Well, Germany's wind was done without a thought about how to implement storage; it did not have to; it was a perfect egotistic game-theoretic play:

The EU energy market mandates that wind and solar production must be bought before everything else. What happens at the moment is France's nuclear reduces production when Germany's wind is over-producing; there is no energy storage at all.

So right now, on top of wind uselessly adding to max production capacity, it thrashes zero-CO2 nuclear-allocated capital's effectiveness. That's a form of capital theft.

And on top of that, Germany's huge coal baseline continues producing just as before:

https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

Really, the EU rules should be changed so as to account for driveability in energy production.

While yes, Germany profits from the European grid to offset some of its over or under production, it doesn't really affect Germany's or France's nuclear energy production.

As you can see even at time when wind provides more than half of Germany's total energy production, the red nuclear bar remains nearly unchanged.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...

If you check France's energy production at the same time nuclear energy production isn't affected.

https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ...

It does affect oil, gas and coal, but hardly affects nuclear.

My understanding is that nuclear doesn’t do variability very well

Some of France's nuclear plants are currently offline for maintenance which is contributing to the spike in natural gas prices.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3780688-france-shuts-down-nucl...

> The EU energy market mandates that wind and solar production must be bought before everything else.

Not exactly. Operators can bid a price for generation and markets dictate the cheapest generators are bought up first. Renewables tend to have zero marginal cost and are therefore often cheapest. Nuclear also has low marginal cost, but not zero.

Renewables being favored is not a rule but effect of how the market works.

The EU is our battery.

Well, good on you I guess.

What's so sad is wind and solar being so concentrated in Germany. If it were more spread out over Europe, it would have lower correlation; and help with production peaks.

There's egotistic, and there's egotistic + harmful.

It isn't. You cannot rely on everyone else staying carbon positive, as you will feel the heat too.

> Germany intends to take all coal-fired generation offline by 2038

Good if they actually mean it maybe?

> leading to a likely increase in renewable-power assets in the long term... Yet in the short term, coal is helping to bridge the supply gap.

This just seems asinine. But what do I know...

Is there something impassably / chronically dangerous about nuclear power or is it just public fear that pushes us away from it? It seems like a solvable engineering scenario from an outside perspective. I just dont get it.

> Is there something impassably / chronically dangerous about nuclear power or is it just public fear that pushes us away from it?

Oil funding of anti-nuclear FUD. Thats it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

First of all, the new German government adjusted the phase-out of coal power to be as close as possible to 2030. 2038 was more a bad compromise by the previous government.

And yes, nuclear power can be dangerous as Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown. Those dangers could probably be addressed by new reactors, but those are very expensive. The big problem are the existing old reactors. They are not as safe and require a lot of maintenance. A few years ago, Germany only had 4 nuclear power plants running through the whole winter as 4 others were down for longer maintenance. Then there is the problem where to plut all the nuclear waste, Germany doesn't have a long-term storage facility (though search started in the 80ies).

I don't really understand why the Chernobyl or Fukushima disasters should be considered evidence of nuclear power being dangerous.

The Chernobyl plant had severe design deficiencies, and the operators were apparently not properly informed about the dangers of operating the plant the way they did at the moment. The Soviet Union was not exactly the epitome of environmental responsibility. Lots of things went wrong.

The Fukushima disaster was precipitated by a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami that pretty much leveled the entire area and stopped the emergency generators. The backup generators also failed. Pretty much everything that could go wrong went wrong.

People were displaced, and the radiation leakage should be considered significant environmental damage.

The number of people displaced was tens of thousands. Although few deaths have been confirmed, if you're pessimistic, you might be able to come up with a larger figure.

However, the Fukushima disaster was a once-per-several-decades event. Coal causes hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths every year through direct air pollution, not to mention the indirect effects from climate change. That's not a rare accident. That's business as usual.

