants to close a coal fired power plant, and replace it with a number of windmills, on the same plot of land, but no, that will ruin someones view (which is currently a power plant). You also can't do cell phone towers, because they are ugly (fair enough), yet you still allow yourself to complain about poor coverage in the same area.
On the one hand: I agree that years of delay are pretty wasteful, considering a lot of projects are really needed to solve urgent problems. With windmills, the same thing happened in my village, which was all up in arms against them. On the other hand, democracy is inherently slow and wasteful, if you want to protect also the rights of the minority, that will have a cost.
What if it isn't something like windmills that clearly are a net improvement for society over coal, and the objections aren't merely 'not a nice view'? For example, suppose some big corp wants to frack the environment to pieces for big bucks, leaving a poisoned, nearly unlivable habitat for the nearby village.
How can we safeguard against this, in a way that the village inhabitants can protest against such threats with real teeth, without grinding everything to a halt that is a mere nuisance but offers real benefits to society?
> You also can't do cell phone towers, because they are ugly (fair enough)
You can disguise cell phone towers[0]. It hurts cell phone company profits though, so they'll only do that if the cost of the cheap ugly tower is more due to objections.
> That honestly completely insane that the legal process makes up for the vast majority of time in infrastructure projects like this.
This time is usually necessary to improve the quality of the projects. It is for a reason that this procedures exist. In the past and still today, we are destroying the environment, endangering people's health and reducing their quality of life through hasty decisions. Therefore citizens have decided to enact planning laws to improve the situation. Of course, the duration of planning periods are a cost factor, but one needs to find a sweet spot between them and the (not only financial) cost of projects going awry.
And remember that it were the Greens under Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck which were primarily in charge for the fast implementation of the LNG terminal.
If the complaints turn out to be valid, you’d have to undo the infrastructure work and restore the prior state, which sometimes is impossible, and in most cases cost-prohibitive. So what you’re saying is that either there are no valid complaints, or you’ll be dismissing any valid complaints.
Pretty much every large-scale renewables project in Germany is blocked by this bullshit. I don't believe in environmentalists anymore. They're the biggest blockers to actual progress in combating things like climate change.
You understand these aren't the same people, yes? The latter are wealthy entrenched (mostly conservative) NIMBYs who have no care for the environment, and have a deeply personal agenda. They may have appropriated the language of environmentalists when they talk about the impact of projects on their lives, but dismissing environmental concerns because some are using them in bad faith is not reasonable.
Even more broadly, what takes time is the governance, legal, bureaucratic, etc, processes. Governance is a lore unto itself.
While we may think we are dealing with 'reality' we are mainly dealing with the artifacts of the governance system - and it believes itself to be the determinant of reality itself!
It only pays lip service to the idea that it is there to facilitate and improve people's lives - the idea of governance/social contract/etc is an just an expedient idea that aseerts itself to be the master not the servant. It is the enemy of the individual.
Growing up, Germany always seemed like a paragon of virtue. Starting somewhere around the VW Emissions Scandal, my view has changed. Did Germany change over the last 20 years, or were my perceptions off from the get-go?
I don't know why this comment was down-voted. I feel exactly the same. When I saw the news source, Wall Street Journal, I wasn't surprised to see how much the article focused on sweeping away "pesky" environmental laws. Ask anyone who lived in Germany, UK, US, Japan in the 1970s. They can tell you all about life before environmental laws. It was hell. And sadly, the narrative is always stolen away by complaints about "my view will be ruined", ignoring all of the good these laws do for our environment. It would be better to improve the environmental laws to exclude "views" as something to be protected.
Yes, but to add some context to it: The very party that initiated this complex, was previously instrumental in installing environmental blocking rights, Habeck's Green Party. ;)
Readit News
Even if you are gone say not to build anything new, just maintaining what they had would have resulted in significantly more energy then all energy they are getting from LNG now.
Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.
