- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
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What a fucking joke. It’s amazing how all these countries set weak goals for themselves and then fail anyway.
We’re all going to die lol
The UK likes to go the other way by talking up a ridiculous goal and then immediately failing it, like "Our goal is to produce zero CO2 and become the global leader in renewables by 2025” and then immediately open a new coal mine.
That’s basically what Germany did. They recently shut down their nuclear plants and restarted their coal plants.
And yet coal power production is practically at the lowest level ever (except for corona months 03/20 and 04/20)
Germany still has a very long way to go to be carbon neutral.
Almost 79% of its primary energy consumption is fossil fuel. 17% is renewable.
For comparison in France 46% of the primary energy consumption is fossil fuel, 14% renewable and 40% nuclear.
Look at the industry’s growth in France though. Renewables has been growing at the expense of nuclear. This is happening in Germany as well.
That is just blatant misinformation. Name one single coal plant that has been restarted since nuclear power was phased out.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-reactivates-coal-fired-power-plant-to-save-gas/a-62893497
The Mehrum plant in Hohenhameln and the Heyden plant in Petershagen (whose operation has been extended).
Unless your nitpick is that these were started before the final nuclear shutdown, but I never said otherwise, only that both things happened recently.
Wow… Where have I read that lie before? Oh, yeah. 20 times in this thread already, because you all get your alternative reality sppon-fed by the same lobbyists.
Actual reality:
The “massive” amount of nuclear shut down
The actual problem was stopping to fund solar, smashing a hundred thousand jobs in renewables under the pretense of “saving workers”. ~20k jobs in coal heroically saved.
But they could easily do it (and get paid by fossil fuel lobbyists) because the discussion is completely twisted anyway. And most constructive discussion of the topic will be drowned in fairy tales about renewables not working, nuclear being our only savior and other bullshit.
Basically this whole thread is a perfect example. We discuss electricity production because that’s the direction the nuclear social media cult is pushing every discussion into…
The actual report linked in this thread is for a German report of construction and traffic sectors not meeting their emission reduction goals… and I’m pretty sure neither coal nor nuclear is used to power cars nowadays. And the electrification bottle neck for transport is the production pace of electric cars, their still too high prize, limits on loading infra-structure etc., not actually energy per se.
Thank you for debunking this nuclear fanboy bullshit that gets repeated all the time.
Yes, but the goals in germany are written into a law, and the highest council actually blaming the government for failed goals.
Still not gonna change a damn thing. The (federal) government(s) don’t care, they are busy framing harmless protesters as potential terrorists and jailing them accordingly. Or they simply change the law again so that they do not have to be held accountable for their missed goals (see the ministry for transport).
The goal is complete decarbonization until 2045 and a lot of sectors in Germany are already on track with that goal, energy being one of them. That with a minister of finance, that does not want to spend money and a minister of transportation, that is more a puppet of the automobile industry and does not care about decarbonization. Imagine the US without the huge subsidies into clean energy. That’s what Germany is trying to do under their current minister of finance.
Energy or electricity? Those are two very different things.
Sorry, that was imprecise. The correct German term would be Energiewirtschaft, that can be translated to energy industry. That’s not only electricity, but also production of biogas, district heating, refining of fossil fuels and so on. The struggling departments from worst to slightly struggling are: -transportation: widespread use of fossil fuels -building: heating with fossil fuels and emissions from concrete -industry: high use of energy and no alternative to fossil fuels in some cases
Great that the plan is for the entire economy. Cheap and reliable clean electricity is possibly the most important and straightforward(ish) issue to solve with steel and concrete sitting at the opposite end of the spectrum.
German here.
Even back under Merkel, elected parties had a habit of defining good goals and then rendering them impossible to hit through policy. This meant that no one could fault them for trying, and no one could fault them for not being able to hit them.
Nowadays my countrymen aren’t as stupid anymore. That doesn’t mean we can do anything about it, but especially since Merkel we don’t believe any of these leaks anymore.
Good ol CDU turning almost everything they touched into steaming horseshit
I’m much more optimistic, though I do think it will get worse before it gets better. I think we’ll end up with a few mass killer enviromental events before humans start to save themselves properly. It’ll never be too late as Earth is always going to better than anywhere else for us.
Quick list of things hopeful in my feeds of the top of my head.
- Renewable energy is the cheapest energy.
- Agrivoltaics can increase yeilds while also providing power.
- Home Solar & battery pay back time is coming down all the time.
- Electric cars are the cheapest over their life time and the upfront costs are tumbling.
- Electrification of more and more transport types is happening to save costs.
- EVs are going V2H/V2G/V2X which means you get a large home (and office?) battery to take part in energy markets.
- Second life EV batteries will eventury be a source of larger, cheaper, home batteries.
- Just the other day another methane solution : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/22/bacteria-that-eats-methane-could-slow-global-heating-study-finds
- Fusion looks closer than 50 years out now.
- RightToRepair + OpenSource is slowly spreading and will reduce life time costs and reduce e-waste. Regulators are waking up too.
- Vertical farming is developing and will end up cheaper.
- Lab meat or precision fermentation is a path to animal free animal protein at lower costs.
- 5 minute cities as an idea is spreading.