Yes, nuclear power has risks, and sometimes something goes wrong. Lots of work has been done to minimize the risks, as should be. But it's entirely emotion-driven and intellectually untenable to consider nuclear to be a major risk, comparatively. The damage caused by accidents that apparently should happen at most once per several decades in well-managed (or even less well managed) plants is still a fraction of the damage that coal-fired or other fossil-fueled plants cause every year as part of their normal operation.

If anything, the lesson to be learned from the Fukushima disaster should be: "consider carefully whether to build nuclear plants in an area where major earthquakes and tsunamis are statistically to be expected; design and manage plants responsibly; other than that, it's probably fine".

Nuclear waste is still be a problem but it's hard to imagine it being anywhere near the magnitude of the problems that burning fossil fuels causes.

However even those old reactors are several magnitudes safer per MWh than coal, over 20 000 people die each in Europe due pollution emitted from burning coal that as much as several Chernobyl's each year (even if we use the most pessimistic estimates).

The old reactors were intentionally unfunded for years to make them so expensive that it looked better to decommission them.

> underfunded ... expensive

You're at least going to have to provide some numbers if you want that conspiracy theory to be taken seriously.

For me it's not an engineering problem but a human one. Since the waste from a single power plant during one year of operation is enough to kill hundreds of millions of people we have to ensure no madmen get their hands on the waste for thousands of years after we have spent all the watt-hours the waste has produced.

We're leaving that problem to hundreds of generations to come, who will get no benefit from it, just so we can have cheap energy today. That seems unfair. It's equivalent to Julius Caesar building the aqueducts using some technology that France would still have to pay for today.

I think investing in energy storage - hydrogen, ammonia, pumped storage to mention a few - would be vastly better. Solar and wind already generate more electricity in Germany than nuclear ever did, if it could be stored during the proverbial cloudy days, the problem is solved permanently and in a much better way than with nuclear power plants.

"waste from a single power plant during one year of operation is enough to kill hundreds of millions of people"

You know what else can kill millions of people? Pesticides, and anyone can buy them.

Bhopal disaster killed thousands of people and left 500,000 with debilitating injuries when a pesticide factory operated by Union Carbide Limited had a leak due to lack of maintenance. The CEO is wanted man in India, but has fled to the US and theybare refusing to extradite.

> Since the waste from a single power plant during one year of operation is enough to kill hundreds of millions of people

Chances of that happening is minuscule and if left uncheck, global warming will kill more than that.

> who will get no benefit from it, just so we can have cheap energy today

Or they figure out better ways to use it that don’t involve killing people.

> proverbial cloudy days

According to this website[0], Germany had about half a years worth of sunny days in 2020. 50% is a long shot from proverbial and according to tfa it’s being bridged by other EU nations and coal.

[0] https://ru-geld.de/en/country/weather-and-climate/sunshine.h...

The water in a small lake is enough to drown a billion people.

These horror fantasies mean nothing.

From a political point of view re-introducing nuclear in Germany would be suicide for anyone attempting it.

It‘s just not a politically viable option. That’s the reality of it, irregardless of anything else.

Is the real reason perhaps that those coal-fired generators are running 32-bit Unix?

Not only is it solvable, it's basically been solved for years.

https://youtu.be/c1QmB5bW_WQ is aimed at the lay audience.

The issue is that radiation is a silent killer, so it is extremely easy people with vested interests in (say) fossil fuels to exploit our inability to access risk. Coal hurts people every single day, but it doesn't have the same poetic weight as radiation so this is lost on the general public.

Nuclear power is expensive, however. Dealing with the waste is also an issue but firstly, forcing us to deal with the waste seriously is potentially not such a bad thing (assuming we need nuclear in the long run, which unless storage comes a very long way we presumably will), and secondly this is the kind of question where a government with a lot of political capital needs to just find some deserted land to build a long term solution.

It's mostly expensive due to artificial reasons. If we invested the effort we have in renewables into nuclear, the price, availability and reliability would increase in a similar fashion.