Are there any plans on using waste heat from industry combined with district heating anywhere? Biofuels? Subsidized insulation retrofitting?
They decommissioned ~20GW of clean nuclear power over the past 20 years. Whatever way you cut it that’s a huge mistake for the climate (not to mention economy). That replaces most of the coal in that picture. Or replaces all of the gas and then some in that picture.
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Why? At that point resistive heating could be cheaper than gas, and remove at least some of the demand.
Even so, not using any LNG for electricity and replacing coal is just if not more valuable.
And of course the reluctance to electrify heating for houses is linked to the bad overall energy policy.
That it wasn't done doesn't make it less needed?
The issue with gas in Germany is not generating electricity but using it for heating and industry. Nuclear cannot really help with that. There were a only a few GW of nuclear left at the beginning of the year. I believe some of that is being kept online a bit longer. Or they are considering to. But it's just a few GW. All little bits help of course but accelerating the tens of GW of wind coming online in the next few years is much more productive to obsess about keeping the few GW of nuclear power. Not actually against that but it's just not enough to matter much at all.
I will grant you that Trump did get this right... but it was by no means a policy that he was an architect of, and the degree to which he was invested in this policy was questionable (US sanctions were driven largely by Congress, not the president).
This isn't really a German thing although Germany has some peculiar domestic reasons for its nuclear distaste that go back many decades. The nuclear energy industry collapsing is a secular trend globally with share of energy production steadily falling. The one country somewhat buckling that trend is China, but only due to heavy state intervention and even in China the industry is in slow decline. The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
""Nuclear energy's share of global gross electricity generation continues its slow but steady decline from a peak of 17.5% in 1996 with a share of 10.1% in 2020," states the report.
The comparatively cheap cost of renewables is at the heart of the problem. The WNISR confirms that new renewable electricity investment was above $300 billion (€256 billion) in 2020, which is 17 times higher than the reported global investment commitments to nuclear power."
https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-c...
Believe me, I know. Having lived in Berlin the amount of anti-nuclear propaganda there is just mind blowing.
> but only due to heavy state intervention
And no state intervention was used in any of the other sectors of energy. Solar for example was just this totally market driving thing where no state intervention was needed.
To talk about the energy market in Europe and Asia as 'heavy state intervention' is ridiculous, its simply totally driven by states. Its states that decide what they want to build, its states that lay out their long term strategy.
> The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
Nuclear declined because governments decided they didn't want nuclear, solar and wind were successful because governments bet all out on solar and wind even before they made financial sense. They had good arguments like, yes its more expensive now but prices will come down once we produce more and it will make our grid green. And this was correct, but its just as correct for nuclear. Its not difficult to understand.
Had Europe spend the last 20 years collectively embracing nuclear and deployed a few 100GW hours of nuclear building 100s of plants, investing 300 billion $ in it, with a well trained workforce for and the same few models over and over again it would also very also be very cheap.
To act like this has anything to do with markets is silly.
And this is without even mentioning all the 100s of nuclear research projects that were killed up, all the nuclear plants that were scheduled to build that were prevented by protestors. In France an insane Swiss politician from the Green party literally crossed the border to shot the nuclear reactor with an RPG. All the nuclear research and education that was removed from universities as well.
There is no reason, non what so ever that we could be deploying 10 new GenIV nuclear reactors every year in Europe, had this been our policy for the last 20 years.
I am genuinely baffled when I read such histrionic statements.
Can you explain what has been destroyed?
Nuclear was never a big part of power generation and the shutdown has been compensated by renewable. LNG is compensating for the shutdown of Russian pipelines.
Prices for energy have gone up in Germany, but they are going up everywhere. There have been no power blackouts or bankruptcy of major industries. And I don't believe for minute that Russia somehow would not have invaded if Germany had more nuclear.
The Nordstream projects were conceived to allow Russia to exert force on Eastern European countries without endangering supply of gas to Germany.