- Covid has normalized WFH
- Green spaces in cities to cool them and improve mental health is increasingly being talked about and pushed in some forward thinking cities.
- Peak population is constantly revised down and sooner. Once population starts to fall, it’s not set to stop for a long time.
There is a lot of movement. It’s all about aligning economics with fighting climate change. Which is natural as using less to do the same thing is better for both.
One thing that is a very good sign is oil companies are scared. They are spending a lot of money pumping out FUD. Doom peddling to slow climate action, but economics is against them. Even without climate damage being costed in. Which governments will do when oil is less powerful.
Fight the doom!
There’s also a lot of propaganda paid by fossil fuel lobbyists (and some nuclear lobbyists still going for the perceived easy target of renewables, as rediculous as it is…) with the goal to disrupt the energy transition.
And the majority here actually believes they are anti-fossil fuels while they actually parrot their propaganda (for example the “Germany stopped nuclear power to burn more coal”-fairy tale you can read a hundred times by now here - only invented for the talking point of coal being needed, when Germany is actually at a historic low in use) and thus constantly running (objectively wrong) talking points against renewable power.
On one hand I love the obvious panic of fossil fuel lobbyists getting more desperate and rediculous in their massaging by the day. On the other hand, they already brain-washed a massive amount of people that I fear are really lost and will fight tooth and nails against a reasonable green transition to pursue their fantasies of “sane” nuclear build-up (that isn’t sane because nobody is actually building enough capoacities to make sense mathematically), without that “non-working” storage (that nuclear power actually needs to be economically viable) and “expensive” renewables (same, same…).
You get it. But at the end of the day, the fossil fuel companies will lose because of economics. Renewable energy and electrification is cheaper and better and planet saving. There will be economic feedback loops kicking in as less fuel is used, taking up the price.
But “in the end” isn’t fast enough for my taste… or for the taste of people losing their homes or base of life to floods, draughts, forest fires and so on.
And it won’t even get better but just worse even if we stopped co2 emission completely today. We would have need that feedback loop a decade ago. Instead the same lobbyists now sabotaging it got a lot of renewables killed the moment they were too cheap to compete.
If you draw a curve of deployed solar and wind power, the last decade is a hole that basically threw us back more than the missed time even.
And even if renewables take over for economicla reasons now, they will just change tactic and instead sabotage storage and infrastructure to keep fossil fuels relevant.
Germany had a very coal heavy power prodcution originally and massively build up renewables… and the lobbyists were already ahead… they blocked grid extensions to create pockets depending on coal no matter how much cheap green electricity is available. They blocked grid extensions to make diversification less effective. They -also for that reason- pushed antiwind sentiments in one part of the country and anti-solar in another. They made storage commercially unviable by massive double taxation (once as an end consumer while loading, then as a producer while unloading).
And they did all that basically without anyone taking much notice because they also -and much more visible- blocked wind and solar power in general (ffs… they killed a 100k people industry and sold it off to China just because solar was getting too cheap).
Yes, renewables are extremely cheap. So cheap in fact that people fight for their chance to build solar and wind in designated areas instead of wanting subsidies like for other power production. But if we don’t take a very close and constant look, we will be surprised in a decade how all those renewables did not actually help reduce co2 much as the 10-year-infrastructure plans for storage and grid are suddenly about lagging 9 years behind. Just look at such basic projects like the north-south grid connection in Germany. The 10-year plan to build SüdLink is scheduled to be done in ~6 years now… after 12 years. 100% sponsored by conservative local politicians and conservative nimbys cosplaying as environmentalists.
Never give up hope. That’s what fossil fuels companies want.
In 2005 me and my now wife watched “Who Killed the electric car” and it felt hopeless. Now we both drive EVs and you see more and more of them on the road. Home solar used to be a pipe dream, but now I know more people with it and hope to set it up myself. My electricity provider claims 100% renewables. We plan to remove gas use from the house.
Germany will hurt itself by not looking forwards, and as that becomes more and apparent, it will be harder to maintain. Fossil fuel money will start to reduce and with that, it’s corruption of politics and information. At some point, I hope some jail time is handed out to those who knowing slowly climate against for money. Now, climate action and money are more and more lined up. Always have been long term, but now short term too. Aligned on energy and thus everything down stream of energy. Which a lot of stuff!
Australia’s Teals movement shows common sense can win out.
It’s amazing how all these countries set weak goal
It’s can kicking. Make a promise for something 25 years in the future. Who cares if the country can’t meet it? You’ll likely be out of office or retired by that point. That’s the next person’s problem.
We’ll be fine. We’re gonna throw some reflective particulate into the atmosphere or some shit.
We’ll drop a giant ice cube into the ocean, solving the problem once and for all!
You kid, but we’re not gonna get greenhouse gases under control. We’re gonna find a way to stabilize temps and kick the can down the road to the next issue co2 causes.
Didn’t you hear him? ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!
Por que no los dos?
because of this
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That’s fallacious reasoning.
Just because climate engineering is the only way to stabilize temperatures doesn’t actually mean it can be done. That’s all hypothetical tech, just like carbon capture and other fairy tales we tell ourselves to cope with the reality of the end of the fucking world.
