Off topic: I'm always a bit mystified as to why people try to use German articles in English texts when they obviously don't know the gender of the word. "Wende" (turn) is female and you thus use "die" as an article. The third possible article is "das" and used for neutral nouns like "Auto". Given it is easy to look up [1], I guess you didn't know there are several?
On topic: I won't state my opinion about the short term cost efficiency of nuclear power, because I don't have the references or raw data at hand to back it up (I wish a lot of others in this thread in the same situation wouldn't either). But IMHO the strongest argument against nuclear power is the uncertainty of long term waste disposal, given that we (currently) can't realistically predict storage conditions on a geological time frame. A month ago there was an article on HN about how we fail to come up with a way to communicate the danger of long term storage to future generations in a reliable way [2].
Even from an economic point of view the danger of a cost explosion of the nuclear waste disposal purely because of political struggles is daunting. In Germany we have a small disposal facility, the Asse, build to test long term storage in salt mines. Because of the usual combination of human error, incompetence and cover ups, waste was dumped there even while it was slowly becoming unstable [3]. Getting it all back out will cost somewhere around 5 billion euros. Guess who's paying for it.
[1] https://www.google.de/search?q=dictionary+energiewende
[2] http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/ , corresponding hacker news thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090759
[3] I'm oversimplifying. See http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-weighs-o... for more background and http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/photogalleri... for pictures.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/01/sellafiel...
France's electricity is all state-run and the price of electricity is a political one. No French president survives raising electricity prices, even though the companies would need that money...
> Der Energiewende is both expensive and inefficient.
Expensive is not a problem for us on that level. Nuclear is as expensive as renewable and more. We have a lot of money. Let's say the Energiewende will cost us around a trillion dollar over 50 years. Maybe more? So what? The positive effects will be much larger. We actually have the money.
> inefficient
If you look at nuclear power plants, they use around 30% of the energy for electricity. With the rest they heat the rivers in France. That's inefficient.
Btw the billions poured into nuclear energy as direct and indirect subsidizes could have been and could be spend better.
So your thinking is not shaped on ideology?
> German industry may indeed be in better shape, but that is inspite of German energy policies, not because of them.
Well, it's the opposite.
The renewable energy industry is growing and is already earning lots of money.
> What you're really arguing for here is a poorer, less prosperous,
That's what the big utilities told us twenty years ago. The opposite happened.
> actually improve people's lives instead
That's not even good propaganda. After the Energiewende has started in 2000 we now have the lowest unemployment for decades.
Facts are that electricity in Germany is much more expensive compared to countries without an Energiewende. This is not a positive for German industry, plain and simple.
Germany currently has low unemployment and high prosperity because it's executing it's own Marshallplan. Lending trillions to other EU states, and getting that money back through selling cars to them. German cars are known for many good things, but their price is not one of them. The same goes for many other German products. German industrial automation. No complaints about the quality (well, a little, but certainly much better than the competition. Though it would be great if German engineering firms met this little thing called "English", and gave manuals in more than one language with their things). The price, however, WTF.
The economic data of the last decade says EXACTLY the opposite. Record unemployment, record exports, very competitive industry ... - all despite the financial crisis. We are talking about FACTS.
Fact is that the energy intensive industry has lower energy prices. Fact is, Germany has more industry than France, much more and it is also more efficient. Fact is Germany exports a lot of energy technology. Fact is: German industry has very efficient tools and processes - due to energy prices and the large amount of research and development in this area. Exactly this stuff sells excellent on the world market.
Fact is German's industry is in much better shape than France. A simple look at the economic data should make that clear for you.
> Germany currently has low unemployment and high prosperity because it's executing it's own Marshallplan. Lending trillions to other EU states, and getting that money back through selling cars to them.
Fact is: Germany is selling world wide. Fact is: Germany is selling much more than cars.
> German cars are known for many good things, but their price is not one of them.
Okay?
> The price, however, WTF.
Last year Germany sold goods and services for 1.09 trillion Euros. All time record. Fact.
Despite energy prices.
If the Energiewende, which started in 2000, has had any effects on German economic performance, we want more of that.
Then Germany lent out $XX trillion and in return received sales of $X trillion. Germany lent out money they didn't have (ie. vast majority freshly printed money), and lent it out at record low interest rates, because it's sales were dropping. The "Energiewende" was just one more of those loans, which Germany made out to itself.
Those results, while they provided quite a bit of economic improvement, are not exactly impressive. Using these techniques, a company called "anthrax diarrhoea and coffees" can sell for billions to the medical establishment.
I'm not saying Germany doesn't have impressive engineering, and research (though not as impressive as the US has, and it's not like it matters, cost dominates everything and copying is much more efficient than research). I would argue Germany does not have impressive efficiency. However no sane person believes that's what's made the difference in the last 10 years.
