Great debunking. I'm from Germany and I have never experienced a blackout since the early 90s.

The facts about the energy transition are true too. But also to mention is that due to strong fossil industry lobbying and some conservative and/or neo-liberal politicians it was slowed down a lot. Mostly these get their legitimation and votes with the same kind of misinformation as mentioned in the article. FUD and FLICC often work on people that are not willing to make their homework; and sadly not many are. Even academics are not immune.

You as a private person are the last entity to be cut off from the power grid.

It’s the big consumers in the industry that are cut off first.

Oh, and the fact that the grid has become more unstable is even reported by the German federal agency responsible for the power grid.

According to them, there was a new record last winter regarding the number of interventions from the grid operators.

See: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Sac... (page 8)

I’m not going even to argue against all the other bullshit that the author in the original article is coming up with.

Question:

How much new Natural Uranium does it take as an initial fuel load to bring 50GW of new nuclear online per year (including using as much reprocessed MOX fuel as is possible)?

What are the total world uranium reserves? How much is mined per year currently?

With that in mind, how do you propose Germany provide grid stability while decarbonising?

invest in solar, wind and storage

and not tolerate that bavaria is doing a texas

And you get downvoted for the cannot-be truth.. better to stay with the wished panic smarties "aaand in Germany they will freeze to death now, hadn't they just given up on Nuclear, stupid Germans" crowd ;)

(Previously discussed a little here[0] nine days ago).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295974

This is a strawman. Most people knowledgeable of the topic do not blame Germany for increased carbon emission, but for 1 - high absolute carbon emissions when compared to France and other countries who did not discard nuclear 2 - a low relative decrease in carbon emissions when compared to the improvements they could have achieved with the same amount of money.

I don't see how it can be a straw man, when Ive seen the claims it's debunking being repeated here and elsewhere. Sure, people knowledgeable on the topic might not make such claims, but it's a fact that they are often made.

> 1 - high absolute carbon emissions when compared to France and other countries who did not discard nuclear

High absolute carbon emissions per capita? Which other countries? Here are the figures[0] for various EU countries using nuclear power, for comparison:

   Country      CO2 Emissions per capita (tons) 
   Czechia      10.53
   Netherlands   9.62
   Germany       9.44
   Finland       9.31

So it's true that France managed low carbon emissions by committing fully to nuclear power long ago, but I don't think Germany is exceptional among EU nations for their failure to copy France's policies.

> 2 - a low relative decrease in carbon emissions when compared to the improvements they could have achieved with the same amount of money.

How much money did they spend, and how much nuclear power could they have generated with that money? If the counterfactual you are comparing to is Germany somehow deciding to start build new nuclear power stations in 2011 (after the Fukushima disaster) then the amount of nuclear power they could have generated is zero, based on France's experience[1] with building Flamanville unit 3.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

Germany in a nutshell: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/revealed-how-ge...

hydrogen from nuclear definitely not Green

hydrogen from russian gas absolutely Green

More info:

https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/how-messed-up-was-german...

> Reading the press or comments these days in French or English, the tone about Germany’s energy policies is a mix of the gleeful (of the “schadenfreude” kind) and the contemptuous. Germany was naive (to trust Putin), mercantilist / corrupt (its elite selling their soul or themselves for the “cheap gas” that its industry craves), or in thrall to the perverse ideology of the “commie greens” (who pushed to close nuclear and promote useless renewables).

> While it is clear that the current situation, with Russia wilfully reducing gas volumes to Europe, hits Germany quite hard, and will impose harsh choices on its industry and population this year, how much of the above criticism makes sense?