I’ll tell you what will happen. We won’t do anything to stop or slow climate change and we’ll reach a tipping point, after which society will rapidly collapse into warring factions and any hope of stabilizing the climate will be gone until we have a nuclear winter reset.
We’re all going to die lol
I agree … but that attitude also encourages people, especially leaders … and especially the billionaires that control this world … to believe that destruction is the ultimate end and to just play along, pick up as much wealth as possible while you can and do whatever you please because the end is near.
As if billionaires needed more reasons to pick up as much wealth as possible while they can lol
Not german but I’m in the same continent and in a country that nobody really cares about and we are nearing the threshold where renewables produce more than we require to run the country.
Funny thing is, private citizens are doing more for that effort alone than government in real terms because saving money is high on the priorities list here and free, renewable energy is a good thing, even more if you can produce it yourself.
Meanwhile, we’ve been fighting the government to cancel the authorization to log nearly 2000 old growth cork oaks for installing a solar panel farm when we have a lot of room to plant off shore wind farms.
Nobody really understands what is going on.
Which country?
Portugal
Oh nice. Yeah, Portugal runs under the radar here. I found rhis https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/portugal
Seems like you got rid of coal already. Oil/gas seem to hover however. Do you have plans about getting rid of fuel cars? And what do you use gas for? In Germany it’s mostly heating, I would have guessed you don’t need so much heating in Portugal and can use the AC in winter.
And good look with these oaks, I hate forest being cut down.
There a few incentives towards the purchase of eletric cars but its something still way out of reach for the majority of people. But the number of eletric cars is rising.
Gas is mostly used to run a few eletric generation plants. AC is a doubled edge sword here as houses are poorly insulated and the minimal recommmended power for having an equipment is 10.35Kva, which is a power requirement where all VAT is applied at 23%. The equipments are also very expensive and the installation even more.
And thank. Lets hope we can make enough noise to have to trees left alone
cork oaks
Portugal! What a wonderful country full of wonderful people. We do care about you and your delicious but slightly greasy food.
You’ve been eating at the wrong places… that’s a spanish thing: too much olive oil on every dish and too much fat on every cured meat
Easy mistake, isn’t it? Spain is next door.
From Spain, we don’t get neither good winds nor good weddings…
It’s tiresome. We, as a nation, exist for longer. Our language, culture, traditions, manerisms, etc, are different. We are not a part of Spain and we are not their bretheren, unlike many like to tell.
Our first king mother was a spanish woman and he decided to leave home by waging war on his mother, kill her lover and burn the lands where they lived.
So, it is understandable we dislike to be overlooked or mistaken as spanish
I just remember a sandwich covered in melted cheese with an egg on top and some kind of sauce. And a lot of delicious fried food. Both usually with fries as a side dish. Never any salad unless I specifically ordered it. I’m sure I could have gone to lots of restaurants where they would have had lighter meals, but I was on holiday so greasy was perfect.
Francesinha.
You can get those swimming in a pool of fat and you can get it very lean and clean.
You’ve been to Porto, right?
The make or break for that dish is the sauce. Some people can make it very heavy and some are capable of making it very light. Just know the amount of booze it goes in it could fuel a small plane.
Then comes the cheese and some places just overdo it. Four or five thin slices are enough but I do know some places throw half a block over every sandwhich.
I apologise for the fries. That’s fast food influence. And the egg was unexpected; that’s an addition from the croque madame.
Hope you had fun here.
Churassco chicken is the best chicken I’ve ever had but hard to find in Canada
Take notes:
One chicken, between 1 and 1,5kg (feeds four or two very hungry or one very, very hungry individual)
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil
Hot peppers or dried chilli flakes, optional (our local chillis are very strong and we usually avoid putting it into food for children or people that in general don’t tolerate spice)
two cloves of garlic
white wine (if it doesn’t smell like you could use it as fuel, you’re good)
a small bay leaf (or more, it’s your food)
==##==
cut or have your chicken cut open at your local butcher shop; don’t have it cut into pieces! It’s just a cut through the breast to get it flat
season it with salt and pepper and leave it be
in a bowl (now comes the tricky part) mix all the other ingredients to make up a marinade; just how much you’ll be making depends if you want to marinate the entire chicken for a few hours (two hours minimum, six to twelve is better, anything up to a week is good; your pick) or just brush the chicken and throw it in the hoven around 180C and go at it with the brush every ten minutes to coat it with the marinade so it roasts without drying. remember to flip your bird occasionally for even cooking.
I’m not saying you should flip it the bird but if that works for you, be my guest; swearing at and cursing the food while cooking is kinda of traditional here. Maybe it adds some extra dimension to the end result? Try it and let me know or don’t and leave it at that.
Keep in mind you need more wine than olive oil in the marinade as the chicken will be cooking with the skin on and you want to render the fat in the skin and have it crisp for eating. Wine provides moisture and flavor, olive oil aids in crisping up and adhere the seasonings to the meat. Whisk everything with a fork (it further bruises the chopped garlic, chillis and the bay leaf and releases more flavour).
You’ll require less liquid if you are not marinading the meat; if you are, you’ll require enough liquid to drown the bird in it. Also, marinade it in the fridge to avoid spoilage, especially if it is going to be a long dip.