Our energy policy has been incredibly short-sighted, focused on maximizing certain sector's economic interests at the expense of national security and EU security.
Literally Germany made the choice to replace nuclear rather then coal. That was literally their choice.
Do you know about all the bad effects of burning coal at large scale?
> And I don't believe for minute that Russia somehow would not have invaded if Germany had more nuclear.
That is not an argument I made.
So people over and over bring up this one year where France has some maintenance problem but somehow 40 years of brown coal in Germany is just considers unimportant, not to mention the still extensive use of coal now in Germany.
So how about instead of constantly shitting on France and Nuclear we look at the basic facts of what was actually good for humanity and what was a disaster.
Also, most nuclear plants should be back by then, some already, they are 'bracing' themselves in case of emergency and because anti-nuclear people have hyped this issue to a frenzy on social media.
And the French problems with nuclear now are 95% related to the last 20 years of anti-nuclear politics and specially the outright attack on nuclear by the Holland government where critical maintenance was ignored because they lived in a fantasy world where renwables were just gone do everything. This has been well documented.
Even before that France just stopped building new plants and started to use more and more LNG because of the opposition to nuclear and now they are eating the fruits of that.
Not to mention canceling amazing projects like the Superphénix reactor.
France is still living of the glory days of nuclear from the 70/80s. Its ridiculous, 20 years of sensible energy policy with 1960s tech is all that is required and yet most governments can't figure it out.
Also, more importantly: if we can agree that nuclear shutdown was a bad decision, then we can work backwards from that and conclude that the people responsible for it shouldn't be trusted with anything more complex than digging ditches.
Whatever the merits, the most salient point on the issue is that nuclear power, by and large, doesn't matter. It's below 5 % of total now and was at about 15 % at its highest.
Also capacity is a dumb thing to look at. There can be week long streches where solar has like 5% utilization.
Of course Germany could have done what France did, there the graph looks quite different if you go back to the 1960 to now.
Simple put with the right policy, the German 'Grünewende' could be mostly done by now and very little LNG would be required.
Except that is simply a lie that anti-nuclear people spread.
Nuclear plants can reach 80 or 100 years and we honestly don't even know the max lifespan. Almost the German plants could have continued to run. 30 year is nothing for a nuclear plant.
Yes, it requires maintenance and partial replacement of subsystems, but that's just the reality. We are talking about replacing fucking coal, I just don't understand why people don't care about that.
You can use them for 50-70 years
It really doesn't make much sense of speaking is superlatives, sure Germany did a mistake here with relying on russian gas and so did most of europe. Problem is, you have to rely on someone, is russia better than saudi-arabia? Irak? You have to rely on something and europe sees now the consequences
France had clean energy for 40 years so how are they doing, fantastic compared to all the coal the Germans have been breathing.
They had a few maintenance issue because in the last 10 years anti-nuclear energy ministers deferred maintenance. Most of these issues however should be fixed before winter.
We are seriously comparing one year of a few maintenance issue with 50 years of clean energy production. How can anybody be critical of that?
> It really doesn't make much sense of speaking is superlatives
I think 40 years of breathing incredibly dirty coal smoke is kind of big deal.
> Problem is, you have to rely on someone
You can source uranium from Australia or a number of other countries. Or mine it in Europe if you want to. You can actually have a number of suppliers, so there really isn't a problem.
In fact, a really clever policy for Europe would have been to invest in nuclear for electricity. Then go a step further and invest in high-temperature reactors for the next generation and also use them to produce methanol and mix that into fuel supply and eventually mostly replacing it.
This is likely no longer necessary because we are switching to electric cars now, but still, would have been a good policy back then.
That was the logical next step for the DeGaul policy in France but they gave up on it and sadly by the time the EU happened France had largely turned its back on nuclear.
And no, building new powerplants is not the solution. None of these plants were constructed on time or within the budget. They need room, they need to be connected, they need trained workers, they need massive oversight (because the owners will do just enough around security to fulfill the letters of the law, never the spirit of the law).