We experienced fallout from Chernobyl (radiation levels of wild boar meat and some mushrooms are still under surveillance today) and we were designated nuclear ground zero in case that the Soviets tried to invade Europe. What attitude towards all things nuclear do you expect to arise from that?

Oh, come one! I spent most of my childhood in Minsk, 380km north-west to Chernobyl. Now in Europe my only worry is the blackout plan in case of power shortages, not the nuclear plant 60km on the east.

I am always amazed how Germans are irrational about nuclear while nearby countries have a mostly pragmatic attitude. Even in Belgium the nuclear phase out is fake and every politician knows it can not be enforced until Netherlands build two new nuclear powerplants 20 years from now.

Nearly all the people I know in Poland who were children at the time of Chernobyl have thyroid issues, including my partner. It’s not accurate to say that it had zero health impact. Of course, coal has plenty of health impact, just not a good look to be so flippant about a major nuclear disaster.

Chernobyl was also a political/PR issue, and in typical USSR fashion, the general public wasn't even informed until over a week after the incident. Consider the half-life of iodine-135, by the time people were being recommended and provided with the necessary medication most of the damage was already done.

Indeed. I know people who found out because they had friends in the university physics department. General population was not told immediately.

How do you know those issues thyroid issues were not caused by fossil fuel pollution? Many more people have serious health issues or die every year due pollutants emitted from burning coal (and other fossil fuels but coal is by far the worst) than the total death count related to Chernobyl was, its not even comparable.

Poland is especially bad in this regard. It consistently has one the highest PM10 and PM2.5 levels in Europe (and I assume it should have been much worse in the 80's)

Because there is a well studied link and a clear biological pathway has been identified. [1]

I’m not in favor of coal, I know it has health consequences, but the existence of coal pollutants does not negate the existence of health consequences from nuclear disasters. I’m also not against nuclear, but it is clearly dangerous, both to health and environment and for proliferation. Considering and balancing these risks as well as climate risk is good governance.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10626541/

Indeed. We should also not forget that coal ash significantly contributes to radiation exposure in humans. Every winter it's the same all over Poland. There are places like Krakow that consistently rank among the most polluted towns in the world during winter [1].

[1] https://notesfrompoland.com/2021/12/15/polish-city-records-w...

Being target for nuclear bombs isn't related to nuclear power in the slightest.

The fallout sucked, but even that was a minor hiccup compared to the destruction pollution is bringing with it...

Fear doesn’t work that way.

I was forbidden from including a smoke detector in a school show-and-tell (UK, circa 1993) because of the radiation symbol, even though there was a detector just like it on the ceiling of the same classroom.

> Being target for nuclear bombs isn't related to nuclear power in the slightest.

There's a reason nuclear power plant technology is strictly controlled as "dual use": the same technology used for power production can also be used to produce the material for a nuclear bomb. So you can't say they're completely unrelated.

Nuclear waste from commercial reactors in the US is not fissile. Reprocessing would change that (producing plutonium), but that's why we don't have fast breeders in the US (personally, I favor changing that). I'm aware of no enrichment facilities co-located with nuclear power plants, certainly not in the US.

It's a bit more nuanced than that as there's just a subset of all possible nuclear power plant designs that needs the same enrichment facility than for military (bomb making) usage.

Perhaps one that is relevant to the future of your children rather than the fears of your parents?

Depends on how rational you are. Unfortunately, people are not very rational on average.

Well, one small accident 35 years ago and far away, that could have been much worse - is still the cause that large areas are contaminated here.

It is rational, to be sceptic of such a technology.

Most discussions about it are not, sure. Anti-nuclear is a strong dogma in green circles and not to be discussed about - but there are still real reasons, why it became a dogma in the first place.

Because nuclear energy is not as save and easy as it was promised. It is heavily subsidized, but socialised the risk - and the current storage solutions to the waste are sub-optimal. So expensive and dangerous.

I am open to have them run a bit longer, and rather close the coal plants, but they are not a magic bullet solution.