You can cook it in the hoven or you can cook it over hot coals. Both works but I’m not going to lie to you and say it’s the exact same thing because it isn’t: the smoke adds to the final taste.
Goes well with a nice chopped salad (lettuce, tomato, white onion and cucumber, a pinch of coarse salt, olive oil and vinegar), boiled potatoes (get some small potatoes, wash it well, keep the skin on and throw a garlic clove and a bay leaf into the cooking water) and a nice red wine. Lemonade, ice tea or a soft drink for those who don’t drink goes fine as well, as long as it is not overwhelming sweet.
Hope this is of any use to you.
I mean, they have only really started since the corrupt right-wing shitheads are not in office anymore. Now we only have to deal with a minister of transport who just refuses to work and claims policies the greens pushed for are his achievement lol
Wow what a surprise, guess brown coal isn’t good for the climate. Bunch of idiots those German politicians. They even tried to weaken that EU bill that bans the sale of new fossil fuel cars.
Voted in by German citizens.
Who have been subjected to targeted information warfare/propaganda for years.
And also, people straight up lie and deceive.
It’s a very, veeery good thing the fucking CDU was voted out. No matter how much you hate the current government for one reason or another, at least they do something besides shoveling money into their pockets and maintaining status quo.
We’ll see whether their ideas work out, but at least they have some.
I had high hopes for the current government, but I never imagined the FDP would be able to do so much damage with so few votes. The way it is now, I’m pretty disappointed. A lot of great ideas that were just shut down in their infancy.
It’s not just the FDP though, Scholz is at least complicit with their bullshit. It is beyond me, how the SPD supports whatever Wissing does in the transportation department.
The fact that Scholz didn’t even come to my mind when I thought about the German government says it all. I had no expectations and I was still disappointed.
Awww, poor German people. Never learned to think for themselves. Just learned how to follow orders.
You don’t realize how incredible funny (or sad… depending on perpective) it is to see people like you parrot the same lie spoon-fed to you by lobbyists again and again while talking about other being too stupid to think.
This incredible post-factual world where popular narrative trumps reality is truely lost…
Lol, what an egoistic view of the world. “Everybody else is to blame but me”. It’s all those lobbyists, immigrants, bankers, politicians, nazis, antifa, that boogeyman over there! But me? Nah, I’m perfect and all my friends and family never do anything wrong. In fact, anybody who I can identify with is globally right.
Now that’s sad.
Yes, it looks egoistic if you are this deluded as you are.
But we have real problems to solve and can’t save every propaganda victim that refuses to accept reality because you run on the usual hateful narrative about Germany. Hey, I don’t even blame you. Telling a lie about Germany any time you need to divert from some own issue is a well honored tradition in Europe (and thus wide-spread in media) and so I understand that you were trained to follow that pattern. It’s sad (or funny… I still haven’t decided…) none-the-less.
So you can cry about those imaginary egoistic Germans of yours all you want. The actual ones are massively building up renewables, are -contrary to your beloved lies- on a historic low in coal use. And this report is actually about the transport and construction sectors not matching their emission reduction goals (while sectors liker energy or industry -the actual sources of coal use- are easily fullfilling theirs… but that’s not mentioned because -as I said before- energy and industry are not even remotely the topic of this report.)
What makes you think that person only thinks poorly of German low-information voters? Low-information voters are a plague around the world.
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Luckily we will get rid of coal soon.
I hope so…
No matter the platform worldnews comments contain mainly ignorant, overconfident bullshit. Glad to know that there are some things in life one can depend upon.
You’d think the shock of the gas shortage from Russia would of been a wake up call and they’d be ahead of a timeline like this…
This is the best summary I could come up with:
BERLIN, Aug 22 (Reuters) - 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.
“According to the current status, Germany would still emit 229 million tonnes of climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions in the target year 2045,” the UBA report found.
Under pressure from the pro-business FDP party, the ruling coalition in June agreed to dilute a bill to phase out oil and gas heating systems from 2024.
Building minister Klara Geywitz said the sector was making progress but needs improvements in some areas to close the emissions gap, adding that climate protection measures should be practical and doable to avoid overtaxing people.
The council said assumptions made by the transport ministry on the effectiveness of the planned and already implemented measures, such as a discounted national rail ticket, a CO2 surcharge on truck tolls and increased working from home, were also optimistic.
And that is ultimately a gap in the transport programme," Brigitte Knopf, deputy chairwoman of the council, told a news conference presenting the report findings on Tuesday.
The original article contains 679 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Well duh? Are they nationalizing all carbon emitting industries to begin a managed decline of the industry or are they hoping economic magic and wishful thinking will work?
Well not a bad idea tbh, as most state owned and controlled companies tend to go belly up.
Shit I had hoped we could leave the nuclear stans over at reddit.
What’s wrong with nuclear?
deleted by creator
Well if you don’t support nuclear because its “too complex,” you de facto support coal, which will inevitably turn into “degrowth” as most of the world can’t support agriculture anymore, and so you will get to nod your head as 100’s of millions are “de-growthed” into starvation.
Why would anyone who’s against nuclear automatically be pro coal? It’s not like the only options available to us are nuclear and coal.