Nuclear reactors are also not fit for the coming climate change, especially not the ones now being turned off. Almost all of them needed to be shut down in the last summers, because the water intake from rivers was either to warm or there was simply not enough water available.
In addition, nuclear is only viable, because it gets supported by tax money. Nobody will ensure these things against accidents, the companies are not responsible for transport/storage of the waste and get price guarantees. '
And despite all of that, the price for nuclear power rises - while the prices for all others forms of energy drop. From a market standpoint, it makes no sense to invest billions (face it, it will be billions, even if companies responsible tell you it will "only be millions") into a technology that is more expensive than others, harder to control, and not flexible enough. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...) Investing these billions into decentralization of the power grid and renewable energies (Wind, Solar, Hydro, Storage capacities) will yield a way better return with less complications and more stability.
But, what I will agree with you is that exit plan for nuclear by Merkel and her CDU/CSU was shitty done. They did not have a strategy and, in parallel, they destroyed the German solar industry (which could have been a powerhouse now but was basically sold do China by the CDU). And yes, it would have made more sense to first bring down coal and then nuclear. Or that the grid needed to be meshed more to support distributed energy generation. But nuclear was never a (good) option in a country so densely populated.
You mean the nation that in 15 years decaronized most of the grid? Yeah how horrible to have 40 years of clean power.
The reason France has problems and has to import, is because since the early 1990s France has stopped building new nuclear reactors.
Even worse, since then leftist governments, specially after 2014 when they basically wanted to copy Germany and get ride of all nuclear. They essentially stopped with vital maintenance.
Unfortunately, they built so many plants in the same period, and those are getting in to their mid years and need maintenance. Because they have largely stopped building new plants, some of the knowlage is now lacking.
Overall, the issue in France is not enough nuclear, not nuclear itself.
France even had really awesome advanced nuclear projects, that were all killed off often by Green/Left governments.
Don't you think its kind of funny to point at the only large industrial nation with a green grid and say 'look at the issues those people have'. If I was German I wish we had those kinds of problems.
> And no, building new powerplants is not the solution. None of these plants were constructed on time or within the budget. They need room, they need to be connected, they need trained workers, they need massive oversight (because the owners will do just enough around security to fulfill the letters of the law, never the spirit of the law).
Actually new plants is the solution. Yes, they need time, that's why building shouldn't have been stopped.
Nuclear plants don't need that much room, and there are already train lines most places, adding a branch line isn't that hard.
Yes, training workers for those jobs is actually good.
Energy is mostly government driven anyway, and so it is in France.
> Nuclear reactors are also not fit for the coming climate change, especially not the ones now being turned off. Almost all of them needed to be shut down in the last summers, because the water intake from rivers was either to warm or there was simply not enough water available.
Saying all of them need to shut down because of water is just wrong. Most nuclear reactors continued to operate in most places in Europe.
The hardest energy problems are in winter, all you need to make sure is that you build new plants in places where you can cool them even under worst case assumptions for future climate and it will be fine.
> In addition, nuclear is only viable, because it gets supported by tax money. Nobody will ensure these things against accidents, the companies are not responsible for transport/storage of the waste and get price guarantees. '
In the European context saying only because tax money is nonsense. The 'markets' are so strongly regulated and often lots of it is state owned. Wind and Solar were only made viable by tax money. Massive government projects to push these drove the economics of scale.
The same could have been done for nuclear for the same price. Had Europe built 100 new nuclear reactors in the last 30 years, the economics of nuclear would be way better. Had Europe not invested massively in wind and solar, the economics there wouldn't be as good.
Even going back to 1970, Jimmy Carter killed nuclear project and focused research on solar. And many of the same trends were happening in Europe. If you prioritize one group of technologies and demonize another you can't then act supersized decades later with the results you get.
