This is not a good discussion, this is fanatics fighting. Anytime someone suggest simple solution to a big problem %99.9 of the time they don't actually have a simple and obvious solution.
The problem of relying on Russia for energy was obvious. There isn't a singular "the solution" because there were many possible solutions, nuclear energy being just one. In addition to investing in wind/solar, there are other solutions besides nuclear. Particularly, fracing and coal mining. Both of these are unpopular for obvious reasons (which is the reason everybody talks about nuclear instead), but I think both are better than the political autonomy of an entire subcontinent being threatened by a belligerent foe.
In 2020, the EU imported 13 786 PJ of natural gas, while gross available energy was 57 767 PJ, i.e. gas imports accounted for 23.9% https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Also in 2020, 27.2% of petroleum gas imports into the EU were from Russia. https://oec.world/en/profile/international_organization/euro...
Put together, 6.5% of gross available energy in the EU was from Russian gas.
It's not so obvious that that is a problematic level of reliance threatening the political autonomy of an entire subcontinent.
If it meant that 6.5% of the population will be left without any energy, that would be quite terrible. If it meant a 6.5% drop in GDP per capita PPP, it would be worse than the drop from 2019 to 2020, but still only throw the EU economy back to 2013 levels.
That doesn't mean it isn't worth planning ahead for the consequences of reduced energy availability, but maybe we don't need to panic, either.
> Put together, 6.5% of gross available energy in the EU was from Russian gas.
In case anyone is curious, the sources I find suggest the following about the sources of the primary energy in the European Union:
~38% from oil, of which ~29% is from Russia = ~11% of total energy, plus
~24% from natural gas, of which 39--45% [note this is higher than in the parent comment] is from Russia = 9+% of total, plus
~14% from coal, of which 46--70% is from Russia = 6+% of total energy, plus
~11% from uranium (nuclear), of which ~20% is from Russia = ~2% of total energy,
altogether totaling >28% from Russia.
Other sources may disagree on the particular numbers, but the rough estimate of "one quarter" is in line with other sources: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/europe-russia-energy-...
Some sources for the individual numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_the_European_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_... https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy/bloc-2... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034930/eu-hard-coal-imp... https://www.dw.com/en/eu-ban-on-russian-coal-imports-comes-i...
But there's a limit to the price war. At some point, a factory making widgets is going to look at price increases that make the cost of producing a widget greater than its expected sale price, at which point they'll probably stop their production lines, unless they feel like setting money on fire to keep them running. Those factory closures then provide for the necessary reduction in energy use. But everyone else still needs to pay the higher prices.
Fortunately, higher energy prices also incentivize increasing supply from alternative sources, so the EU probably won't have to reduce energy use by the full 6.5%. And as long as people setting money on fire are sufficiently rare, it will be energy-intensive, low-profitabilty users who give up first, so the economy likely won't shrink by 6.5% either. But a larger fraction will be captured by energy suppliers as profit.
Indeed. Always found it strange that Germany didn't see a problem with relying on Russia for their main energy source.
People laugh at Preppers and call them crazy for taking prudent preparedness steps as insurance against future risks. It's a very human thing to do.
During the early days of COVID, some people started coming around to preppers being not-so-crazy-after-all, which lasted for precisely a few months before the toilet paper returned and preparedness being an acceptable idea left mainstream thought.
Expediency and lifestyle will always trump prudence in the human mind. It's the primary reason we will eventually exterminate ourselves, regardless of the specific existential risk we succumb to. The Great Filter is no great mystery.
I think most of the time people are laughing at preppers on TV. Having an emergency radio, a gun, extra water storage, a back-up generator, etc. - I haven't experience many people who laugh at that, though certainly I imagine someone exists who does. The government publishes info on emergency disaster preparedness kits and other things too.
I guess details and context still matter.
