German goals to cut greenhouse emissions by 65% by 2030 are likely to be missed, meaning a longer-term net zero by a 2045 target is also in doubt, reports by government climate advisers and the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) show.
Except that never happened. Gas is mostly used for heating in Germany, not for electricity like nuclear power. I don’t know where this rumour started (probably somewhere on reddit) but it’s just not true.
Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not saying that relying so much on Russian gas was a good move or that we couldn’t (and shouldn’t) have done a lot more to move away from coal. But that particular argument is misinformation.
We are trying to get more heat pumps installed, but people are still proud of getting a new gas furnace installed in 2023, thus avoiding a potential ban and betting on guaranteed dirt-cheap natural gas for another 20 years.
But either way, nuclear power is history in Germany and it makes absolutely no sense to bring it back. We never had a lot of nuclear power to begin with and the few power plants that could maybe be reactivated with a ton of money and labor are just a drop in the bucket. Building new reactors takes decades from initial planning to going live and nuclear construction projects are notorious for immense cost overruns. Plus, there are only a few construction companies in the world that have the capabilities to build a nuclear reactor and they’re already tied up in other projects. We would need dozens of new reactors built simultaneously and they would still be finished too late to contribute anything meaningful to a carbon-free electrical grid.
At the same time, wind energy is a dirt cheap, proven technology that is much more easily deployed, scales really well, is decentralized and reliable. Yes, it can be intermittent but it’s predictable (weather forecasts exist). And if we had invested a fraction of the R&D budget for nuclear fission and fusion into energy storage technology, it would be a complete non-issue. We have some work to do in that regard, but sodium ion batteries are pretty far in development and should be much cheaper. Iron redox flow and liquid metal batteries also have potential, maybe hydrogen. Demand response will also be a big factor. With flexible pricing during the day, both households and businesses can save a lot of money by using more energy whenever there’s a lot of it and less when it’s scarce.
Your second paragraph could be summed up as: we chose the destination years ago, so there’s no point changing course.
Will wind and solar will be sufficient to replace all the gas with heat pumps, and keep them running every day in the winter? I would also be hesitant to give up gas heat, without understanding where the replacement electricity will be coming from. “Demand response” means that the rich stay warm, while industry migrates to countries with better price stability… or continued CO₂ emission to avoid those outcomes.
Perhaps in the end it doesn’t really matter, since the transmission infrastructure for EU-wide renewables will also be useful for buying nuclear from the countries that are investing now.
Your second paragraph could be summed up as: we chose the destination years ago, so there’s no point changing course.
Which makes perfect sense when you consider that there’s a deadline, we’ve gone a very long way in one direction and going all the way back to take another route would guarantee missing that deadline.
It’s like you’re taking your ship from China to Rotterdam, you’re past the Suez canal, in the Mediterranean and now you decide to turn around and go around Africa after all. It really would be idiotic.
It’s like you’re taking your ship from China to Rotterdam, you’re past the Suez canal, in the Mediterranean and now you decide to turn around and go around Africa after all. It really would be idiotic.
That decision wouldn’t be idiotic if I actually wanted to go to Africa. It takes even longer to turn around from Rotterdam.
In my example, ‘Rotterdam’ is supposed to be the ultimate destination, so it would be equivalent to ‘carbon neutrality’. Changing the destination to ‘Africa’ would be the equivalent to just building nuclear power plants for the sake of it, regardless of whether they help us reach carbon neutrality.
I think the ultimate destination should be carbon neutrality while maintaining a strong industrial base and high standard of living for everyone in the world. Humanity needs to engineer an energy surplus to undo the damage we’ve done, and when one of the richest countries is planning for “demand response”, that doesn’t really inspire much confidence.
You have to look back a few decades to see the whole picture. If we’d kept investing in nuclear technology since the 1980s, with a focus on passive safety and cost reduction, we’d never have needed all that gas in the first place.
By “we”, I mean the entire western world, not Germany specifically. The fossil fuel companies allegedly encouraged anti-nuclear sentiment during that era, and nobody had the organization and foresight to fight back, so we’re all paying the price today.
That doesn’t make any sense. That’s like, going to a mechanic and giving them a few million to start an auto business vs going to some random guy, and giving them billions to start an auto business. Sure, eventually it would work out, just by sheer volume of investment, but it’s just not feasible. Otherwise governments and private industry would’ve just done it. That’s like saying we should’ve had the foresight to invest in hydrogen powered cars. Why prioritise that when batteries are easier and cheaper?
If your goal is reliable carbon-free power, it’s not obvious that renewables will work out. We basically have to build these enormous continent-spanning machines in order to maintain uptime regardless of weather conditions.
It might be possible in the US and Europe, large regions that will hopefully remain politically stable, but it’s never been done before. By comparison, we have built reliable nuclear power plants. Is it really so obvious who is the mechanic and who is the random guy?
