this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
662 points (69.5% liked)
Memes
45666 readers
1219 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Actually, the industry is fully investing in wind and solar and wouldn't touch nuclear with a long pole, because excessively expensive.
In case of Germany, they'd quite literally fire up coal over nuclear. Like holy shit...
Coal, gas and oil could be zero instead of nuclear.
Looks like I'm a bit behind on the latest news, I mean in 2015 it (basically) alone was still half of their energy production. That's quite the explosion, too bad it's largely wind power and...biomass??? Right it's "renewable©® (in theory)", not "sustainable right now or benefitial to the current situation". Same to the natural gass growth, guess it's better than coal, but come on... And to my original point, in your graph we can see a negative corelation between coal+lignite over nuclear at a few ranges (when they shut down nuclear over fucking coal), roughly starting after 2005. Also wow, they actually fucking killed nuclear last year... JESUS...
Solar is ahead of biomass and while solar and wind is growing, biomass is not. You're also misreading the graph. Nuclear was never such a huge part of Germany's energy production and killing nuclear was a 25 year long process, Germany let most of the plants run and just did not build new ones
While I agree that getting rid of coal first would have been the better strategy, I don't get this nuclear power fetish and constant bashing of Germany on this while most countries are doing worse than Germany. Nuclear power is extremely expensive, we have as of now no storage solution for nuclear waste in Germany and Germany has no source of nuclear material itself. There are quite a few drawbacks
Just want to throw in this link. https://energy-charts.info/?l=en&c=DE
Very detailed info on Energy and power usage in Germany
I didn't say nuclear was ever big in Germany. The whole point is about Germany being against it. If you mean the part where I said it was half their energy production, I meant coal+lignite.
Nothing generates more than nuclear (like it's not even comparable), it has basically zero emissions and there are countries like Finland who'll happily let you burry it there, tho you ofc don't need to go that far away. You don't need to dispose it nearly as often as coal ash, so it being in another country ain't really that big of a deal.
Ofc solar is also a great option, because of the versatility, sadly German seems to really fucking love wind.
im fact they're closing one of the last scaled down power plant simulator, where scientists and students could have a hands down experience in learning about It
im not german, but its so sad, the thing was even made of glass so you could literally see the process
Kyle's video
Oh thank god... Apparently they aren't destroying it YET. There is hope. Personally, I'd feel a lot safer if it went into more nuclear loving hands, like the French or Czech, actually, most of Germany's neighbors would do.
hell yeah, sometimes problems just need a bit of internet exposure
In Australia the coal and gas industries appear to be pushing nuclear quite hard, mainly because they distract from the renewable options preferred by the market. They know that while we’re arguing over literally every other power source, they can just keep burning holes in the ground.
They solve different problems. Nuclear is cheaper than the batteries needed to make solar/wind reliable.
Overproduction is cheaper than batteries
Overproduction doesn't cover when large swaths of land have low wind speeds at night
Wind is always blowing somewhere
Yes but the grid doesn't carry power efficiently over extremely long distances. You're putting undue load on the grid if you expect wind blowing 500 miles away to cover all the power needs of the area it's supposed to supply as well as every neighboring area where there's not enough power.
This isn't just an efficiency issue you can solve by throwing more windmills at the issue. If there's too much power flowing through the lines we have currently, things break. Usually with fires and exploding transformers. Our power grid is designed for distributed production, but with on-demand generation as a backup for when intermittent generation is underperforming. Batteries are one option to achieve this, but they're expensive to build in the scale we need them. Hydrogen fuel production is an interesting candidate to fill this niche and for all-renewable power, but the efficiency is quite low so you're basically tripling the cost per unit energy produced.
But one way or another, you need additional infrastructure to power the grid with zero fossil fuels. Nuclear, batteries, hydrogen fuel, or a total revamp of transmission infrastructure all require expensive construction projects. Nuclear is the only one that's been done at scale, that's why I want to see it given a fair chance again. But I also think plenty of other options are promising BECAUSE they are novel, and I'd love to see a future where a combination is used to make a carbon-free, brownout-free power grid
I'm all for keeping existing nuclear infrastructure but building new nuclear is mad.