Germany To Keep Last Three Nuclear-Power Plants Running In Policy U-Turn (telegraph.co.uk) 260
Germany plans to keep its remaining nuclear power plants open for longer in a major U-turn as it scrambles to keep the lights on this winter with less Russian gas. The Telegraph reports: Officials have concluded the plants are needed due to gas shortages and they can be kept open without safety concerns, the Wall Street Journal reported. Germany pledged to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, which hardened opposition to the technology. Berlin has been under pressure to change course since the invasion of Ukraine to limit the impact of the gas crisis on manufacturers and households. Germany has three plants left, operated by E.ON, EnBW and RWE, supplying about 6pc of the country's electricity. They are currently due to close at the end of the year. Any extension has yet to be officially adopted and details remain under discussion, the Wall Street Journal added. It came as Norway warned it could not do more to help Germany avoid a gas crisis this winter as Russia restricts supplies.
Nice idea, except they don't have enough fuel. (Score:3)
As recently as a few months ago the operators said they literally don't have enough fuel to run at or near capacity through the winter, so it's probably not going to help much.
(https://www.politico.eu/article/politics-behind-germany-refusal-reconsider-nuclear-phaseout/ )
I'm feeling the schadenfreude (though trying not to). If they'd used their investments in wind and solar to replace fossil fuels over the past 15 years then this would be a non-issue. Instead they used them (mostly) to replace nuclear...
Wrong (Score:2)
From your own link:
As for new supplies, the association believes a sufficient quantity could be in place as early as winter.
Why you would believe anything from an article that we now know was outright lying is beyond me though.
But that's what you get for reading Politico, a worldview that does not match with reality.
I knew way before that Politico article Germany was going to be re-starting reactors, anyone who knew anything about energy knew that.
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I knew way before that Politico article Germany was going to be re-starting reactors, anyone who knew anything about energy knew that.
Apparently they're still denying it, for now.
Pretty early on it became clear that they don't want to do it, and that once you start from that position, it's trivial to find a million excuses for why it's not possible. No fuel... no technicians, everything is already in motion. All obviously trivial to overcome if your nation's energy needs depended on it, but lol.
Fuel (Score:3)
So then, buy some more? I'm guessing they stopped buying new rods because closure was imminent. That's not stopping them from buying more.
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As recently as a few months ago the operators said they literally don't have enough fuel to run at or near capacity through the winter, so it's probably not going to help much.
Which is a load of shit as the three remaining reactors were not due to be shut down this year, but next year.
Also as recently as a few *days* ago Westinghouse said they can deliver fuel rods if needed.
Don't reference problems of the past when discussing the present.
If they'd used their investments in wind and solar to replace fossil fuels over the past 15 years then this would be a non-issue. Instead they used them (mostly) to replace nuclear...
Ever since Germany started down this path their coal consumption has plummeted. Yeah they shutdown nuclear as well, but don't pretend like the goal here didn't have a positive impact on CO2 emissions (to say nothing of air quality), they are con
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How actually do you exit from nuclear power without shutting down the nuclear plants?
The larger point is that you don't exit from nuclear power until fossil is phased out completely.
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Considering they have even less of the other fuel (You know, Russian gas) I'm pretty sure this can be solved.
They were phasing them out because ... (Score:5, Funny)
Germany pledged to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, ...
Ya, since Germany is so... prone to tsunamis ... according to Google, and this arrticle [sciencenordic.com] the last one hit Europe 8,200 years ago, "ravaging Stone Age coastal communities as far south as Denmark" so... I guess they're due any day now?
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Ya, since Germany is so... prone to tsunamis
That's like pointing to an American dying in a car due to getting t-boned and saying that British driving cars are 100% safe because they sit on the other side of the car and thus wouldn't have a problem with a left side impact.
Germany too has a long history of problems in the nuclear industry, just none that escalated to major incidents. They too have a reactor population that was well and truly past end of life and has been limping on with extensions. Notice how Germany didn't shut down everything after C
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No, it's like saying that if there had been no tsunami, the ONE guy that died as a result of the Fukushima "disaster" wouldn't have died.
On a daily basis, hundreds of people die in Rush Hour accidents. But ONE death due to a tsunami, and it's "Nuclear Power is the DEBHIL!!!!"
Well,
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It was due to an understanding that the series of design flaws that lead to Fukushima were not unique to that site.