That is the truth. Nuclear competes with fossil fuels, not wind or solar.
deleted by creator
Living up to your name.
Then why are you here? Your horrid omnicidal wish will be, by your own admission, inevitably granted. You have nothing to worry about.
deleted by creator
If you want degrowth, you want to see billions dead, because that is what degrowth means.
Nothing in general. Well the build times are rediculous in Europe and planning right not to build nuclear soon is too late already for any agreed upon climate goal. But that’s another matter…
The problem is the brain-washed nuclear cult on social media briganding everything. In the last year on Reddit you couldn’t even post any report about any new opening of wind or solar power without it degenerating into always the same story: “bUt ReNeWaBlEs DoN’t WoRk! StOrAgE DoEs’Nt ExIsT! tHeY aRe A sCaM tO bUrN mOrE FoSsIl FuElS! gErMaNy KiLlEd ThEir NuClEaR To BuRn MoRe CoAl BeCaUsE ThEy ArE InSanE!!”
Mentioning the fact that Germany in reality shut down reactors not even contributing 5% of their electricity production that were scheduled for shutdown for 30 years and in a state you would expect with that plan and already more than replaced by renewables got you donwvoted into oblivion every single time.
Reality is uncomfortable for the idealist. But ultimate any sustainable future MUST include nuclear and everything you sarcastically dismissed with that childish spongebob typing is just the reality of our world society. You may as well get upset about how we didn’t leave the “reality stans,” back on reddit.
In fact, I should turn this back on you, I’m upset about the coal-stans that apparently migrated over here from reddit. If there is any world where you want to claim to be “green,” coal CANNOT be any part of the conversation. If it is, you have failed and don’t’ get to discuss environmentalism anymore.
Except nobody is advocating coal. So what do you want to turn back on him exactly?
Just because you developed a hate boner for anyone who’s not on your nuclear train doesn’t mean they’re pro coal. If you need to put words in others people’s mouths to confirm yourself… you’re wrong.
With your reaction you just confirmed what he described.
If you aren’t pro-nuclear you are pro-coal, thats the reality. No one is replacing nuclear reactors with anything but coal. The development of wind and solar generation is going to happen regardless, but for every nuclear plant that Germany shut down, they opened, or re-opened a coal plant.
Saying “that’s the reality” doesn’t make it a reality. You can repeat it as often as you want, it makes you look like a self absorbed jerk - because it’s simply not true. Just because it’s a nice narrative to push for you not every opponent to nuclear energy is a proponent to coal. Quite the contrary I’d figure.
The single last coal plant started operation in 2020, and none has been “re-opened”. Some are kept in prolonged reserve mode until 2024 (half a year longer than originally planned), IF the Alarmstufe Gas stays in effect.
Maybe try with some verifiable facts and stop lying.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/08/germany-reactivate-coal-power-plants-russia-curbs-gas-flow I guess “reactivating coal power plants” means something different in the original German, an must be semantically different then “re-opened.” Also note that natural gas is still a fossil fuel that has the dubious distinction of being “better” then coal, but infinitely worse then Nuclear.
Now if you are against nuclear energy, it means you have to have a replacement in mind and all replacements for Nuclear Power Plants are fossil fuel based. There isn’t another option. Wind/Solar are great, there is no one accusing you of being against renewables. But renewables are NOT replacements for Nuclear or Fossil Fuel based power. So there is your choice. Pro-Nuclear or Pro-Fossil fuel.
Poor track record with safety (not talking about the big issues such as meltdowns, but smaller issues such as minor leaks, and workplace incidents). Nobody’s interested in building them unless they’ve got profit guarantees and subsidies from the government. Nobody’s interested in insuring them in full (unless it’s the government). Nobody’s interested in the eventual decommissioning process, which can take a century, and again, still costs. Renewables will be up and running, and profitable, long before nuclear is constructed.
Speaking about the safety record here’s what final storage looks like in Germany. That’s another eight billion Euros of cleanup costs right there. I’m not usually that crass but whoever ok’d fucking dumping fucking nuclear waste in a fucking salt mine (unsurprisingly, yes, there’s water incursions) deserves to be shot.
In a nutshell the sentiment in Germany is that the only people that can be trusted to not play it fast and loose with nuclear safety are the Greens, and the Greens rather don’t want to deal with it either so we have a decision.
If you see the environment as just another way to profit, and you assume that we can’t save the environment because it costs too much, you are just another shitty fossil fuel executive, but worse because at least the fossil fuel executives get paid for their short-term ideas, you are just supporting them and thereby standing by as hundreds of millions of people are condemned to death, hopefully including yourself, for literally nothing.
So, you’re going to spend, billions, to build a nuclear powerplant, that will decarbonise at a slower rate, never turn a profit, be an economic sinkhole megaproject, or, you could just build a solar panel or wind turbine in like, a year, where it’ll be functional and working. Profits allow you to reinvest into more projects. Losses, mean you’re putting endless amounts of money into less.
Again if you are worried about “turning a profit” you don’t give a fuck about the environment and need to leave.