It is, I’ve not seen a single academic study show otherwise. Not the west, nor China, have shown scepticism towards renewables. But there’s plenty of that when it comes to the nuclear question. Just look at HPC and SWC in the UK. Companies won’t touch it unless the UK government guarantees they make a profit. Not a long term profit. A profit before the project is completed. They want an advance. Then there’s the US, over-budget and delayed. Finland, over-budget and delayed. France, over-budger and delayed. EDF prefer their renewables investments than their nuclear ones, mainly because half their nuclear plants are unreliable, and nobody wants to waste more money on them.
I agree that building wind/solar is currently profitable and reduces emissions. Incremental progress is politically easy.
I remain skeptical that following this strategy will ever eliminate fossil fuels, because people will turn to them whenever renewables are underperforming. They’ll see the price uncertainty and stick with gas because it works. We won’t demolish the power plants because they’re still needed 10 days a year. The fossil infrastructure will keep on chugging, just at a reduced scale. We’ll eliminate 80% of CO2, and continue to cook ourselves with the last 20%. It’s human nature to lose interest when the problem gets hard. Look how long it’s taking to deploy IPv6, and that’s relatively easy.
We should invest in the hard problem now, so fission can actually take us carbon-negative in 30 years. Maybe fusion will save the day, but that’s a gamble, and it’s really not that much better than Gen IV fission.
I don’t really know why you are trying to start a discussion with me because I never argued against any of that. You are right, we could be a lot farther if we had done a lot of things earlier. And it sucks that we aren’t. All of that doesn’t change that the comment I replied to was factually wrong. We could have replaced gas (or coal*) with electricity by using electricity based heating. We did not replace nuclear power with gas.
Anti-nuclear is anti environmentalism and the failure to act sooner is on the shoulders of the people who continue to expand fossil fuels and refuse to invest in alternatives
It’s more interesting to ask where the fuel could come from, given a few years of planning. The energy density is so much higher than gas, that geographical locality doesn’t really matter.
If you’re asking where stuff /could/ come from, why couldn’t we just build renewables. For Germany at least, the ship has sailed anyways. It is not currently legislatively and practically possible to build out the required energy infrastructure with nuclear to phase out gas in a timeframe that makes sense. With the beaureaucracy and everything, it’ll be at least a decade before even the first power plant would be connected to the grid.
getting rid of nuclear power for russian gas was always a bad idea and this is why
Except that never happened. Gas is mostly used for heating in Germany, not for electricity like nuclear power. I don’t know where this rumour started (probably somewhere on reddit) but it’s just not true.
Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not saying that relying so much on Russian gas was a good move or that we couldn’t (and shouldn’t) have done a lot more to move away from coal. But that particular argument is misinformation.
Electricity could be used for heating (via heat pumps) if Germany had an abundance of clean electricity in the winter.
We are trying to get more heat pumps installed, but people are still proud of getting a new gas furnace installed in 2023, thus avoiding a potential ban and betting on guaranteed dirt-cheap natural gas for another 20 years.
But either way, nuclear power is history in Germany and it makes absolutely no sense to bring it back. We never had a lot of nuclear power to begin with and the few power plants that could maybe be reactivated with a ton of money and labor are just a drop in the bucket. Building new reactors takes decades from initial planning to going live and nuclear construction projects are notorious for immense cost overruns. Plus, there are only a few construction companies in the world that have the capabilities to build a nuclear reactor and they’re already tied up in other projects. We would need dozens of new reactors built simultaneously and they would still be finished too late to contribute anything meaningful to a carbon-free electrical grid.
At the same time, wind energy is a dirt cheap, proven technology that is much more easily deployed, scales really well, is decentralized and reliable. Yes, it can be intermittent but it’s predictable (weather forecasts exist). And if we had invested a fraction of the R&D budget for nuclear fission and fusion into energy storage technology, it would be a complete non-issue. We have some work to do in that regard, but sodium ion batteries are pretty far in development and should be much cheaper. Iron redox flow and liquid metal batteries also have potential, maybe hydrogen. Demand response will also be a big factor. With flexible pricing during the day, both households and businesses can save a lot of money by using more energy whenever there’s a lot of it and less when it’s scarce.
Your second paragraph could be summed up as: we chose the destination years ago, so there’s no point changing course.
Will wind and solar will be sufficient to replace all the gas with heat pumps, and keep them running every day in the winter? I would also be hesitant to give up gas heat, without understanding where the replacement electricity will be coming from. “Demand response” means that the rich stay warm, while industry migrates to countries with better price stability… or continued CO₂ emission to avoid those outcomes.
Perhaps in the end it doesn’t really matter, since the transmission infrastructure for EU-wide renewables will also be useful for buying nuclear from the countries that are investing now.
