Nuclear plants are not a real replacement to gas. First of all, a lot of gas gets used for heating - nuclear isn't useful there. Then it is used for providing flexible power, to ramp up and down as quickly as possible to follow the production of renewables. Only a small fraction of the gas goes into "base load" usage. So the government might look into the nuclear power plants to dampen the price level for electricity a bit, but that is about it.

For the last days, there was a lot of wind in Germany, causing the German wind energy production to sometimes even exceed French nuclear (up to 48GW of wind power). Germany most of all now has to correct the mistakes by the previous government and very quickly has to push for building up more wind and solar capacity.

The only reason gas is used for heating is the historical cheap price for gas. Gas line and gas infrastructure is actually a bit expensive and require additional maintenance compared to just running electrical lines between homes, and gas heaters are generally a bit more complex to install than electric heaters. The incentives to continue with gas heaters goes down when gas prices goes up, in similar way that the incentives for electric heaters will go down when the electricity prices goes up.

If we compare Sweden to Germany, almost no homes in Sweden has gas lines connected to them. Swedish homes use heated up water (central or communal heating), or just heat up the air. Sweden has a lot of nuclear and hydro so the electricity prices has historically been low, and importing gas would be expensive. There have been few incentives to spend money and government resources into the infrastructure needed for gas. Germany in contrast seems to have done the opposite, with historical low prices for gas (didn't the coal industry produce also produce gas in the past?), and fairly high prices for electricity. By now there is a pretty large sunk costs into gas infrastructures, and a switch to electric heating would be both expensive for the government and for individual home owners.

On the positive side, a massive investment towards electric heating would be a major boon for the environment. Leaks from natural gas is considered a major contributor for green house gases, and burning it also not very good.

Sweden has 8x less residents then Germany tho

People always come up with this population-size argument in contexts where it's totally irrelevant[1]. So what if Germany has eight times more residents than Sweden, or Sweden eight times fewer than Germany?!? Everything still works the same, only scaled up or down by a factor of eight: You have eight times more/fewer consumers to supply (with energy, staplers, food, whatever), but you also have eight times more/fewer entrepreneurs and workers to supply it.

___

[1]: This moronic argument is most frequently brought up as "Single-payer health care can't work in the US as it does in [insert any country with single-payer health care], because the US population is [X] times bigger!" Yeah, but so fucking WHAT? That just means the US has X times more health care recipients, and an X times larger economy to supply health care! It's just the same thing, scaled up by a factor of X. Sheesh...

It's relevant, but I'm no expert by how much. Sweden has tons of hydro, Germany has none. Scaling infrastructure is hard af.

How is population size relevant to the occurrence or lack of geographic / geological features?

> First of all, a lot of gas gets used for heating - nuclear isn't useful there

All electricity basically turns to heat at some point. So why not?

You lose something like 70% of the thermal output of the reactor in the conversion to electricity. Also the capacities a nowhere near large enough. Nord Stream 2 alone can transport something like 63 GW worth of gas. This is more than the total electricity consumption of Germany.

And for a home heater, 80% of the heat from the gas you burn goes up the chimney.

Larger energy capture devices can be more efficient. One highly-efficient fuel burning plant providing power to a hundred thousand electric resistive heaters can produce more useful heat per unit fuel than a hundred thousand small-scale self-maintained home furnaces.

You're both wrong.

Combined cycle power plants can be 64% efficient [1] at turning heat into electricity. And if that power goes on to run a heat pump, 1 watt of electric power can deliver 3-4 watts of heating.

And modern gas combi boilers can be 92-98% efficient [2].

The days of people throwing away 80% of the energy they pay for are long gone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant [2] https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/boilers/article/boiler-energ...

Could you give some examples for nuclear power plants that are using a combined cycle turbine? I was under the impression that the operating temperatures of BWRs or PWRs are nowhere near high enough for that.

Your numbers are totally off. When did you bought and installed the last heater?

