[Taig]

Germany actually replaced the nuclear energy with wind & solar. The argument that remains is that instead of phasing out nuclear, reducing coal would have been preferred. The decision to phase out nuclear has long been made (for good reasons). Keeping them active or even building new reactors of that kind is not an economically viable solution. The price Germany pays for this is higher carbon emissions for the time being until renewables push coal out of the mix. What Germany gains, on the other hand, is the removal of the most expensive form of energy from its production and one big step towards a fully renewable and modern electricity grid.

[KptMarchewa]

If you could leave nuclear, and "replace" lignite with wind and solar instead, you actually replaced nuclear with lignite.

>The decision to phase out nuclear has long been made (for good reasons).

No, it was made for bad reasons.

>Keeping them active or even building new reactors of that kind is not an economically viable solution. The price Germany pays for this is higher carbon emissions for the time being until renewables push coal out of the mix. What Germany gains, on the other hand, is the removal of the most expensive form of energy

_Existing_ nuclear reactors are the cheapest possible source of electricity. You already had to build them and will have to close them. Left is the cheapest part, of actually operating them.

[neuronic]

Your comment is wrong and malicious and looking at the data proves you wrong.

Using lignite only slowed the reduction of coal, nuclear was almost completely replaced by renewables.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...

[jskrablin]

What Germany gained is more pollution, higher CO2 emissions and a lot of hopium that current energy fubar will somehow be resolved sometimes in the unspecified future using semi specified technology (there is no large scale energy storage solution available for renewables and it will stay like this for some years to come). Shutting down nuclear was a political decision, fueled by pure ideology (and some Russian help because natural gas exports).

What entire EU gained is getting to support often unstable electricity grid in Germany. So we all gained a lot by the looks of it.

[Taig]

The European electricity market is working quite well, imports and exports are expected to happen. Countries prefer to import electricity when it is cheaper than producing it themselves. Germany has more than enough capacity installed to handle its energy needs (even if a lot of this is still fossil). Germany does not have an "often unstable electricity grid", not at all. That information is simply wrong.

[ZeroGravitas]

Zoom out one more time and you see that the world gained a solution to climate change that is actually competitive economically.

Competitive even without a strong government regulation to enforce people paying for externalities, and even working against the entrenched intests of fossil fuels.

A solution which is rolling out at a truly astonishing rate.

What happens in Germany is irrelevant compared with what has happened globally due, in large part, to Germany.

[starbugs]

Yep. We all gained primarily a lower living standard without reducing any CO2 consumption globally at all _and_ without improving the environment locally. Looks like a good policy to continue with, doesn't it?

[frnkng]

The grid in Europe is so stable that you can literally use it to synchronise a clock by counting the oscillations.

Error over time: 0

[martinald]

It's hard for renewables to replace coal or nuclear though, because coal and nuclear provide baseload power, whereas wind and solar are very intermittent and require basically 100% gas backup (as there will be circumstances with very low wind and solar, which tends to happen in europe on very cold, still, winter nights when demand is the highest).

There is absolutely no reason the (ex-west) German nuclear power plants could not have been life extended. They were extremely reliable and about 10GWe of modern PWRs were finished in the late 80s. They could have easily be extended to at least 2030 had there been the political will at not a huge amount of cost. The RoI with current/previous high energy prices would have probably been 100 fold.

[Taig]

> It's hard for renewables to replace coal or nuclear though, because coal and nuclear provide baseload power, whereas wind and solar are very intermittent and require basically 100% gas backup (as there will be circumstances with very low wind and solar, which tends to happen in europe on very cold, still, winter nights when demand is the highest).

I absolutely agree with you that we need the coal plants and imports for base load. For a fully renewable grid, we need massive storage capacity. This, however, is far from an unsolved problem. The problem is that the economic incentives aren't aligned with that goal yet. There is reason to be optimistic though, and that the money Germany is saving on nuclear, is more sustainably and effectively spent on renewables and storage.

[Findeton]

Renewable energy is unpredictable, thus you need a backup source of energy for when there's no wind, sunlight or rain. It's yet unfeasible to store large amounts of energy unfortunately so that means using either natural gas or coal, because you need to be able to rapidly increase/reduce/regulate the energy output. It's coal at the moment for Germany and that means more pollution and dirty politicians that don't care about the environment, just about votes. Actually nuclear power plants can nowadays also regulate their output fast enough, but they got rid of those.

[wongarsu]

Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine coal was on its way out due to purely economical factors: coal plants are more expensive to operate than natural gas plants.

Of course recent months changed that since a lot of our gas used to come from Russia. If we went all-in on nuclear we could reactivate (East) German uranium mines that were closed shortly after reunification. But (traditional) nuclear also loses on economic factors, on top of being politically untenable.

[iSnow]

Just to add: the German NPPs were not able to regulate output fast, b/c they were of an older generation.

[Moldoteck]

it's possible to store huge amounts of energy with hydro, but at that point nuclear is not that bad in terms of price and nr of people killed by nuclear vs hydro accidents, so again Germany fkd up

[mahkeiro]

Germany didn't replace nuclear energy at all. Germany is producing less electricity than when nuclear reactors were running.

[Taig]

And what conclusion do you draw from this, or rather, how is this relevant to this thread?

[ffgjgf1]

> for good reasons

Like what? Surely nuclear is much cheaper than coal if we take at least some of the externalities into account?

Carbon emissions are arguably not even the worst aspect of burning coal…

[DeathArrow]

>Keeping them active or even building new reactors of that kind is not an economically viable solution.

Only reason nuclear energy is not viable is the people pushing against it, which means less nuclear plants are being built and prices skyrocketing.

If people would have pushed for nuclear energy like they push for wind and solar, then we would have no coal or gas burning plants by now.

[Taig]

A few reasons why people might be pushing against nuclear:

  - high electricity generation costs
  - "I don't want to live next to a nuclear plant"
  - If Japan can't handle it securely, why do we think we can?
  - Unsolved long-term waste storage location
  - Cost for long-term storage must additionally covered by the society
  - We are producing radioactive waste that must be securely stored for thousands of years to feed the energy needs of a couple generations, even though there are more sustainable and cheaper alternatives