I feel you are living in a parallel world.
> Then Germany lent out $XX trillion and in return received sales of $X trillion.
Ah, the funny smell of 'zero facts'.
> Those results, while they provided quite a bit of economic improvement, are not exactly impressive. Using these techniques, a company called "anthrax diarrhoea and coffees" can sell for billions to the medical establishment.
You are hallucinating.
> The "Energiewende" was just one more of those loans, which Germany made out to itself.
Everybody does something like that when investing in new energy infrastructure.
> I'm not saying Germany doesn't have impressive engineering, and research (though not as impressive as the US has, and it's not like it matters, cost dominates everything and copying is much more efficient than research).
I'm not sure Germany will care whether you'll find its engineering impressive or not. Fact Germany sells much more engineering products to the world market per capita than the US.
The US has wonderful engineering products. Though I doubt a Boeing is more impressive than an Airbus...
> I would argue Germany does not have impressive efficiency. However no sane person believes that's what's made the difference in the last 10 years.
Well, many German engineering companies are targeting this market.
Example: Siemens, http://www.industry.siemens.com/topics/global/en/energy-effi...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
Most deaths for most energy generation methods come from disasters (all except solar, where most deaths happen during installations), for example, the tidal wave that caused fukushima raised the death tolls for nuclear, solar, wind and fossil. For nuclear, because 2 employees were having a smoke outside of the power plant, got picked up by the wave and smacked against the wall of the power plant. Nuclear death, right ? Solar, why ? Two reasons, first a number of installations were rudely interrupted by the wave, and for a few larger buildings solar panels came crashing down, a few of them right into people (that second part happens more often during earthquakes). Solar deaths ? Well, yes. Wind, well, if you were doing maintenance on a wind turbine while the wave washed it away ... And for fossil fuel the same : a number of employees of refineries and transporters (one oil train, for example), were killed. One particularly bad example : in one of the refineries a number of engineers were doing a quality inspection with management of the inside of several new gas tanks, and the wave filled it with water after knocking it over. My point here is that in many cases it's a bit of a stretch saying that the energy generation method is what killed people.
Although it must be said that coal mine safety in China, yes, deaths come from disasters, but ... it takes a special kind of dishonesty to call these disasters accidental.
I don't get people that defend rooftop's solar track record. Installing slippery, heavy pieces of glass on inclined surfaces a dozen meter up from the ground, that may have become slippery due to rain and frequently suffer structural failure (meaning a small piece cracks when you walk on it) ... Believe it or not this is NOT a particularly safe thing to do. (and of course, the US has many seismically active zones, and well, you may want to avoid being a roof worker in those zones)
Wind power, incidentally, is also famous for killing or maiming maintenance technicians.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
(note that if you take China out of the statistics, coal becomes as safe as oil was, and oil becomes half as safe as solar)
Can it be done quickly enough to prevent the damage from climate change? If not, the problems of nuclear may be much less than the alternative.
> * protests were suppressed with military-like police, escalated almost into civil war
I don't mind a little hyperbole, but many people reading this have no idea what actually happened. Could you describe it?
Actually the renewable push in Germany is accelerating climate change, not preventing it. They don't get enough sun to make solar cells worth it, yet they do it anyway.
What it means is they will never make EROEI for them. On paper everything is wonderful (as a country emissions are low), but actually all they are doing is shipping the emissions to China which is where the solar cells are made.
PS: Though from an economic and EROEI standpoint Rooftop solar is significantly less appealing than solar farms.
If the EROEI was so high they would not need massive government subsidies to encourage adoption - people would do it without encouragement.
Edit: I take it back. Based on your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8248722 you are either dense as a rock or spreading FUD like the preceding comment suggested. I suspect I am not engaging in a good faith discussion.
Edit 2: Just something to leave you with. Nuclear disposal costs are externalized (deferred), educating the workforce is externalized (navy), risk is externalized (indemnified), fuel is currently underpriced (megatons to megawatts), construction (highest single input cost) is massively subsidized, and in the end it's still burning unrenewable fuel so even assuming it's cheap and we never have an accident we're just kicking the can down the road a couple of hundred years.
Actually I claim there is virtually no difference.
Every single time I read an EREOI calculation I kept wondering "But he ignored that energy, and that, and that". After thinking about it I realized that money makes an excellent proxy for EROEI.
Every step in the process that costs energy also increase the cost. So the money essentially acts as "book keeping" for energy.
Everyone always gets mad when they encounter this for the first time, but think about for a while. Think about the basic cost for every single thing we make, and you'll realize at its core its always energy.
There is one exception that I thought of and that is pollution. Reducing pollution is a valuable thing even if it costs extra energy to do so.
Because at the end of the day we don't care how much energy we use, we care that we don't dirty our environment, and that we don't run out.