Modern condensing heaters have an efficiency of 90%.

I think you got your numbers wrong. Even in the US, you are not allowed to sell gas furnaces with less than 80% efficiency. High-end ones reach over 99% efficiency.

Maybe because 90%* of all houses need to be refitted.

(*estimated number out of thin air, but yes majority is gas or oil)

In the UK, air source heat pumps are pushed as a 1:1 replacement, with running costs basically the same as gas, in GBP.

I can’t verify that easily, but this doesn’t seem disputed, so the retrofitting is maybe not so much of an issue. There is of course the initial installation cost, but also presumably lower maintenance costs.

Yes, of course you can heat with electricity - and using heat pumps this is definitely the future. However, the amount of nuclear available would make only a small difference here. It should be much easier to just buy gas internationally and push forward with renewables.

You can also use the heat directly (district heating) without having to go to electricity and back. This limits the electricity output efficiency but increases the overall efficiency of the plant. It requires changes to the turbines and the buildout of a district heating system though.

Sure you could heat with nuclear directly. Actually that sounds like something that should have been done when nuclear was in fashion. But you would have to produce a lot of new infrastructure and most of all, new nuclear plants. None of the existing nuclear plants is suitable for that.

And that is sure, while keeping the remaining nuclear power plants in service a little bit longer might be a consideration (though unlikely), investing in new nuclear infrastructure for sure isn't. There, renewables are the way to go.

Germans can barely get their heads around nuclear energy. Pumping fluids that have been anywhere near a reactor into homes will be untenable.

I don't think this is the core problem, that would have been to build a nuclear reactor so close to a major city, that you could run a pipe to it.

As you can tell from the map that's not really an issue. Nuclear power plants aren't in the middle of nowhere, they need access to an educated workforce.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-map-of-Nuclear-Power...

They aren't in the middle of nowhere, but usually quite a bit away from city centers, for safety reasons. Too far for a hot water line to be practical.

Up to 30km is no problem for water between 90-175 degrees celcius, so you reach plenty of cities.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.02.080

SMRs operating at atmospheric pressure, or otherwise more managable due to smaller scales may alleviate that.

https://waerme.hamburg/presse-media/pressemitteilungen/erneu... <- This is one such plant at the western edge of Hamburg, being remodeled for that use-case. Having recently seen workers from Statnett climbing the masts in the rain to put pilot wires to pull new wires(80MW upgrade) on one half of the masts, while hearing the 50hz-buzz about 25 to 30 meters below. Crazy Vikings! :-)

You can't use electricity to run your gas furnace.

But if you use that gas furnace to heat radiators in a fluid-born (usually water) heating system, you only need to install an electric heater next to your furnace and re-route the pipes to/from the furnace to use that heater in stead. Not all that humongous an operation.

Green hydrogen derivatives would make that theoretically possible. This is receiving quite a lot of attention in the EU at the moment. In practice, the stress is more on industrial processes and other primary energy use scenarios.

Nobody here uses electrical heating. It's all done with radiators and the like, pretty much exclusively.

And heat pumps work much better than induction generally.

It also isn't politically feasible. Nuclear power needs subsidies and I doubt a green government will restart those. Government can be impulsive, but I don't see that happening again.

In Germany protest against nuclear weapons and nuclear energy was one of the core issues of the Green Party for the last 40 years. Restarting or extending the lifetime of existing plants would be political suicide for the current government.

If they're smart they can build support for modern designs, probably small nuclear, as long as they can convince their voter base that the risk of accidents and the problem of waste disposal are much smaller than with the outdated plants they helped close down.

From an economic perspective it's a hard sell compared to solar and wind plus storage, but with the resistance to new windfarms by NIMBYs you can probably justify some subsidies. The timescales involved are still a problem though.

> In Germany protest against nuclear weapons and nuclear energy was one of the core issues of the Green Party for the last 40 years.

Yes, "Green" Parties are a blight on the political landscape everywhere.