EDIT: Which is bad reason, but at least an understandable when it comes to foreign policy. And it is not that arms exports are actually hindered by morals, all the exports to Saudi, UAE, Mexico and every other crisis region show otherwise. Personally, I think the West shouldn't export to those countries or conflict zones. The West also needs the industrial base to maintain reasonably strong militaries so, and with defense spending being a less than popular thing after the Cold War ended, exports are necessary for that. This could change so, and already did in Germany with additional military spending.
I find it tiring that any country that plays chicken with the superpowers gets all these warnings and abuse while the superpowers themselves do not give a crap who does what to undo their progress to Armageddon.
Germany was right to give Russia an option not to suck, the idea that Russia would not already suck worse by now and yet still be a military superpower if Germany didn't try to keep a vague semblance of balance in economics is a fantasy.
Is it seriously believable that Russia would have done nothing with violence by now to force changes in the economics if the west was shunning its natural resources for strategic reasons since the 1990's?
Nuclear actually is a solution, in the sense that if you implement it, the problem will go away. Renewables are not a solution in the sense that even if you over-implement to an absurd degree, with present technology the problem will sometimes remain.
The people pointing this out are not zealots, they're people with a basic understanding of how electricity works. It's the people who insist against basic physics that renewables can power 100% of the grid that are the zealots, and now we all will pay the price for accommodating their extremism :(
Variable renewable sources can’t power 100% of the grid, but they can easily power 80% of it without any of the normal whatabout problems. Renewables could also power 120% of the grid without problems, interesting variable loads to take up the extra very cheap energy would manifest soon enough.
Claiming exactly 100% is full of problems is true, pedantic, and nowhere close to any reality which would happen.
Of course there will be a mixture of power sources, relax. You can develop a lot of variable renewables before the issues come up.
Europe needs to develop every power source at the same time, distributing resources compromising for risk, several time frames, and cost. This involves a solar/wind heavy mix along with longer term nuclear developments and large scale energy imports from North America.
Still that's just one building block obviously...
Seriously?
Trying to now pretend, ex post facto, that this was strikingly obvious and the result of incompetent leadership is profoundly narrow-sighted.
When thinking of politicians, Intelligence is not an attribute which comes naturally to my mind.
Yet the absence of intelligence in karge swaths of green politicians is striking. Im specifically talking about the German green movement, not generalising.
Yeah, absolutely stupid things to do in the current situation.
"Kochen ohne Strom" https://www.bbk.bund.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/202...
It would have been useful to keep coal powered electric plants in use and stocked with a mountain of coal.
Thats 60 years ago. Wow.
we should have taken the US more seriously when they said to buy US oil. not wise to piss the US off
A former Polish Minister of Defense posted "Thankyou USA" to Twitter after the attack. Various US officials have made public statements since the start of 2022 stating the US wouldn't allow Nord Stream to go forward. The whole reason the pipelines were built was for Russia to cut out the Ukrainian/Polish middlemen (transit fees) involved in selling gas to Germany, so the Russians don't have any incentive to blow up their own pipeline.
I disagree that Russia has no incentive.
While the USA obviously has the means and more than zero motivation, I don’t see this type of infrastructure damage so close to allies as likely. Especially given the EU was already in the process of permanently ending the purchase of all Russian gas, not just these pipelines.
Russia, however, is looking at one never-opened pipeline and one already-offline pipeline, which is going to a bloc that has announced that it won’t pay as much as Russia is asking for its gas, won’t pay in the currency Russia is demanding, and wants to rapidly move away from Russian gas entirely, and which is currently sanctioning against Russia. Russia appears to believe that cutting off gas to Europe will end European support for Ukraine, and therefore has an obvious incentive to cut it off. Russia has incentives to make this look like it isn’t Russia’s fault, for the same reason anyone who might have done this would have had an incentive to hide their own identity.
Russia had already done the former by basically "turning off the tap", and already argued it wasn't their fault because they were willing to supply gas to Europe as long as Europe paid in Russian rubles. They were also using the gas supply for political leverage:
"release our frozen assets and we'll turn the gas back on" "pay in rubles and we'll turn the gas back on" "stop sending weapons to Ukraine and we'll turn the gas back on"
Now they physically CAN'T do any of those things, so this is a massive blow to what little bargaining power they hoped to retain through the winter. If there is any nation that is harmed by the physical destruction of these pipes, it's Russia.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220928201734/https://twitter.c...
