Climate change is a (existential?) threat to humanity. There is only so much renewable energy generation capacity that can be constructed in any given year. If you shutdown a nuclear power plant, the demand it was servicing does not magically go away. So you need to something to meet that demand: that may be renewable, but if not enough can be constructed, then it could also mean running fossil fuels more.
So if you want to actually treat climate change as an important problem, why would you shutdown non-emitting source of power that you already have?
Keep the existing nuclear plants, shutdown the fossil fuel-based generators, and use the renewable power you're building to offset the retirement of the latter.
Once all your carbon-emitting generators are retired then consider shutting down the non-emitting nuclear generators.
At no point in the above process are new nuclear plants built.
In Germany's case because they saw what happened in Japan and made an adjustment to their projected risk assessments and decided it wasnt worthwhile.
It may have been the wrong decision, especially given the difficulty in measuring the risks involved but it wasnt an irrational decision.
Nuclear power has a small chance of going wrong but when it does it goes very wrong.
And when it did, Japan had to fire up all of its coal and natural gas.
* https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/germ...
"German energy demand, carbon dioxide emissions seen rising in 2021 -industry group"
* https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/german-energy-d...
"Germany’s energy consumption rising, renewables share falling in 2021"
* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-energy-consump...
I live 50km from a nuclear power plant. I don't worry about it at all.
I'd have expected a larger spike in light of the end of lockdowns.
One can have an endless debate about whether nuclear power plants and/or wind/solar/something else should be built. But to have the discussion about whether existing plants that are here NOW should be stopped, at the same time as Russia is using the energy crisis in Europe as an opportunity for a land grab is... crazy .
* Most countries have to import uranium exactly as they have to import oil. They don't have to import sun and wind.
* If a nuclear power plant seriously fails (2 accidents in 70 years) nobody and their nephew's nephew's will be able to live in that area. If a dam fails at least that ground is not lost forever.
* Building, managing and eventually decommissioning a nuclear power plant has its own CO2 impact if we do it using fossil fuels.
This is a fair assessment IMHO: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/nuclear-power-an...
People do live near Fukushima power plant. Regarding one of the nearby towns, Ōkuma: "In April 2019, parts of the town were deemed to have been successfully decontaminated, with residents allowed to return to these areas. [...] The actual population resident in the town was 2578 people". [1]
> If a dam fails at least that ground is not lost forever.
Relocating population for good is very much the case when it comes to dam _building_. [2]
Nuclear power does have pros and cons, but let's stop with fearmongering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ckuma,_Fukushima
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flooded_towns_in_the_U...
How can you even estimate the cost of batteries? Insane amounts of batteries would be needed, capable of storing all of Germany's energy needs (including transportation and residential heating) for 10 days or so. That would be at least 10 TWh, as Germany currently uses about 550 TWh per year.
The global production of lithium ion batteries in 2018 was 290 GWh (1000 GWh = 1 TWh), expected to increase to 2 TWh per year by 2028 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247625/global-productio...).
In other words, even if Germany would buy every single battery produced on Earth over the course of 5 years, it probably wouldn't be sufficient to provide energy for 10 winter days without wind.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab91e9
In your once in a lifetime event I'd be happy if we used a bit of gas. This is something, after all, that Japan also had to do for years after Fukushima went kaput.
Bear in mind also that demand for heating and transportation can be timeshifted. An Octopus tariff in the UK already allows for this. We've barely scratched the surface of whats possible here because electric grids are slow to evolve to this new reality.
Gas alone does not produce electricity. Gas power stations do. This means building enough gas power stations to cover power requirements of the entire country, then having them sitting most of the time idle there, "just in case".
This is the core of the problem: wind and solar need to be massively backed up. You cannot rely on them supplying even 5 per cent of their nominal capacity if the weather turns against you.
Such a massive backup is eye-wateringly expensive, too. And it consumes concrete and steel, two elements whose production is carbon-intensive.
If you assume:
* We dont already have the infrastructure.
* Power cant be imported.
* Power usage cant be timeshifted.
* Power cant be stored in batteries.
* 10 day periods without wind and sun are routine.
Then yes, it might get expensive.
Solar and wind are predicated on certain things staying one way, while nuclear is predicated on other things staying in a certain way.
Instead, Germany chose the path of decommissioning, which, as you mention, is expensive - and produces no electricity. This was a purely ideological move.
If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better, https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
> Even if it were the same price, nuclear takes decades to build rather than years.
We are talking about closing existing plants. Also, stopping coal in 2038 is no problem, right?
> Despite constant claims of its safety you wont find an insurance company in the world that will insure one without 99% of the cleanup cost being borne by taxpayer.
Probably because of the stupid government regulations? See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#/media/File:Deat....
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* It's eye wateringly expensive both to build and to decommission. Solar, wind and batteries are cheaper. Hornsea 2 produces the same power as a nuclear plant at half the price and with surprisingly low intermittency.
* Even if it were the same price, nuclear takes decades to build rather than years.
* Despite constant claims of its safety you wont find an insurance company in the world that will insure one without 99% of the cleanup cost being borne by taxpayer. Nuclear plants simply dont get built without taxpayer insurance and the nuclear industry refuses to take that risk themselves.
* If current history is anything to go by the risk of disaster is about 1 in 4000 per reactor year and the cleanup cost in Japan is around the $600-800 billion mark.
* It is possible to supplant it with green energy and Germany has done exactly that, which is why emissions have gone down.
* The idea that spending more money on a more expensive and slower to build form of green energy will help speed up the green transition is dubious at best.
Why is it so popular in spite of this? It helps offset some of the costs of having a nuclear arsenal (or puts you on the road to having one). This is a large part of why the US, China, UK and France are happy to pay up and take the risks while Germany and Japan threw in the towel.