> Restarting or extending the lifetime of existing plants would be political suicide for the current government.

Well, for the bottom of the current "traffic-light" coalition, anyway... (We can but hope.)

Germany will kill its economy if they rely solely on so called "green energy".

> a lot of gas gets used for heating - nuclear isn't useful there.

Erm, no, that's just not true. Ironically, the best counter to that is... Russia, which successfully supplies a few million with extremely cheap hot water.

Maybe not with the existing ones. Otherwise a lazy search for nuclear district heat is contradicting you:

[1] https://www.nucnet.org/news/operation-begins-of-qinshan-nucl...

[2] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202112/22/WS61c27b44a310cdd39...

[3] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-nuclear-...

[4] https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newschinese-nuclear-compani...

Heat pumps are a thing. Also the problem with wind and pv is insufficient storage. We need additional storage more than additional wind/pv.

> Germany most of all now has to correct the mistakes by the previous government and very quickly has to push for building up more wind and solar capacity.

If any of what you say is true at all, how did France survive for so long on nuclear power?

See https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...

France uses 40.7 billion cubic meters of gas (0.6 per capita), while Germany uses 86.5 (1.03 per capita). Given that France has a warmer climate the difference is not all that big. France does not survive on nuclear power alone.

Only 14% of the gas imported to Germany is used for electricity generation [1]. A few nuclear power plants would not make a big difference.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37985/umfrage...

Germany needs gas today, not after n years, so making a nuclear plant today is not a good solution. We should be investing in small nuclear plants that China is making for future needs. Restarting old nuclear plants is not solving the problem because it is expensive. And I highly doubt the government would cut taxes. And, buying oil from other countries is expensive.

This probably explains why Germany is not supporting Ukraine with fists. If they make Russia angry, the Germans will be enemies of Germany due to social unrest. This is a decision of morality vs economics, and the government will choose economics. I think for now, just like China, Germany is just stopping to appease the mass. But after a month they will take Russian gas.

> This probably explains why Germany is not supporting Ukraine with fists.

And also probably because we don't want a war on our borders? Ukraine was supposed to be a buffer state between NATO and Russia, and then US promised that Ukraine would have joined NATO, and back at the time Germany and France pushed back[0]. But US has only to gain with disorders in the old continent, so here we are...

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03nato.html

Very true, but as with the Iraq war, the guilty are easily found and support for a war quickly comes from the righteous®.

Russia actually does have an argument for protecting former Russians in some countries. These are people that suddenly lost their nationality with the collapse of the soviet union and don't want to relieve it in favor of the new countries. That puts them in a situation where they are not allowed to travel because of lacking passports. There is additional discrimination that the population faces. Of course that is not at all an excuse for an invasion. But if you deny that Russia has security interests in that region, you basically are asking for a war. And the Russians have made it very clear that it is seen that way and made their reaction very predictable. Yet, western nations ignored that completely.

After what the US media conjured as Russian election interference it certainly drove more animosity towards Russians. Completely irresponsible behavior and not a lesser extend of state propaganda than you would hear from Kremlin media. But people will completely deny this reality due to a religious self-image, even if they know it was bollocks. Shame on those that reiterated that message which was not restricted to the US at all.

The US might have some obligations towards Ukraine, as has Great Britain. But I don't think the involvement of the US has been very helpful. Bush wanted to be seen as strong everywhere after 9-11 and that extended to giving Ukraine and Georgia hope of Nato membership. At that time Russia didn't even react much. But the course for the escalation was set.

One common factor of those that asked for a strong response, which the west mostly gave with the exception of Germany perhaps, was being profoundly ignorant in how to talk to Russia and its interest. Ukraine has interests too, but there is no solution for them without a dialogue with its neighbor.

And just promising to not include Ukraine in a military alliance (it is not just a defensive pact) would have mostly ended the conflict and most arguments. Yet, some people decided not to do that.