I'm not worried about new reactor designs failing. I'm more worried about storing and protecting waste that lasts 20,000 years.

Just seems like another opportunity to externalize costs onto future humans to me.

> storing and protecting waste that lasts 20,000 years

Earth core contains gazilions of spent nuclear fuel. Just burying spent nuclear fuel would not make anything worse.

But it is suboptimal, because spent nuclear fuel can be used in the future reactors.

I don't understand why people repeat this statement about spent fuel again and again why there's no problem.

Germans have always been anti-nuclear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...

Longer insanity is not less insanity!

It's democracy. We were much closer to Chernobyl, than all the Americans promoting yesterday's easy future here. Some parts in Germany are suffering the fallout still, when mushrooms and wild game make the Geiger counters beep in the news.

Germany is extremely population dense and nobody wants to live next to radioactive waste. Especially in rich Bavaria were all the AKWs have been build (and where they had suitable rock to bury it).

No one here wants nuclear power. Not even the energy producers. There is no lobby, no support, no future for Atomkraftwerke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer

> nobody wants to live next to radioactive waste.

It seems irrational as sealed high profile waste doesn't leak any radiations beyond the natural ambiant radioactive noise. The problem may arise in a very long time due to water molecules progressively entering and exiting the enclosure during thousands of years.

One could live and sleep every night in a nuclear waste storage building and nothing will happen to them. Similarly, one could swim in nuclear fuel cooling pools everyday and won't have any problem either.

It's way more problematic for health to live next to a coal power plant.

> The problem may arise in a very long time due to water molecules progressively entering and exiting the enclosure during thousands of years.

Or you know, after a couple of decades because the storage containers really don't like salt water and start to corrode. And as recovery of the waste was not foreseen initially, it gets really difficult and expensive now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

"We've always hated X therefore X must be bad"

The history of twentieth century tells us that Germans have questionable judgement and bad opinions.

If you think that Germans are capable of making multiple terrible political decisions in the space of a century, then why do you trust them to operate and regulate nuclear reactors and safely store their waste for thousands of years?

Unless there is a higher risk of war. Can you imagine if WWII had been a bit more technologically advanced, with bombing raids on nuclear reactors? Here’s a report on their vulnerability in a modern war.

https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

If WWII had nuclear technology in play, bombing raids on nuclear reactors would've been one of the smaller problems. Then again, if MAD had been around pre-WWII it may have never happened.

Nuclear fusion is.

Nuclear fission is definitely not environmentally friendly, and will probably be obsolete in 30-40 years. Then the future generations have to deal with the problem that comes with nuclear fission power plants.

Its less the coal industry and just a random quirk of culture.

And that thinking is insane to me, long-term best is to have renewables and not pollute - nuclear is no alternative but just another bad with too many problems, bad economics, and waste produced.

Nuclear is fantastic economics, its just regulated to death. The real effect of suppressing nuclear has been a slower transition to a sustainable carbon economy, and increased power prices limiting innovation and productivity. Solar and wind have benefitted, but its still a minor player, and without a revolutionary new battery tech, and gargantuan infrastructure investment, it simply cant replace a majority of current power production, much less satisfy the massive suppressed demand.

We must be looking at very different numbers - or what do you mean with regulation, requiring some safety standards?

Nowhere nuclear got economic, required massive subsidies - and in the end has been driven by the need for the precious byproducts?

You can tell because for profit(if staterun) companies are building them across the world. France is drawing significant profits from existing nuclear, and constructing new. Nuclear has been ridiculously profitable for most countries which built them, with the sole exception of countries which started building them, then forbid nuclear. Many countries in Asia are building them because its cheaper than coal power. Most countries impose nuclear specific taxes, in addition to long term disposal fees, which exceed the price of production by several times. Sheer state profit. Despite this, the main reason nuclear does not get built in Europe is regulation, the the risk of losing the investment due to changing laws on nuclear. Which has happened several times.