Like aviation, nuclear safety uses the Swiss cheese model. Individual slices of Swiss cheese have holes in them, but if you stack a bunch of them up the holes don't line up, and there is no direct line through all of them. In other words, even if one layer of safety features fails, another layer with different holes in it will save the day.
Problem is, now and then you find that the holes do lin
Sacrilege! (Score:2, Insightful)
Everyone knows that shutting down a zero-emissions gigawatt-class baseload powerplant in favor of natural gas peaker plants is the way to be green.
Just like everyone knows a society can gey rich and stay rich by making youtube videos about making YouTube videos.
And just like everyone knows that flipping houses is a bubble that will never pop, dollar bills can be printed ad infinitum without consequence, and if your business's name ends in a .com, there's no way investing in your boiler room operation could
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I kinda feel sorry for ol' Gerd. First he gets blackballed for insisting in remaining Putin's suppository, now he ain't even the greatest failure as a chancellor anymore.
Who is surprised by this news? (Score:2)
This is no shocker.
Germany has been increasing their use of natural gas for producing electricity, while natural gas is still used heavily for heating. The usual argument is that there's no electricity shortage so keeping the nuclear power plants open won't help. It does help if it means less natural gas burned for electricity.
I read somewhere that nuclear power plants that have been shutdown recently could be restarted in as little as 6 months. When a nuclear power plant is shutdown for decommissioning
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The situation in Japan: The first two reactors restarted in August and October 2015, with a further eight having restarted since. 16 reactors are currently in the process of restart approval. [world-nuclear.org]
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After the tsunami Japan didn't immediately decommission any nuclear power plants, it was a shutdown order to give time for a safety review. Those that didn't scram from the quake were kept running until they had coal and gas power to make up the difference. I recall several were brought back online relatively quickly, and about half the reactors deemed too old and small to make it worth a refit to the new safety standards. That's not half the generation capacity lost, more like one third as these were sm
Finally, Now, RESTART YOUR NUKE PROGRAM (Score:3, Insightful)
To clean up the world's energy, we need a lot more Nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, wind, and even solar energy.
And hopefully, the west re-thinks National Security and starts pushing to have solar on residential roof tops, along with distributed storage.
Ukraine has several 'utility solar' that is worthless since the grid is down. OTOH, those homes that have solar/batteries, also have the ability to power EVs, radios, lights, medical equipment, etc. Those are needed not just for a war/invasion (and a useless one at that), but also for when disasters strike.
Finally, if the west restarts our nuclear programs and sells/installs nuclear reactors into undeveloped nations, we can help them escape the nightmare that China is foisting on them: debt, combined with having to buy Chinese coal, which will make them accountable for CO2 down the road.
We need all nations to LOWER their CO2, not raise them.
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It looks like Germany has brought back some intelligent ppl
There's nothing intelligent about keeping ancient reactors operating well past their design life. Intelligent would be to finish shutting down and as you said, restart the nuclear program. Start building something modern.
Finally, if the west restarts our nuclear programs and sells/installs nuclear reactors into undeveloped nations
We have been. A lot of nuclear programs are underway in developing nations. India for example has 6 under construction, and 8 more in the planning stage.
We need all nations to LOWER their CO2, not raise them.
Germany has been doing that too.
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This is just a temporary measure to help with the acute price problems. These plants will still be closed once more renewable capacity comes online.
It takes a war to make existing nuclear look competitive. New nuclear with all the build costs and 20 year timeframe is still not the answer. Too expensive, too late. All it's good for is as a stopgap while renewables are added, and it's not even good at that.
Scare knee jerk reaction (Score:5, Interesting)
" Germany pledged to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011"
And how many tsunamis and powerful earthquakes does Germany experience? And why did they not shut down their nukes after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster?
I don't know if this was a PR move to get the public good feels or what, but it just smacks of a kneejerk reaction to a disaster that caused Japan's meltdown that could not happen in Germany
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It was simply an excuse for the anti-nuclear lot in power at the time including Merkel to get rid of some old nuke stations they didn't want to maintain any more. Merkel naively thought russian gas was a no cost (economically or politically) alternative. Turns out she was wrong about that along with a lot of other things too.
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And how many tsunamis and powerful earthquakes does Germany experience? And why did they not shut down their nukes after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster?
Why write two sentences which contradict each other? Your second one clearly shows that Tsunamis have nothing to do with nuclear risks.