(For scale, I doubt any nation other than the USA itself cares about pissing off the state of Florida, while almost every nation cares about not pissing off the USA collectivity).
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN07...
That's because everyone has been operating their PWRs/BWRs way beyond the design lifespan, which would be fine if we didn't just stop building new ones in the past 20-40 years (depending on country) to prevent too many of them needing regular maintenance at once.
Then again, the parent says all these things and goes to the culture war. Feels a bit all over the place to me. Though it does seem that a lot of these issues are all caused by us trying to act more intelligent than we are and social signaling. But I don't think that's what the parent was saying.
[0] You could also easily make the argument that we wouldn't be in this mess if Germany didn't shut down their nuclear plants early because doing so increased their dependence on France and Russia for power. But this also isn't that great of an argument.
I suspect that the cost-based anti-nuclear arguments aren't really meant for the crowd that understands budgeting or long term planning, since the arguments tend to highlight numbers out of context. It's really meant to create short, stand-alone soundbites that could be repeated in social media posts and news articles.
Nuclear power should be subsidized as necessary for the exact same reason healthcare is: energy security is a critical matter.
A nation like Germany for example could easily afford to have many more nuclear power plants and be pushing that much more energy over the borders to the rest of the EU in exports. They could do a lot to further the EU's energy security, given their fiscal and engineering capabilities. Their main reason for not doing it (fear) is heavy in emotionalism, irrationality.
Not that I disagree, but money is not an infinite resource. So yeah, it does matter. Maybe I'm interpreting your comment as more dismissive than it actually is.
(I do think a wide distribution of ideas that we can sample from, with a fairly normal-ish looking distribution, creates a powerful framework to build democracies. You do need anarchists, nationalists, and extremists, but not in large potions. When the mean shifts to any of these I think the system becomes unstable. But neither should we truncate the distribution.)
I don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle so please tell me, why would my, positive to some degree, views on nuclear energy be more valid if I did ?
Now what does this specific test have to do with nuclear energy? I'll be honest that the specific example only has a little, and that's to do with waste. These particles are common forms of radiation and knowing how they interact is important in understanding safety and longevity of waste. (our decay typically comes in the form of alpha, beta, neutron, and gamma)
I do want to be clear though, that this doesn't -- and shouldn't -- stop you from having an opinion. But it should note how strong those opinions should be, as it is naive to have strong opinions on topics you also do not care to learn about the details. This is more what I'm getting at. Strong opinions matched with weak knowledge is a dangerous situation. The key part being the strength of the opinion, not existence.
I also don't think this disqualifies other types of opinions that you can have about nuclear (or other topics). An economist could not have any working nuclear theory knowledge but also be well qualified discussing the cost. But they may also not be well qualified to discuss the cost of decommission or waste without the support/collaboration of someone with working nuclear theory. At least we can recognize that without the combined effort that the opinion is limited in accuracy. (this is also true in the reverse direction fwiw)
So for some signals that may help you navigate this space (these are not absolute, mind you, but there is a tendency).
Pro-nuclear armchair experts tend to hype up thorium, ignore costs, claiming nuclear's issue is only fear, and dismissing the waste issue completely.
Anti-nuclear armchair experts tend to exaggerate the waste issue, ignore developments over the last half century, and pit nuclear against renewables (a position no scientist actually has. Our opinion is that nuclear is a zero carbon energy source and should be _on the table_. Which isn't a strong stance btw).
But mainly I think the issue is that in a world of ever increasing complexity we are also gaining access to large amounts of high level knowledge and internalizing that as expertise. I do think this is a recipe for disaster and we're already seeing the effects of it. We see this commonly in climate discussions. Where even the pro-green people are not always aligned with the scientists albeit substantially closer in alignment than the anti-climate people. But climate is one of the most (if not them most) complex issues humanity has ever faced. Unfortunately complex issues require substantial amounts of nuance and require complex solutions. Which ironically includes political support which is hard to garner without these same high level explanations. I'm not sure there's a good solution to all this tbh.