If you’re constantly pouring money into a loss-making industry, it means you’re not efficiently managing your resources to build more projects. Profits from renewables can be reinvested before a single plant can’t be constructed. And that nuclear plant, will never make enough profit to build another.
What the fuck is the point of “making a profit?” The world is burning because of profits. If all fossil fuel plants were taxed at 1,000,000 Million per ton of carbon emissions would you support nuclear then?
It scares people into making them plan and pay for everything up front. If you did the same with literally any other fuel source it wouldn’t even get built. Coal would be DoA if they had the same limits on radioactive emissions as a nuclear plant.
But that’s the thing with nuclear. The upfront costs are massive, and literally irrecoverable. Can you name a single nuclear powerplant that has broken even? I can’t. Not unless, it’s one that the government has built and then handed over to private industry, for example. Reducing safety from nuclear powerplants is not viable long term. And that’s the only way to get them commercially viable.
It’s not about reducing safety, it’s about reducing regulations that are about the appearance of safety, it’s about not imposing decommissioning costs as part of construction.
The US Navy has been able to consistently and safely build and run reactors for 50 years. It’s basically just fear preventing that knowledge and experience from being used in the commercial sector.
The US Navy isn’t concerned about making their fleets commercially viable. Taxpayers expect to subsidise defence, and for the US, this is done at vast cost. They don’t expect to constantly be funding an expensive, loss-making powerplant. Not when alternatives are cheaper and more effective.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Germany doesn’t get all of its electrical power by renewable meness by a long shot. Nuclear plants were prematurely shut down before their end of life while at the same time germanies reliance on fossil fuels went up. This is what everyone is talking about.
I just called out this particular piece of misinformation. Being of the opinion that Germany shut down nuclear power plant prematurely doesn’t make it okay to spread misinformation, does it?
You haven’t shown a single piece of evidence to show that I’m wrong. I can just throw back to you that what your saying is pure missingormation.
That is just misinformation. First of all, nuclear power never contributed that much anyway. If all nuclear power plants ever built in Germany were running at full load 24/7 for 365 days of the year, they would produce 231 TWh, which is less than 10% of our total energy demand. So there was never that big of a hole to fill in the first place. Especially in the last ten years, when only a handful of power plants were still in service.
In reality, renewables have managed to replace both nuclear power and a large chunk of fossil fuels (source). Last year we had to export enormous amounts of energy to France, because their nuclear plants had proven so unreliable (source). This has admittedly led to an increased use of fossil fuels, which we could have avoided by building more renewables here (or in France).
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.
Hey, Schroeder got paid so it also wasn’t totally bad idea.
This is the German plan:
- Shutdown the nuclear plants
- Burn more lignite
- WFH
The council said assumptions made by the transport ministry on the effectiveness of the planned and already implemented measures, such as a discounted national rail ticket, a CO2 surcharge on truck tolls and increased working from home, were also optimistic. “Private vehicle individual transport is not addressed, so to speak. And that is ultimately a gap in the transport programme,” Brigitte Knopf, deputy chairwoman of the council, told a news conference presenting the report findings on Tuesday
The plan for transportation emissions, 2/3 of the target to be cut, is WFH. Yikes!
If all the subsidiaries that went into nuclear power the last few decades went to renewables instead Germany would have no issues at all, but hey… giving tax payer money to some very few giant energy companies is more important than creating a Europe leading renewables energy sector that does not rely on russian fossils or nuclear material.
You should know that nuclear power is very expensive while renewables are absurd crazy cheap. I’ve been to a German Endlager and it takes years and BILLIONS of Euros just to seal this thing off. Guess who is paying? Mostly tax payers.
There’s be no company in Germany which would be willing to run a nuclear power plant if they were responsible for the permanent disposal of their waste on their own instead of letting the tax payer pay (most of) for it.
That’s all well and good in the energy sector. What about transportation? If I understand correctly, transportation makes up the majority of the emissions Germany aims to cut
Sadly, we have a long history of incompetent transport ministers. That didn’t change with the last elections.
Funny, because the energy sector was the only on track to fulfill the targets. Last year it even overshot its targets and is expected to again save more CO2 as planned in 2023.
Maybe, just maybe, its more relevant that other sectors are managed by the FDP (market liberals) and SPD (social democrats), while energy is managed by die Grünen (greens).
Do you know about the transportation sector? It is where 2/3 of Germanys planned reduction is.
If only there was some means of replacing all that coal with a non-carbon intensive source of energy that isn’t dependant on the weather…
Has anyone heard of such a technology?
Sarcasm aside, that Germany shut down their last two nuclear reactors so recently and carried through is astounding. The excuses are mind-boggling. They’re old? Refurbishing is cheaper and faster than new built. They need re-certification? Then do it.
It’s more efficient to use the money required for
- The inspection
- The renovations
- Acquiring new fuel
And spend it on renewables than to do the above.
Also a big factor noone seems to care about: staff. The people who worked there have other jobs now. You can’t just plop a reactor plant somewhere and expect it to make electricity you need highly specialised staff for that. We also did not invest into training new staff because why would we, with the stop for nuclear power being decided 10 years ago.
Highly Specialized staff
I watched this animated documentary from the states called The Simpsons that seems to state otherwise.
Nein!
Doch!