If someone in your street gets shot and killed, you may be surprised, shocked a bit, but hey life carries on.
If multiple people in your street in completely separate incidents get shot and killed, a wise person would consider moving away from the high crime hellhole of a street they live in.
The nuclear industry has a history of incidents. Germany has old reactors, with exten
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The nuclear industry has a history of incidents.
So? All industries have a history of incidents.
Fake news? (Score:2)
There is nothing regarding that in German news at the moment.
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Nuclear isn't green. (Score:2)
Telegraph is not a credible source (Score:2)
At present this is fake news. The idea has been coined in political circles to modestly prolong the nuclear power plant fade-out date but no decision has been taken so far.
Whatever happens to the nuclear power plans, the main agenda of the government remains: phase in renewable energy on a massive industrial scale.
WSJ reported. (Score:3)
But from the picture that German media paints the coalition is still in disagreement over how to proceed.
There's no consensus yet, except perhaps that sucking Putin's dick for so long might not have been a good idea after all (only tangentially related to the nuclear power plant issue).
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That doesn't mean we should not phase out fossil fuels, in fact it means we should do it ASAP in a manner that might be inconvenient but not extreme. In other words, there is no reason to not be green when there's some prosperity. Obviously it's not worth it if people are going to starve/riot, but if we aren't facing that why not be green?
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
What's WRONG with subsidies and public services?
Economic Puritanism is boring. The French have nice things like nuclear power and high-speed trains (lovely trains) precisely because their government stands behind them. Sometimes, you need to move beyond individualism.
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The Chinese also understand this. They now have 80% of the world's high speed rail system, most of which has been built in the last decade. It's our interstate highway system on steroids. Not all routes are immediately profitable but they're fine with that. Is there any wonder why or how they are overtaking us as the next superpower.
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Re: What a surprise (Score:2)
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The advantages of scientific progress that come from the space programs repay their cost several times over.
Re: What a surprise (Score:2)
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No, they don't, but the manufacture every single component those companies are using. Your point being?
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There's nothing wrong with subsidies and public services. But we should promote technology that isn't a dead end and causes more headaches 30 years down the road.
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Nothing wrong in principal, the issue is that there are much cheaper options available and nuclear is basically pork.
Spending public money on services and infrastructure is good, but it has to be spent wisely. To hit our climate goals we need cheap energy (nuclear is at least 8x the cost of offshore win based purely on the strike price, and subsidies are on top of that), and we need it soon (EDF, the only people building new nuclear in Europe, are quoting 20 years to get a plant built, after the site has be
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I believe the American "cowboys" are going to space, not Europe. These people are looking for freedom and room to roam. Not a room in Rome.
I could see a kind of "Wild West" exploration of the moon. Maybe to Mars but that's going to be further out for some time. Once people get a hang of how the systems work in theory then there may be people trying to test the theories in practice. Some "cowboys" looking for a spot on the moon to claim. Or maybe "Sooners" is a better analogy, depending on how things p
Re: What a surprise (Score:2)
They are not going for the old world scenery, though it's a plus. They're going because they are fed up with the high crime, insane cost of living, and political instability that has plagued America in recent times. Usualy the destination is a place like France or Italy (the UK seems to be off the list).
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I find this difficult to believe. People don't generally relocate to places where they don't speak the language, not unless things are truly dire. Reading reports and seeing videos of immigrants from Africa and Asia in France causing troubles leads me to believe that there are many better places to go. If for some reason these Americans take places like Texas and Florida off the list then I'd think Canada, UK, Australia, or New Zealand rank higher. South America might even be preferable with good sized
Re: What a surprise (Score:2)
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American "cowboys" are not looking for freedom in the abstract, they are looking for the freedom to not care about their fellow citizens. It is the ultimate Me Statement. They have even nominated their favorite orange clown as their standard bearer. In this sense, they are not actually American.
Re: What a surprise (Score:2)
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The nuclear power wasn't. They could have had much better results with renewables. Solar has been viable since the seventies.