> ...don't want to relieve it in favor of the new countries. That puts them in a situation where they are not allowed to travel because of lacking passports. There is additional discrimination...

They put themselves in that situation by not getting new passports, so if there's any "additional discrimination" it's done by themselves. If they didn't want to become citizens of their newly independent ex-Soviet Republics but remain Russians, they should have moved to Russia.

> Of course that is not at all an excuse for an invasion.

It certainly is being used as one, just as it has in the past.

> But if you deny that Russia has security interests in that region, you basically are asking for a war. And the Russians have made it very clear that it is seen that way and made their reaction very predictable.

Russia's "security interests" are, as they have ever been, aggressive unilateral expansion. Nobody else was "asking for a war"; nobody needs to, because Russia is always only too willing to serve one up unasked. So yes indeed, "their reaction [is] very predictable". It always is, and it's of course even easier to predict when it's a "reaction" to circumstances they themselves engineered.

> Yet, western nations ignored that completely.

So WTF were they supposed to do? Acquiesce and appease, as so many times before? There has to be a limit somewhere. Putin cannot count on Munich 1938 going on forever.

> One common factor of those that asked for a strong response, which the west mostly gave with the exception of Germany perhaps, was being profoundly ignorant in how to talk to Russia and its interest.

Because normal international diplomatic relations and norms don't apply to Russia; one has to "talk to" Russia in a special way? How about fucking Russia just come down off its high horse, in stead?

> Ukraine has interests too, but there is no solution for them without a dialogue with its neighbor.

There is no solution for them with such a neighbour.

> And just promising to not include Ukraine in a military alliance (it is not just a defensive pact) would have mostly ended the conflict and most arguments. Yet, some people decided not to do that.

Here's what people with a dictatorial mindset[1] just can't seem to get: It's not a matter of what other powers should "promise" or "decide", but what the people of the sovereign nation of Ukraine themselves WANT to do. If they feel that they need to belong to an alliance in order to preserve their national security, then who the fuck is Putin to say they can't? He has his own nation to run; he is not the dictator of the Ukrainians. (Yet. :-( )

[1]: Like you are so convincingly demonstrating here.

> These are people that suddenly lost their nationality

No, these people are occupants. They should either deported or jailed.

Letting them stay is a democracy glitch that now terrorists like Putin is exploiting.

So you are advocating pogroms? I'll take democracy over that.

Pogroms, genocides, mass murders is what Russia was and is known for.

Sure, but I read it like you wanted to respond in kind.

> restart/keep open the nuclear power plants

Never going to happen. I would expect looking for alternative suppliers of gas, and developing renewables further.

I was unaware it was dead. I was under the impression that despite the brewing trouble with Russia, Germany was planning to use this pipe to buy more Russian gas. It's possible that Scholtz has different ideas about that than Merkel, I suppose.

The SPD has always been on the moderate side when it comes to Russia. His Green coalition partners are NATO hawks though.

They really are not. Instead, they were friends with the human rights movement and anti-stalinist organisations in Russia (e.g. Мемориал), which got gutted by Putin. So naturally they are not happy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)

>His Green coalition partners are NATO hawks though.

What's their reasoning?

I would guess because Russia has shown itself to be a bad actor over and over? They kill/imprison people just for being gay. Imagine what they do to dissidents and those who don't "go with the Russian flow". Dealing with Russia of today is dealing with the devil.

This seems like a caricature and not at all honest.

Only if you have no fucking clue about anything.

Most major cities on Germany either use district heating or gas (esp. in eastern Germany).

Overall, rounded: 48% natural gas, 25% oil, 14% district heating

https://www.bmwi-energiewende.de/EWD/Redaktion/Newsletter/20...

Electrical heating is rare, because it's inefficient. And considering the former energy mix of Germany: not ecological.

You don't have to like Scholz, but talking about nuclear in this context and calling the head of a state dumb... ?!?!... doesn't make much sense.