Ohh…
Hopefully they wake up to reality and follow Sweden’s approach
Once it becomes more profitable to betray oil, gas, and coal companies, it’ll happen. Not a moment sooner.
Unfortunately we’ll already be doomed long before that happens
It’s a party then?
Unless something “unfortunate” were to happen that might impact profitability.
yeah sure, nuclear powerplants finished in the late 40th are gonna solve our current problems (if that’s the approach you are talking about)
Sure as fuck better than setting targets you know you’re not going to hit and then acting all shocked when you don’t
Is it though? You’d need to cut the price of nuclear by about 1/4. Even then, renewables are faster at decarbonisation. Not that nuclear represented a large amount of the German grid in the first place. Best case scenario for Germany, is extending the lifespan of their plants not more than a few years.
Sitting here and complaining about how long it’ll take once we start, and as such never actually starting, is exactly how we got here.
Best time was 40 years ago, second best time is now.
The targets got missed by construction (some small part) and transport (mainly)… and again like clockwork the brain-washed nuclear brigade storms in lying about electricity production.
What is Swedens approach?
The usual fantasizing about nuclear and failing any actual plan, very popular right now. Because nuclear lobbyists pay well.
Or more precise: They want to build more nuclear power. But of course all their planned and their existing nuclear combined will not even be remotely enough to cover just the minimal required base load in a few decades. Because changing most of our primary energy demand (industry, heating, transport in varying shares) to electricity (that is often only making up 20%+ in a lot of countries) will massively increase the demand.
If you are not building (or planning to start the build-up very, very soon) enough nuclear capacity to cover 80% or more of today’s electricity demand then you will not have the minimal base load required in 2-3 decades, because there will be an increase by at least a factor of 2,5 in demand.
But that’s not something you tell people as nobody has a clue how to pay for building even more nuclear (where “even more” means the actual needed amount)…
(A few exceptions with massive hydro potential aside -as they have access to that cheaper base load- there is exactly one country with a plan that works mathematically: France. And even their government is lying to their people when they talk about 6 new reactors with another 8 optional. Because the full set of 14 is the required minimum they will need in 2050 and onward (their old ones are not in a state to run mcuh longer than that).
But hey. Even the most pro-nuclear country and the one with a domestic indutry actually doing a lot of the nuclear build up for other countries can’t tell their population the trutz about costs and minimla requirements. If you want to know just onme thing about the state of nuclear, that this should be it.
Who the fuck are paying nuclear lobbyist? Do they even exist? Like is “Big Nuclear” real? Can I get a job there? I’d love to get paid a shit load to go to the same dinners fossil fuel executives go to, but I’d get to actually advocate for something worthwhile and that would improve life in the future.
Yeah, it genuinely is. Doesn’t take too long to find the lobby groups. A lot of funding comes from mining. Also, RAB funding (from the government) allows nuclear companies to earn a profit without having the plant completed yet. So there is money to be made. Ever wonder why there’s a lot of pro-nuke videos on YouTube? Rather than academic spaces? Which time and again shows you that renewables are superior in virtually every way?
I can’t read it, as the website doesn’t like my adblocker. The first few sentences talked about nuclear.
I found this showing that in 1991 1/3 of your total energy came from nuclear, which is super impressive, now it is down to 1/5. Do is your plan to double that number again? And what is your current time-frame for that?
https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/sweden?country=~DEU
I’m not from Sweden, but they currently have 6.8 GW of nuclear.
From the article: “Climate Minister Romina Pourmokhtari said […] that the government believed that new nuclear power equalling 10 conventional reactors would need to go into service in the 2030s and 2040s.”
Assuming that a conventional reactor is around 1 GW, adding 10 would more than double their current capacity.
It took Finland nearly two decades to complete Scandinavia’s newest reactor. Sweden can remove the cap, but good luck finding private companies willing to invest in that. Not without guaranteed profits and subsidies. Of course Sweden could just build it themselves. But it’s not cheap.
Yeah, nuclear is quite expensive, just like batteries, hydrogen, and long-distance transmission are expensive. The effects of climate change will be incredibly expensive. The best way to make technology cheaper is to build a lot of it, and just building something is step one.
and building lots of solar and wind farms is cheaper and faster than nuclear, so what?!
Sweden’s approach is over.
They have no targets, the industry isn’t interested, and the government’s analysis has been based on nothing.
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/Q70mzQ/regeringen-svanger-om-karnkraftsreaktorerna
I wonder if they would ever reconsider what they did for the deactivation of nuclear power plants.
Because uranium appears out of thin air and it’s not being extracted in politically volatile areas. Every Euro that’s spent on a nuclear reactor is an euro that would be better spent on renewable energies.
And of course, the materials that go into solar panels and other renewable tech (lithium ion batteries) also appear out of thin air and isn’t extracted in environmentally degrading ways…
Depends. Renewables are faster at decarbonising than nuclear. Only if we’re starting from scratch. They’re also cheaper, and at scale, more reliable. Difference here was, Germany shut down existing nuclear before they could ramp up renewables. I will add that this is the most generous argument to maintain nuclear.
That’s true but couldn’t that also be said for the rare earth metals used in batteries to power phones and EVs?