Which makes perfect sense when you consider that there’s a deadline, we’ve gone a very long way in one direction and going all the way back to take another route would guarantee missing that deadline.
It’s like you’re taking your ship from China to Rotterdam, you’re past the Suez canal, in the Mediterranean and now you decide to turn around and go around Africa after all. It really would be idiotic.
That decision wouldn’t be idiotic if I actually wanted to go to Africa. It takes even longer to turn around from Rotterdam.
In my example, ‘Rotterdam’ is supposed to be the ultimate destination, so it would be equivalent to ‘carbon neutrality’. Changing the destination to ‘Africa’ would be the equivalent to just building nuclear power plants for the sake of it, regardless of whether they help us reach carbon neutrality.
I think the ultimate destination should be carbon neutrality while maintaining a strong industrial base and high standard of living for everyone in the world. Humanity needs to engineer an energy surplus to undo the damage we’ve done, and when one of the richest countries is planning for “demand response”, that doesn’t really inspire much confidence.
Yes, it could and increasingly is. But that still doesn’t make it true that the nuclear power was replaced by gas.
You have to look back a few decades to see the whole picture. If we’d kept investing in nuclear technology since the 1980s, with a focus on passive safety and cost reduction, we’d never have needed all that gas in the first place.
By “we”, I mean the entire western world, not Germany specifically. The fossil fuel companies allegedly encouraged anti-nuclear sentiment during that era, and nobody had the organization and foresight to fight back, so we’re all paying the price today.
That doesn’t make any sense. That’s like, going to a mechanic and giving them a few million to start an auto business vs going to some random guy, and giving them billions to start an auto business. Sure, eventually it would work out, just by sheer volume of investment, but it’s just not feasible. Otherwise governments and private industry would’ve just done it. That’s like saying we should’ve had the foresight to invest in hydrogen powered cars. Why prioritise that when batteries are easier and cheaper?
If your goal is reliable carbon-free power, it’s not obvious that renewables will work out. We basically have to build these enormous continent-spanning machines in order to maintain uptime regardless of weather conditions.
It might be possible in the US and Europe, large regions that will hopefully remain politically stable, but it’s never been done before. By comparison, we have built reliable nuclear power plants. Is it really so obvious who is the mechanic and who is the random guy?
It is, I’ve not seen a single academic study show otherwise. Not the west, nor China, have shown scepticism towards renewables. But there’s plenty of that when it comes to the nuclear question. Just look at HPC and SWC in the UK. Companies won’t touch it unless the UK government guarantees they make a profit. Not a long term profit. A profit before the project is completed. They want an advance. Then there’s the US, over-budget and delayed. Finland, over-budget and delayed. France, over-budger and delayed. EDF prefer their renewables investments than their nuclear ones, mainly because half their nuclear plants are unreliable, and nobody wants to waste more money on them.
I agree that building wind/solar is currently profitable and reduces emissions. Incremental progress is politically easy.
I remain skeptical that following this strategy will ever eliminate fossil fuels, because people will turn to them whenever renewables are underperforming. They’ll see the price uncertainty and stick with gas because it works. We won’t demolish the power plants because they’re still needed 10 days a year. The fossil infrastructure will keep on chugging, just at a reduced scale. We’ll eliminate 80% of CO2, and continue to cook ourselves with the last 20%. It’s human nature to lose interest when the problem gets hard. Look how long it’s taking to deploy IPv6, and that’s relatively easy.
We should invest in the hard problem now, so fission can actually take us carbon-negative in 30 years. Maybe fusion will save the day, but that’s a gamble, and it’s really not that much better than Gen IV fission.
I don’t really know why you are trying to start a discussion with me because I never argued against any of that. You are right, we could be a lot farther if we had done a lot of things earlier. And it sucks that we aren’t. All of that doesn’t change that the comment I replied to was factually wrong. We could have replaced gas (or coal*) with electricity by using electricity based heating. We did not replace nuclear power with gas.
Edit: * I wrote coal, I meant oil.
Anti-nuclear is anti environmentalism and the failure to act sooner is on the shoulders of the people who continue to expand fossil fuels and refuse to invest in alternatives
Soooo… Where do the fuel rods for european nuclear power plants come from?
It’s more interesting to ask where the fuel could come from, given a few years of planning. The energy density is so much higher than gas, that geographical locality doesn’t really matter.
If you’re asking where stuff /could/ come from, why couldn’t we just build renewables. For Germany at least, the ship has sailed anyways. It is not currently legislatively and practically possible to build out the required energy infrastructure with nuclear to phase out gas in a timeframe that makes sense. With the beaureaucracy and everything, it’ll be at least a decade before even the first power plant would be connected to the grid.
Hey, Schroeder got paid so it also wasn’t totally bad idea.