> Maybe EU wanted to have Russia as a reliable petrostate as an alternative to the USA so they can do their thing without USA?
Considering the EU’s actions since the war started we can safely discard this theory.
Did Russia transform from a cosmopolitan, Western European-loving, tolerant nation with fantastic relations to the EU overnight into a savage brute in Feb 2022? Or was it always at least a little bit backwards, clearly not democratic, sphere of influence-envious, and had already arguably been at indirect war with Ukraine since 2014?
To claim that Germany/EU wanted closer relations with the Russian Empire contra the American Empire is clearly asinine if you look at the actions of Germany/EU.
Russia decided to throw all that away in a failed bid to keep NATO away from their borders. Or rather Putin did.
Instead they pester Yemen.
> Human rights aside wouldn't most petrol customers prefer SA over Russia?
Yeah, “aside”. “Invasions aside, Russia blah blah blah”. Such an easy word to deploy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian%E2%80%93led_in...
... with a fuel cycle that goes through a breeder in Seversk, Russia
... with no long term plan for low radioactive waste and contaminated equipment
... with almost no uranium deposits worth exploiting left
as is true for all of europa
No, the fuel cycle doesn't depend on Seversk, the contract from EDF was signed in 2018 (and EDF says that nothing was sent yet)
No, this is not even the fuel cycle, Orano signed a contract with Rosatom so that they could send spent URT and Rosatom uses it for their own reactors. Literally selling spent fuel (instead of burying it)
No, you are lying, there are plans both for long term storage (Cigeo) and for low radioactive waste which the Andra handles. (https://www.irsn.fr/FR/connaissances/Installations_nucleaire...)
No, you are lying once again. The uranium deposits are not worth exploiting because it is currently cheaper to get mines in say, Niger, but Europe still has large potential mining sites, and extracting it from lignite is easy.
So, no, your sources are Greenpeace and are lying.
well, if you put it that way, then the fuel cycle doesn't even exist at all, france just imports fresh uranium from Russia, Nigeria, Kazhakstan and Australia and sells spent fuel to Russia.
> and EDF says that nothing was sent yet
under that new contract maybe, here is an article from 2009 in which EDF "told news agency AFP that it is only “recyclable uranium from fuel processing at EDF nuclear power stations that is transported to Russia to be enriched.” - rfi.fr/actuen/articles/118/article_5481.asp
> No, you are lying once again. The uranium deposits are not worth exploiting
that is literally what i said. They are not worth exploiting
> So, no, your sources are Greenpeace and are lying.
that is just low effort insults, here have an IAEA uranium deposit database: https://infcis.iaea.org/UDEPO/ France largest "reserves" are the trace amounts in the rocks around a mine they closed 21 years ago. Even if the price rises to a point where exploitation of those trace amounts becomes worthwhile again, there are no large reserves in europa, we are talking a demand in the thousands of tons per year.
The nuclear industry in europa depends on imports, stop peddling some makebelieve about large untapped reserves with which europa could theoretically become energy independent if they would just use them. It is nonsensical
France has 56 nuclear plants in operation. A cursory web search puts a 1TW reactor at about 30 tonnes of processed uranium per year. 56*30=1680.
8700 tons per year according to: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264796/uranium-consumpti...
quite hard to find good numbers, but the size "thousands of tons" seems to fit. The thread starter proposed that Europa, not only France, should build more nuclear power plants, so we may even be in the tens of thousands of tons per year for the whole continent.
Well, two things. One, pretty sure the push to shut down Germany’s nuclear plants was a response to a single issue, Fukushima.
Two, one simple answer to this particular situation is to assess your energy independence before sanctioning the country you rely on for natural gas. Germany is getting raked over the coals with the same talking points precisely because they walked into a situation they weren’t well-equipped to handle.
Safety concerns are definitely an issue that can nudge you to prefer alternative sources but this doesn't make it single issue. It's simply one of the things you consider.