No energy production is perfect. Just good to look at the pros and cons.
So we should back ourselves into a corner when we have alternatives, because we don’t have alternatives for everything?
Clearly that only matters with nuclear and magically doesn’t happen in any other case
People also think that nuclear is some sort of magical thing that provides cheap unlimited energy on demand, when really it’s an expensive, lumbering option, that is slow to construct and difficult to maintain. There’s a reason why even China prefers renewables over nuclear, and they have reactors for military research.
You should probably tell China that, then…
I don’t have to tell China they’re finding it out themselves. Yes, China leads in deploying nuclear, for various reasons. Energy, research, military. But despite this, renewables represents by far the largest investment and growth. Though China’s nuclear energy ambitions seem large, don’t forget, it’s a huge country. It’s just a small piece of the pie, the pie being dominated by renewables.
Ah yes… The classic primary source of an op ed from CU Boulder, which isn’t exactly known for having a great Asian Studies program.
It’s almost as if that’s why the gold standard is a nuclear baseline with renewable to meet demand spikes.
That’s not how renewables work. They don’t produce electricity on demand (at least not solar and wind), their energy output is dependent on the weather. If there’s no wind and no sun, they won’t cover any demand spikes. Which is why baseload power like nuclear is pretty much useless in combination with renewables.
What is actually needed is flexible power that can be quickly adapted to the varying output from solar and wind. This is currently mostly done with natural gas, which we’re trying to get away from. In the future, biomass, water and storage will cover that part, while demand response strategies will help reduce demand peaks during times of low energy production.
Oh good, biomass. Because there aren’t enough starving people in the world already.
If there is no wind or sun, we’re facing a global apocalypse. There’s always wind or sun. You just need to capture it. Nuclear is not on demand either, most plants aren’t designed to be. Nuclear is designed to be baseload energy, which, for decades, has fallen out of favour in lieu of more flexible doctrines. Octopus Energy is doing quite a bit of work with AI and energy demand, using incentives to control public energy consumption, which reduces the backup you would need for renewables. Also, that study I referenced, presumes about a 25% decrease in cost of nuclear. Again, best case scenario for nuclear.
There is some evidence to suggest a small nuclear presence in an otherwise majority renewables grid, can be ideal. But this is the most generous position you can have for nuclear.
I wonder if any of the nuclear bros on here ever consider, that jerking a fuel rod isn’t always the best approach?
Seriously, every fucking time this comes up and every fucking time you guys show nothing but arrogance and ignorance, both usually weapons grade.
I don’t understand the hostility. Germany made a conscious decision to turn off their nuclear power plants.
Facts are facts. Nuclear power is the 2nd safest power generation method per terawatt hour. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Additionally there are ways to recycle nuclear fuel. Most often the arguments against nuclear are fueled by emotion and not fact based.
Germany isn’t failing its climate goals because of getting rid of nuclear power. In 2018 6,3% of our energy (not just electricity) came from nuclear power. May all the nuclear chills please kindly stfu?
Letting those few remaining nuclear power plants stay active for another few years would’ve done jack shit. We’re failing because of shortcomings in many sectors. The worst offenders currently are housing (~25% of total CO2 emissions) and transportation (19%).
Perhaps the timetable for them could’ve been extended, but when literally one of the largest nuclear power companies in the world prefers renewables, and balks at the cost of opening a nuclear powerplant without significant government guarantees and subsidies, that should tell you something. The nuclear argument is usually fuelled by the mining lobby. Even China, who does not care for public opinion, and has an active nuclear stake for military purposes, prefers renewables. The only argument for Germany was the when was the appropriate time to shut down the reactors, not that it shouldn’t have been done.
I’d like to add that the agreement to shut down the nuclear power plants was made years in advance anyways. Shortly after Fukushima the german political parties voted for that, even the conservatives. Talks began even before that because there’s never been a definitive place for the final storage of fuel rods and other waste, this is still not solved for the current waste btw.
The only thing I can really agree on, is that Germany should’ve been much better prepared at that point. Everyone acted like this came out of thin air and something the current parties in power decided on a whim.
Adding to this, german energy providers wouldn’t even consider starting up the plants again:
https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/atom-kraft-laufzeit-verlaengerung-100.amp
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/die-nutzung-der-kernenergie-hat-sich-erledigt-6607834.html
Germany was better prepared. The plan was to use natural gas. Which was cheaply supplied by Russia. Who woulda thunk that relying on mining operations in despotic countries could be such a bad decision? Goes for Gas as well as Uranium…
balks at the cost of opening a nuclear powerplant without significant government guarantees and subsidies, that should tell you something.
It tells of sane business, yes. The German government is completely unreliable with regards to nuclear power. Remember, a CDU chancellor eventually shut them down - the supposed right party that used to fight for prolonged lifetime of the plants. Any sane businessperson would request legal safety before making a huge investment that only pays off over decades.
I don’t understand the hostility
Possibly a German Green. They are hostile like that towards nuclear. Ironically that made the German Green Party effectively a coal party (they don’t like to hear that).
Every single statement you’ve written is false.
The German Greens aren’t hostile towards nuclear?
I wonder why your username is AggressivelyPassive. More like AggressivelyAggressive ha.