That's hugely debatable, not a fact. Solar is feasible now, but it is vastly cheaper than in the 1970s. Vastly. We also have much better control of power grids now, something required for heavy use of renewables. Even the power semicoductors used now for distributed power generation flat out didn't exist (and it's still improving, I reckon we'll have SiC IGBTs within the next 2 years,
Re: What a surprise (Score:3)
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
That's nice but it doesn't change other very real reasons on why France and Germany are reversing their policies on abandoning nuclear power. A big one being that they can't build enough wind and solar fast enough to make up for the electrical capacity lost from closed nuclear power plants. Another issue is land use. To replace a nuclear power plant energy (or power, same difference as it's just a matter of time) output would take 10, 100, or even 1000 times more land. That land has to come from somewhere. Fossil fuels have a similar energy (or power) density as nuclear for land use. Even at 100% efficiency solar power would take about four times as much land. That's assuming no future gains with nuclear power taking less land, like doing what Russia did and have floating nuclear power plants off the coast.
Is floating wind and solar power an option? Yes, it is. That's going to have costs, and not all of them can be measured in dollars. One that comes to mind is windmills interfere with weather and navigation radar. This is especially problematic as adversarial ships and aircraft can hide among them. Solar panels can look like water to birds. This means a risk for broken panels, and broken birds.
They may not like nuclear power but then they may not like how much land needs to be set aside for energy production either. If they import electricity from Africa by underwater cables, electricity presumably produced on land inside their deserts by wind and solar, then they traded reliance on one foreign nation that could pull the plug on them for another. Some of those nations might still have bad feelings over old wars, or not like the idea of foreigners getting electricity that they could be using for lights, trains, computers, and industries of all kinds.
There's costs to consider beyond dollars and Euros. Maybe they can be approximated by dollars and Euros in some way, but that cost is not likely to be stable.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Note though that Germany isn't saying it will build new nuclear plants. Those take 20+ years to come online. It's just using existing ones as a stopgap measure while renewables come online.
Germany and France have plenty of room for renewables. The North Sea is also a massive resource that is starting to supply the continent.
Your fear-mongering about windmills and weather/radar are nonsense. Also, they all have cameras on them so good luck "hiding" there. The cost is a small fraction of nuclear power too.
Re: What a surprise (Score:3)
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reasons on why France and Germany are reversing their policies on abandoning nuclear power
Just for completeness, France never had a policy of abandoning Nuclear. Current law places a cap 150 TWh/year for the installed nuclear power capacity; The reason for the cap was 1) force the larger electric company (EDF) to install new capacities through renewable energies and 2) force the decommission of the older (and more insecure) nuclear reactors when building new ones.
The nuclear energy is regulated (ARENH) and sold at fixed price to distributors, currently 42 €/MWh (price for 2012-2025); the di
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You can subsidize nuclear energy, or you can pay even more for the army you'll need to fight WWIII. Your call.
Re: What a surprise (Score:3)
Remember your apparent hatred of "subsidy" the next time you are driving on an interstate highway. This is exactly the kind of program that government should get behind - building infrastructure that is too costly or not profit-generating, thus it wouldn't ever get built otherwise.
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Except the free market actually poured money into Putin's war chest via cheap Russian gas.
Perhaps you should stop relying on the free marked for making sensible decisions with long term strategy in mind, especially with respect to externalised costs.
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Prices for delivering energy to the grid swing wildly. When solar and wind run at full tilt, the price drops close to
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And the taxpayer pays for global warming in the guise of increased natural disasters that the government must pay to mitigate. So you can either subsidize nuclear or you can subsidize natural disasters.
Re: What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you are going to need to show your work on rooftop solar producing more CO2 than nuclear, when building a nuclear plant is hundreds of tons of concrete being mixed, poured, cured; hundreds of tons of steel being smelted, all of it being transported to that site and constructed using equipment burning oil, welded together with energy probably coming from coal or oil, etc. And that's before mining the uranium, which isn't exactly clean either.
Nuclear generates a shed load more power, so you might be right on the balance, but I'd love to see the math that shows this claim as not being false.
Re: What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear is about as green as you can get. Gigawatt-class, nearly all-season, all-weather, round-the-clock with no emissions other than hot air and warm water.
And before you start bleating about nuclear waste, remember to quantify your statements. How much nuclear waste, versus how much toxic chemicals and forever plastics and whatever else y'all have a hard-on about right now that comes from manufacturing and operating solar and wind power, batteries, and everything else that has a finite design life and must be remanufactured every 10 to 20 years.
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There is no "silver bullet" solution.
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Not all weather. nuclear plants are being closed or put offline (France) because the water feed for cooling is too hot, or in the case of Texas - frozen.
These are design issues, not insurmountable problems.