And even those project just use the grid as balance, if base load and intermittency were correctly priced, a lot of those economics aren't as good. But governments didn't want to do that, because they wanted more solar/wind even at the cost of later dealing with intermittency.
> And despite all of that, the price for nuclear power rises - while the prices for all others forms of energy drop. From a market standpoint, it makes no sense to invest billions (face it, it will be billions, even if companies responsible tell you it will "only be millions") into a technology that is more expensive than others, harder to control, and not flexible enough. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...) Investing these billions into decentralization of the power grid and renewable energies (Wind, Solar, Hydro, Storage capacities) will yield a way better return with less complications and more stability.
The economics are not nearly as clear as you make it out to be.
If you build large nuclear project with many of the same reactors multiple times it look pretty good. It also requires far less investment in terms of updating the grid, because usually you can just locate reactors where coal plants were before.
Nuclear build cost are dominated by learning cost, if you build many then they get massively cheaper and you can built them far faster. Look at France in the 70/80s as a good example.
You also solve the intermittency issue because nuclear don't have that. So had we just invested in nuclear, rather then wind and solar, we wouldn't have to do all those investments into intermittency mitigation a problem that still remains unsolved.
Even worse, because intermittency was not price correctly, the base load had to suffer and that made their economics worse. Often nuclear also didn't receive the same subsidies as solar and wind. There are many examples of that.
And this is before we even talk about GenIV reactors. Because all research and development was stopped and often made borderline impossible, we have not progressed. Newer reactor designs have massive amount of potential to be cheaper. They can also solve problem such as heat production for industrial heat. But over the last 30 years there was comically little investment in that.
So what you see as 'economics' and 'market' I see as governments 30 years ago deciding that solar/wind were the future and simply going with it. Had the EU fixed on a single reactor design, even Gen3 design, and had said we will de-carbonize by nuclear it would have been far cheaper and we would be further along by now.
In fact, such a standard nuclear plant would have been an amazing thing to export to other nations as well.
And then have a GenIV reactor in the pipeline after that.
Nuclear isn't the future because 'we' didn't want it to be the future. But it could have been, and it would have been far better future then what we have now.
P.S: Let me give you an example. France had the GenIV Superphénix. They had finally worked out all the issues (including somebody shooting an RPG at it) and could have started to seriously think about building then in larger numbers but by that point they had little interest in building new reactors and the left/green govenrment wanted to kill as soon as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix
Had France simply started building 5-10 of a next generation of these in the 2000s they would now be a net energy exporter with reactor that had super low fuel cost (because of breeder) and the per plant cost would likely be a fraction of the PWR designs they are currently planning.
You can see how small this reactor is compared to PWRs. So the overall cost when in production at scale would be amazing.
For anyone wondering what the specific feat was.
The Revolution of dignity has absolutely no signs of a coup. It resulted in presidential and parlimentary elections.
Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia.
There have been an abundance of coverage on it, even from state media... but nothing ever changes. Heck, the current head of the government was/is involved in the biggest financially scandal of Germany's history and got away with it by "forgetting" everything.
This is a non-sequitur; the transfer of power was extra-constitutional, so it can't be ruled out by this fact alone.
> Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia.
This is a circular argument. It was illegal insofar as it violated Ukrainian law, sure, but whether Ukrainian law should apply in Crimea in the first place is literally the whole point of contention!
The Americans have been trying to push Germany away from Russia literally for decades.
[1] https://www.vocaleurope.eu/how-russian-pipelines-heat-up-ten...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/09/25/trump-accuse...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Liquid_n...
I don't know why they're waffle pattern yet but it sure looks cool. One day I want to stand inside one.
Think of the difference between 91 octane gas at a pump vs slightly filtered crude oil.
It has seemed to me that the planning system in its current state is actually badly damaging our economy and posperity. We don't build enough houses, and when we do, the infrastructure that's needed to support them takes decades to build. I've been hearing about another heathrow runway, and new trainline, etc for years and yet it seems we're no closer to having these built. Now we're stuck paying most of our income into a 30 year mortgage rather than anything useful/productive. That money could have gone into the productive economy.