Byproducts, aside from nuclear weapons, which most countries do not have, are a negligible part. Sweden for instance built ample nuclear early, but never built the kind of reactor which is used in nuclear weapon production. Sweden also didnt subsidize it, but rather has been taxing it at an additional 300-500% in addition to long term disposal fees(so little of which actually went to long term disposal they introduced a second free named exactly the same 40 years latter). Despite also discarding the cooling water heat into the ocean completely needlessly, all it took for these plants to be profitable was not forcing them to shut down when public opinion turned. It took a while sure, but plants have been profitable for 30 years now, and could have continued to be so if they hadn't by law been prohibited from upgrading and researching.

Nuclear regulation in most places goes as follows: is nuclear profitable? if yes, increase safety until it stops being so. If technology improves so that the same safety can be achieved using less cost, further improve safety. If this happens while building a new plant, force them to start over. For what that looks like, look to the 3 complete restarts due to previously approved safety measures suddenly being retracted and increased during the construction of the Finnish plant.

Its this idiotic idea that they must guarantee zero percent risk which is the main culprit. Flying kills more people, and more people need power than flight, yet we require far more of nuclear. Many countries built dozens of perfectly safe plants during the 60ties for pennies on the dollar. If we could build those again, you know the ones where less than 0.25% had an serious accident over a 60 year history, and removed the massive taxes, we could have power prices at a fifth of what they are today.

I'm not that optimistic. France is putting its nuclear activities in a separate company, it's in quite a bit of debt.

Do you have a source for Finland moving the goalposts during the construction?

The wiki article gives a decent overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... Though you will need to follow the references, look for STUK approving some methodology, then claiming its results are insufficient.

Umm, it's not the safety regulator's task to promise the results will be sufficient if you use a specific methodology: "Scrum methodology is fine, so the resulting software quality will be fine too."

There is much more to it than that in this case.

Nuclear is much cheaper when built at scale, with multiple copies of the same design. Serial production of nuclear plans in the 70s produced plants at a cost of about 2 billion per GW of capacity. And bear in mind that nuclear's capacity factor is over 90% as compared to 25-35% for wind and solar. And it's not an intermittent power source, eliminating the need for storage.

The reality is that we don't have the capacity to fulfill energy demand without controllable sources. You can't just say, "well it's cloudy and not very windy. Guess plumbing just isn't going to work today because we can't power the pumps." Well, you can but you'll immediately get voted out of office and replaced with someone who will build fossil fuel plants to keep the country alive.

if this accelerates transitioning to renewables, it is not insane.

Well it’s definitely accelerating transitioning to Russian gas.

Edit: gas not oil

Germany has never really used oil for producing electricity.

GP probably meant Russian gas. They are also going to become net buyers of coal electricity from neighboring countries as a result of this. It's not a good move for the environment.

> become net buyers of coal electricity

even if, it's not because of that we have no coal. it's just not a good idea to use lignite (besides the co2 it also destroys tons of ecosystems which is probably beyond co2) and deep mining is basically dead in germany

Yup sorry! I realized after I submitted I meant gas. I’ll see if I can edit

I seems more like they are transitioning to Russian gas instead.

Things can't be conditionally sane or insane. A winning gamble remains a gamble and people are right to balk and say "you bet the house on this?".

It won't accelerate anything. And in the meantime it takes a huge amount of reliable, non-carbon-producing, 24/7 generation capacity offline. Which is a very bad thing.

You can’t start up the equivalent of “half a country’s nuclear reactors” in 2 weeks. For this to happen you must already have an excess of renewables, which they obviously don’t have.

What will happen is that more coal will be burned because coal always works and is instantly available; Sun and wind isn’t.

Actually is not that difficult: three reactors out of six remaining are closing.

Not saying that the closing is right, but the heading is a little click-baity. Reactors are only about 2-3% of installed capacity, about 6% of production. It's not good, but it's not a catastrophe either.