Your edit #2 is well taken. I will need to think about that.
My initial impression is that nuclear costs more energy (all those externalities you mention) than hydrocarbon fuel, but makes less pollution. So maybe it's worth it anyway.
Let's suppose you your buying a large scale solar system with actual money right now.
Utility system prices are $2.04/W in Q3 2013. http://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight-... it's less now but that's close enough.
Standard warranties offered in the market offer 90% rated power output for 10 years and an 80% rated power output for 25 years http://www.solarenergyhome.co.uk/performance.php
With real world numbers averaging ~90+% of stated efficiency over 25 years.
1W solar produces ~8-10 wh/day * 365 days * 25 years /1000 kw per w = 65.7+ kwh over 25 years. 2.04 / 65.7 = 3.1 cents per kwh worst case. Panels don't instantly die at 25 years. So, actual lifetime output is guaranteed to be higher so costs are lower. But there are vary low maintenance costs and occasional physical damage so that's a reasonable estimate on average.
The time value of money is only meaningful if you want to compare your returns with other options over the long term there is no point in including inflation etc. As it's not like 1kwh will magically turn into more than that just by time passing.
I don't disagree with your approach in a general sense, but what I think you should understand is that this approach is not a true measure of the input costs along early points of a technology's adoption curve.
For example, it looks like I can pick up a high end i7 for $300 at standard consumer prices. It has the cutting edge lithography standards, the kinks in that manufacturing process are still getting worked out (wastage), they are still paying off the initial R&D investment, they are actively marketing & selling it, and it's paying for future R&D investment. I can get a nearly equivalent (roughly speaking) Celeron for $40 from the same site, and I didn't even price out ARM/generic fab cpus. The Celeron price (or more accurately, the average price of that Celeron over time) is much more indicative of the true energy input costs of the underlying technology at scale.
A manufactured product has a virtuous cycle (from a consumer perspective, at least) of high upfront cost for development dropping as less marginal R&D is required, at the same time as the production process gets further optimized/automated and economies of scale kick in.
Solar is still definitely in the early stages of adoption based on growth curves, and prices reflect a huge amount of non-energy input costs that are not truly representative of the EROEI that will be present when it represents 10, 20, or +50% of total energy production.
There are certain physical properties of PV cells that prevent efficiencies of +35% or so in standard unconcentrated single-junction pv cells. Because silicon is so ubiquitous, I suspect that we're already hitting points of diminishing returns in research/cell efficiency and production/process optimizations are going to start dominating until product optimizations are necessary to increase density. Right now, the biggest cost I'm aware of is silicon wasteage, which is the driver behind thin-film tech or alternative geometries (eg Solyndra) - I have heard of research into vapor deposition approaches that could greatly limit this. Hypothetically, if that works at scale, I can't really see a mass-produced 250w panel costing more than $50 (could be even lower assuming a market/industry for refined Si recycling from old/damaged panels).
Same thing would eventually go for concentrated multijunction modules that can hit +80% efficiencies, eventually, assuming that the non-Si junctions don't have material constraints (like HRE elements).
Now, I've gone on too long already, but let me say I'm not de facto anti-nuclear. I think light water reactor design is terrifying and I think existing waste storage policy is basically sticking fingers in ears and yelling 'LALALALA'. In order not to end the world with a climate catastrophe, I think it will be a bridge fuel and hopefully novel reactor design tech (eg CANDU) can help there.
However, the future is solar and wind power supplanting coal and nuclear, bio-petroleum from algal/renewable-electric input supplanting necessary high density applications (oil), and biomass methane supplanting NG for intermediate applications like peaking plant generation.
edit: Evidence of this happening already: http://www.seia.org/policy/environment/pv-recycling ... you've accurately noted that there are substantial subsidies, but they exist to accelerate the maturation of this source of energy. In that sense, though, they've been effective and relatively inexpensive.
Not if you use breeder reactors. The main reason those are not further along in development is precisely that nuclear fuel is currently cheap. As the cost of mining more fuel goes up, the economic advantage to using breeders increases.
No, it turns an isotope that is not fissile into one that is.
> This stretches out the fuel supplies substantially, but it's still nonrenewable. Solar is, as long as our large scale fusion reactor is still running.
The Sun will eventually stop, as will any energy source eventually; so if "renewable" means "inexhaustible", there is no such thing as a renewable energy source.
That is what fertile means.
The sun will be a viable energy source for billions of years, vs tens or hundreds for nuclear.
Ah, sorry, I missed that word. I'm still confused about the "lower energy" bit, though.
> The sun will be a viable energy source for billions of years, vs tens or hundreds for nuclear.
Or thousands or tens of thousands, if we use breeders. Or millions or billions, if we get fusion working.