As you can see, despite NPP construction stalling in late 1980s, world energy consumption continued to increase: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
This simply means, considering the risks and cost of all energy sources, nuclear power fell unfavourably. Doesn't mean single issue.
Trump blurted that to the Germans around 2019. The press brushed it off as "highly misleading".
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/13/trump-is-exaggerating-german...
And the Germans literally laughed in his face: https://youtu.be/FfJv9QYrlwg
Pretty hard to watch now. The smugness is palpable.
Then the article spends significant time pointing out that Russian natural gas plays only a small part in Germany's total demands in energy, citing numbers like 20% & 13% and thus Trump's claim is am exaggeration.
And then goes on to say:
> To be sure, Russia also accounted for about 40 percent of Germany's crude oil imports and 30 percent of its foreign coal supplies in 2016, according to IEA. But that hardly makes it an outlier in Europe.
How is that glossed over? Is it just me or - I hate to say it - Trump actually had a point?
Obviously this point is _highly_ debatable but it is worth consideration. And it is not like the US hasn't benefited from the military industrial complex. Though I do think the funding structure could be reworked or we at least acknowledge that this is what is happening.
EU/Germany energy politics were/are a trainwreck and that was obvious for at least a decade. Instead of recognizing the obvious warning in 2014, most of the continent doubled down on Russia energy dependency.
As a citizen of EU county - this is depressing. Most of our political elite should be locked up somewhere and keys tossed away. They are directly responsible for the clusterf*ck that follows.
I'm not sure why people are afraid to say this. He has literally said everything under the sun. You throw enough darts and you're bound to eventually hit the board. Supporters just focus on the hits and don't pay attention to the misses, but this isn't different from any populist (I mean look at Musk. If you keep predicting that autopilot is a year away you'll eventually be right and that's all we'll ever remember)
>Maybe EU wanted to have Russia as a reliable petrostate as an alternative to the USA so they can do their thing without USA?
The decision to rely on Russia was made when USA was a net energy importer, with some dependence on natural gas from Canada, and terrible dependence on oil from whoever could offer any.
To add to that, nuclear was phased out to a large degree because it gets in the way of renewables, as it's impossible to regulate. Nuclear reactor is pretty much an on/off thing and can't safely operate on power levels much under 100% continuously, and if it's off, it can only be restarted in a day, or even a few days. It makes balancing the grid including a lot of intermittent renewables, a huge headache. Renewables already provide more electricity in EU than nuclear ever did, and they cost a lot less to build, and almost all of them were built in less time than it takes to build a single nuclear reactor.
Speaking of the future, all of this discussion is meaningless again, because of time. If we start today, electricity will be 100% solved by renewables everywhere in EU before any new nuclear can be commissioned.
Notice the OP doesn't even mention the environmentalists etc. but the comment is instantly recognisable. It's the same talking point that needs to be repeated every single time.
Anyway, France is full blown nuclear state and they are having energy issues too, because as it turns out nuclear power plants require long regular maintenance periods.
Maybe there's no simple answer for energy issues and countries don't simply build or close down power plants over single issue? Maybe it wasn't done just to please some tree huggers?
Maybe someone in Germany could have had crunched the numbers too and see the risks? Maybe some politicians were too close to fossil fuel money? Maybe it was considered as a way to keep the relationship with Russia profitable for Russia and encourage Russia to build good relationships with their primary customer? Maybe EU wanted to have Russia as a reliable petrostate as an alternative to the USA so they can do their thing without USA? Maybe they wanted to reduce their footing in Africa by not relying for them in Uranium production? Maybe it make more economical sense to use the non-nuclear solutions?
Just maybe it wasn't a single issue decision even if it didn't play out as hoped? Europe is acutely aware of its tight energy situation, that's why they have been regulating the efficiency since decades, it's not coincidence that in Europe everything is very energy efficient. They squeezed it to the point where faster water heaters and more powerful vacuums were presented as Brexit benefits.
Oh, I'm so fed up by this culture war.