Maintenance is also time heavy, they can be closed for months at a time depending on the maintenance required.
This is already a largely resolved issue. Very rarely does the entire nuclear plant cease operation. They rebalance capacity to the remaining reactors and they perform this maintenance during periods when power is least needed. In the rare case that the entire plant would need to go offline, then solar and wind can come in as a backup. There's no need for a dichotomy here.
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Not really. Nuclear CO2 emissions vary depending on the source of fuel, but even in the best case they are higher than wind. The plants themselves are quite disruptive too, altering large areas of land and killing about twice as many birds per year as onshore wind turbines do.
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before you start bleating about nuclear waste
...which is your job, apparently...
remember to quantify your statements
...which you think is your job, apparently...
How much nuclear waste, versus how much toxic chemicals and forever plastics and whatever else y'all have a hard-on about right now that comes from manufacturing and operating solar and wind power
You little FUD bitch, there's more of all of that shit from making a nuclear plant than from anything else. For example, they use teflon insulation on some of the wiring. You don't need that for solar or wind.
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How far from the nearest nuclear plant do you reside, brave man?
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
These groups were taken over by ppl on the far left extremists and seem to only care that the WEST not have Nuclear power. They seem to not care 1 whit about Russia/China using and SELLING their nuclear power.
And this is after Chernobyl, as well as what France had to say about China when helping them with building a nuclear reactor. China is going to have future issues, but we need to make sure that undeveloped nations do not follow that path. We need them to have high quality reactors AND high quality programs. Otherwise, yes, we will see more Chernobyls.
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Otherwise, yes, we will see more Chernobyls.
Chernobyl was an insane design bourne out of good old Soviet era cost cutting, military interests and a brazen lack of interest in safety especially for a plant outside Mother Russia.
They wanted to be able to cook plutonium for nuclear weapons cheap and fast while using the cheapest Uranium they could get away with (a minimal 2x enrichment or so, much easier than higher enrichment levels). So they just YOLO'd it and went with a design with not just a positive void
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Your ignorance about what "green" implies is fascinating...
Did you know that Nuclear power is less contaminant than Wind + Solar when you take into account what you ask of an energy central, which is the ratio of waste/energy produced?
Airplaines are the safest traveling way, wether you like it or not.
Mercury is the safest antiseptic (and diuretic), wether you like it or not.
Nuceal centrals are the cleanest energy source, wether you like it or not.
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Ukraine had a kind of insanely badly designed Nuclear power plant (not really theirs but the point stands) which is kind of famous for being bad. How many people died there and what was the cost to the Ukraine people? How many people died there and what was the cost to the Ukraine people of gas?
That was never a good solution, and now Germany is paying for it, literally
Barely. Germany's economy boomed for years on cheap gas. Their naivety cannot be excused post 2014. They are paying a bit, but they've manage
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The nuclear plants still running in Germany are still relatively new, so there is no real safety issue from keeping them running (they need to be inspected though).
But: There was no shift to gas for electricity production: 2010: 89 TWh, 2021: 91 TWh from gas. While gas is important to for balancing out the grid when adding renewables, this did not lead to an increase of gas use in Germany. Gas use in the power sector is not at all the reason Germany is dependent on Russian gas. Germany needs a lot of gas f
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The nuclear plants still running in Germany are still relatively new, so there is no real safety issue from keeping them running (they need to be inspected though).
They put off an inspection due in 2019 because they were planning to shut them down this year. Not only do they have to inspect them, but they won't solve the problem at all — they can replace only 1% of Germany's heating needs, because you can't plug in a gas furnace.
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The idea was that Russia's economy would become dependent on Europe buying gas. Not just gas either, Russian aviation is dependent on Europe for parts like engines and flight control systems.
With Russia dependent on Europe, it would make a war unthinkable. At least that was the plan, but Putin's stupidity was underestimated.
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With Russia dependent on Europe, it would make a war unthinkable. At least that was the plan, but Putin's stupidity was underestimated.
Only up to a point. It became clear how stupid he was in 2014. After that, people know how stupid he was, they just didn't care.
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While nuclear produces more CO2 emissions than coal and gas it is still of not a good solution because it is far too costly. Every cent invested in nuclear is not invested in more cost effective solutions.
Germany was wrong not to shut down coal first, but it definitely did not "switch to gas" after shutting down nuclear plants. This is a myth. It produced 88.8 TWh electricity from gas in 2010 and 89.7 TWh in 2021. So this did not change.