I'll agree that the Sun is the current front runner by a wide margin for "time available" if that's all we look at. But given the pace at which human technology is changing, I don't think there's much difference between a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million, or a few billion years; on any of these time scales, we are going to make profound changes in the way we generate energy. What we need right now is a way to get to that point; right now, solar can't give us that because we don't know how to capture it in a way that can provide reliable base load power all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Act#Pa...
It is not paid by the government. The money is paid by the electricity consumers.
The energy intensive industry does not pay this, btw. Their electricity is 35% cheaper than in France, according to 'Uniden'.
http://nuclear-news.net/2014/03/19/frances-nuclear-electrici...
I don't think so.
This book [0] goes through math of pretty much all energy sources and one of the conclusions the author reaches is that if you want to cover all of our power needs with green energy, renewables alone ain't gonna cut it.
Making them was never the problem.
You might want to work for Areva. They need help. In western countries it is quite difficult to build a new nuclear power plant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#C...
For the next two decades it will be difficult to even keep the current number of nuclear power plants online.
We're certainly not helping ourselves by delaying/canceling more nuclear projects because of stupidly high amounts of FUD in the society regarding nuclear powers.
That said, if we stopped using fossil energy, wouldn't we find nuclear plants become much more expensive to build? They're built using fossil energy.
(Or significantly reduced fossil energy, thereby raising its price)
Only because fossil energy is currently cheaper. If it were more expensive, you would see all kinds of construction starting to use electric-powered equipment that used non-fossil-fuel electricity.
EROI is what's motivating my comments. Fossil energy has a higher EROI than other sources, currently.
Not if you use non-fossil electricity to power all the steps in the build process. I should have clarified that that's what I was envisioning.
> Fossil energy has a higher EROI than other sources, currently.
Actually, I don't think that's currently true for nuclear; the EROEI figures for nuclear that I've seen seem way off, even if breeder reactors are left out of the equation. I don't think a lot of people realize just how much energy there is in a kilogram of uranium, compared to a kilogram of fossil fuel.
Great. But Germany is also building new brown coal power plants, what's more Germany is backing a brown coal power plant just across the border with Poland. So it seems that there is a need for ongoing base load power generation... and effectively Germany is going for brown coal over nuclear.
Brown coal is, I believe, the most polluting way to generate electricity. So... why not nuclear instead?
Germany is also closing fossil fuel plants.
> So... why not nuclear instead?
There is no 'instead'. Coal will be phased out a lot during the next decades.
Granted, that's just economics at work as both countries are net exporters - but keep in mind that France periodically has troubles when it gets too hot to use river water for efficient cooling.
The proportion of renewable energy sources in Germany has risen to 23.4%.
Source: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen.de/index.php?article_id=29&fil... (PDF)
edit: Germany has been a net exporter since 2003 - 2008 was a typo.
edit : what I just wrote is untrue, Germany is a net exporter (since 2012) but suffer from the important irregularity of solar/wind production (overproduction and underproduction happen regularly and may damage the network).
And, 46% of the electricity is coming from coal...
But that's wrong.
> Germany is a net exporter (since 2012) but suffer from the important irregularity of solar/wind production (overproduction and underproduction happen regularly and may damage the network).
That's the same with nuclear. France has lots of surplus power on weekends, in the night and on holidays. On demand peaks in summer and winter they have not enough.
> may damage the network
Peak demands like in France can also damage the network.
> And, 46% of the electricity is coming from coal...
That will shrink a lot in the coming decades.
However you've really answered the major reason of why nuclear cannot work:
>* centralization of electricity production in few monopoly-like companies with zero competition
If history has taught us anything its that the concentration of power is not a good thing.
So, the article is BS and repeating a lie once again.
I did not claim that otherwise.
Here in Germany it is mostly dead. For us you are discussing positions of twenty years ago. The US has a very different energy situation compared to us: large country, nuclear weapons, lots of nuclear technology, extremely high energy use (more than twice than the average German), much lower population density, lots of energy sources, ...
Here in Germany we've seen a lot of the negative effects in a country with higher density in the middle of Europe:
* no plan or place for the waste
* nuclear power plants all over the country
* widespread corruption between politicians and industry
* protests were suppressed with military-like police, escalated almost into civil war
* lots of transport of nuclear materials through the country
* extremely costly research paid by the tax payer
* lots of promises of the nuclear industry just did not materialize: for example our pebble-bed reactor was closed silently, while earlier it was promised to solve a lot of technical problems
* centralization of electricity production in few monopoly-like companies with zero competition
The effects on an democratic society of nuclear technology is at least as bad as its technological problems. This was seen decades ago in the book 'Der Atomstaat' and the effects had been shown in Japan, where the Atomstaat was more advanced than here in Germany. We were able to stop it.
Now we have to build-up renewable decentralized energy during the next decades. That's the common goal here in Germany.