Housing prices is, perhaps, a separate question. I think we could probably do infrastructure really well and still have increasing house prices. The way to test that theory is to do infrastructure well, so I suppose my point is moot. Availability in either case, is undeniably bottlenecked by infrastructure.
The question why our authorities aren't better at building runways, train lines or hospitals. Nominal costs, as well as execution times and other overt signs point to serious underperformance. I think that one of the big problems is that any answer to this question is inevitably high politics. Any big success case represents a loss to a relevant political side, a major political interest or whatever. Emergencies tend to give one interest dominion, while also limiting options due to time constraints. That is a recipe for getting things done. It is an excellent lesson in true feasibility. Emergency isn't a solution though.
While a lot of the focus tends to be on corruption, bad faith, and such... I think much of the reasons discussed in "Sucking at Infrastructure: Visionary subtitle about societal stuff" should be focused on innocent enough reasons. For example, I think environmental interest interest groups, parties & institutions are essential. Without this lobby, the environment gets systematically short sticked to devastating cumulative effect. Infrastructure is also a vital interest. So is housing. Monetary stability, economic prosperity etc. These are at tension with each other. Tension is inevitable. How tension is routed isn't. I think that as these tensions mature, pathways stiffen. New pathways become impossible to pave.
Heathrow expansion has considerable opposition, the flight path overflies millions of people.
High Speed 2 is under construction.
An additional nuclear power plant was approved last week.
Britain's problems for major infrastructure are the North/South divide and a general opposition to government investment, not environmentalism.
Not sure I'd use it as a success story.
Sometimes I feel like listing to possible complains from people living around affected areas is a waste of time. Denmark pretty much can't build windmills anymore, because they will: "Ruin my view". Seriously, the city I live in wants to close a coal fired power plant, and replace it with a number of windmills, on the same plot of land, but no, that will ruin someones view (which is currently a power plant). You also can't do cell phone towers, because they are ugly (fair enough), yet you still allow yourself to complain about poor coverage in the same area.
What if it isn't something like windmills that clearly are a net improvement for society over coal, and the objections aren't merely 'not a nice view'? For example, suppose some big corp wants to frack the environment to pieces for big bucks, leaving a poisoned, nearly unlivable habitat for the nearby village.
How can we safeguard against this, in a way that the village inhabitants can protest against such threats with real teeth, without grinding everything to a halt that is a mere nuisance but offers real benefits to society?
You can disguise cell phone towers[0]. It hurts cell phone company profits though, so they'll only do that if the cost of the cheap ugly tower is more due to objections.
[0] https://twistedsifter.com/2012/08/examples-of-cell-phone-tow...
This time is usually necessary to improve the quality of the projects. It is for a reason that this procedures exist. In the past and still today, we are destroying the environment, endangering people's health and reducing their quality of life through hasty decisions. Therefore citizens have decided to enact planning laws to improve the situation. Of course, the duration of planning periods are a cost factor, but one needs to find a sweet spot between them and the (not only financial) cost of projects going awry.
And remember that it were the Greens under Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck which were primarily in charge for the fast implementation of the LNG terminal.
> "Ruin my view".
You understand these aren't the same people, yes? The latter are wealthy entrenched (mostly conservative) NIMBYs who have no care for the environment, and have a deeply personal agenda. They may have appropriated the language of environmentalists when they talk about the impact of projects on their lives, but dismissing environmental concerns because some are using them in bad faith is not reasonable.
Bad faith actors always do this.
While we may think we are dealing with 'reality' we are mainly dealing with the artifacts of the governance system - and it believes itself to be the determinant of reality itself!
It only pays lip service to the idea that it is there to facilitate and improve people's lives - the idea of governance/social contract/etc is an just an expedient idea that aseerts itself to be the master not the servant. It is the enemy of the individual.