Also I would say it is a bit hypocritical to complain (correctly) about
Re: Stupid country (Score:2, Insightful)
Sometimes they shove their heads deeper in. See, for instance, covid freaks still freaking away about unmasked toddlers.
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covid freaks still freaking away about unmasked toddlers.
I like to think of them as cute little disease vectors. :^)
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I'd omit the cute and add a noisy.
Re: That's it! (Score:3, Funny)
Sugar highs feel great.
Until the sun isn't shining, the wind isn't blowing, and it's -5F outside. Then you'll wish you hadn't cheaped out on the intermittent shit and paid for the reliability you actually need versus the painted rust honest bob sold you on.
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I assume this is why France now has historical record prices, imports a huge amount of electricity (from Germany and others), and nationalizing their nuclear industry before it goes bankrupt, while Germany produces and exports electricity more or less as usual.
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Great. We'll unplug your computer first.
No need to unplug shit. (Score:2)
Calm down, drama queen. (Score:2)
I wasn't saying immediately. It's the bitch-ass fossil fuel mob saying they need to be accommodated immediately, despite the plain death toll to their business models.
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He's not a monster. Just not too bright.
Re:Literal Death To All (Score:5, Informative)
Between 150,000 and about half a million bird deaths each year in the USA can actually be attributed to wind farms.
Consider that skyscrapers kill anywhere from 100 to 500 million birds every year. This is a thousand times more than what windfarms do.
And cats in the USA kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year.
The objective reasons not to use wind power are more strongly tied to its reliability than to any significant danger to bird life beyond what otherwise exists.
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Household cats don't kill eagles and condors, windmills do. Eagles kill house cats.
I do wish this bullshit statistic about house cats killing birds would die. It doesn't serve your ends to promote wind power because once people figure out the distinction between common song birds and large birds listed as threatened or endangered then it makes you look like a fool or a liar.
If windmills were not a threat to these birds then there would not need to be exceptions in the rules for how birds killed by windmi
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The objective reasons not to use wind power are more strongly tied to its reliability
Which is excellent when you have enough wind power installed, because the wind is always blowing somewhere, and it is highly predictable. Making use of it may require grid improvements, but installing nuclear power always does because it represents so much generation in one location, so that's a wash. Thanks for supporting wind power.
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The ultimate White Colonizer move is to deny third world countries stable and plentiful power system.
Can you do us a favour? Please shut up and stop making pro nuclear people sound like raging fucking morons obsessed with a culture war.
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stop making pro nuclear people sound like raging fucking morons obsessed with a culture war.
For once he actually provides a useful service. Nuclear won't solve our problems, period. Too expensive, displacing cheaper solutions which achieve more; too slow, we don't have time to wait. Totally unnecessary, we don't need more base load, we need more load-following power. There's no sensible, logical, reality-based argument for nuclear power. What else can you say about the people who support it?
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Who is this "we" and "our" to whom you refer?
Where precisely can we put all the renewable power collection equipment in my country that will collect enough power? Do the math. David Mackay did and concluded that there is just not enough renewable energy for the UK to become self sufficient. So the choice is import the difference from elsewhere or also invest in nuclear power.
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Where precisely can we put all the renewable power collection equipment in my country that will collect enough power?
Offshore. But even if that's not enough...
David Mackay did and concluded that there is just not enough renewable energy for the UK to become self sufficient.
...that's a stupid fucking goal. It's literally impossible for the UK to be self-sufficient in an industrialized world. You literally cannot get enough of things to do that... of pretty much anything, actually. Above literally any level but a fully agrarian society, the UK is literally incapable of meeting its own needs.
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Great idea. Now please tell us a way we could do that.
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Is physically possible as many countries demonstrate. It simply needs the political will which is sadly lacking in europe at the moment as it genuflects in front of the ECHR.
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Europe has the same problem as every country: Too few people actually willing to do some work. And too many to just cancel all social programs without causing a problem.
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Sadly when it comes to mass immigration reality isn't something the mods on here are particularly familiar with. Probably spoilt middle class types with little experience of it or its effects.
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The war can stop five minutes after Putin picks up a telephone.
Or after someone does what's necessary and puts a bullet through his skull.
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Fuck off Russian Troll. This is a war of Putin's making, no one else.