Germany Pushes To Extend Lifespan of Three Nuclear Plants (reuters.com) 199
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has asked the economy, environment and finance ministries to lay the legal framework to keep the country's three nuclear power plants operational until as late as April 15, 2023, a letter seen by Reuters showed on Monday. Reuters reports: Germany had planned to complete a phase-out of nuclear power by the end of this year, but a collapse in energy supplies from Russia because of the war in Ukraine has prompted the government to keep two plants on standby. Lengthy disagreements within the ruling coalition government over the merits and drawbacks of nuclear energy delayed the implementation of a draft law to put the two plants on reserve beyond their planned phase-out at the end of this year.
As well as the Isar II and Neckarwestheim II plants already included in the draft law, Finance Minister Christian Lindner has been pushing to keep a third plant, Emsland, operational, which Economy Minister Robert Habeck -- whose Green Party is historically anti-nuclear -- agreed to. The three plants have 4,300 megawatts (MW) of power capacity, contributing 6% to Germany's electricity production this year. Scholz also requested that the ministries present an "ambitious" law to increase energy efficiency, and put into law an agreement to phase out coal by 2030.
As well as the Isar II and Neckarwestheim II plants already included in the draft law, Finance Minister Christian Lindner has been pushing to keep a third plant, Emsland, operational, which Economy Minister Robert Habeck -- whose Green Party is historically anti-nuclear -- agreed to. The three plants have 4,300 megawatts (MW) of power capacity, contributing 6% to Germany's electricity production this year. Scholz also requested that the ministries present an "ambitious" law to increase energy efficiency, and put into law an agreement to phase out coal by 2030.
What's the worst that could happen? (Score:2)
Time Portals? [wikipedia.org]
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Is nuclear perfect? No, it has serious (but manageable) waste issues.
Is it better than burning fossil fuels? Hell yes.
Sure , in a perfect world it would be renewables all the way but the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't shine at night and tidal power isn't much use for landlocked countries.
Its really time people dragged themselves out of the CND mindset. Thats yesterdays protest, climate change trumps a tiny amount of radioactivity which is actually less than em
Re:What's the worst that could happen? (Score:4, Insightful)
Time Portals? [wikipedia.org]
No, a flock of 3M-54 Kalibr. [wikipedia.org]. That, or corporate cost cutting on safety measures. Both are likely to irradiate most of Europe.
Shutting down those plants now would not prevent any future missiles from blowing radioactive debris everywhere. The shut down is going to make the radioactive material just disappear. Extending the life of the plant by a few months doesn't seem even a bit reckless. They aren't right on the edge of falling down.
Save some time and energy (Score:4, Insightful)
Just look up what you posted the last eight times a story about this specific topic has been on Slashdot, then copy and paste it here.
Re:Save some time and energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Summary of the opinion of the normal, reasonable people:
Greens need to get on board the fight against global warming and suck up nuclear power as part of the solution to that.
Re:Save some time and energy (Score:4, Insightful)
...Nuke fans need to get on board the fight against global warming and suck up the fact that nuclear power takes too long to build and is too expensive to be the solution.
Too long was never a valid excuse when spending years developing advanced jet fighters, and I doubt that reason will magically create the alternative power source. And too expensive? Uh huh. Time to tell Greed N. Corruption to sit the fuck down and don't expect a decade or two of red tape payouts this time around. Pretend it's a new football stadium and we'd have it operational by spring training.
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Jet fighters? That was okay because everyone else took years to develop them as well.
The build time has nothing to do with red tape. Look at the projects in the UK, all legal issues sorted out long ago, infrastructure in place because there are already nuclear plants at those locations and it's just expansion. Still takes 20 years.
We are in a climate emergency. We need to fix this, now. Not in 20 years time.
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Nukes are four times the cost of wind and take ten times as long to build.
In the 20 years it takes to build a nuke, we can have four times as much energy from wind for 18 years before the nuke produces its first kwh.
Re:Save some time and energy (Score:4, Insightful)
Always remember that the very first nuclear power plant took less than four years from "hmm, wonder if we can make this work" to fully operational.
The only reason it takes 20 years to build one now is the lawsuits that spring up whenever one is proposed.
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The only reason it takes 20 years to build one now is the lawsuits that spring up whenever one is proposed.
None of the delays at Hinkley, Vogtle, or Summer were caused by lawsuits.
Safety standards are more strict today. If you think that is a problem, please list which safety improvements should be rolled back.
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That is because the NRC is incentivized to prevent nuclear power.
So long as there is a single plant in existence in the US, they are justified to exist, but every additional plant increases the risk of them getting blamed for some sort of failure, so every time the cost of nuclear power starts to get competitive, they print up more safety regulations to keep them uncompetitive.
And every time the safety regulations change, any plant that is still being bult needs to get half torn down so that they can abide
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Wow, that's dishonest.
Don't you think the designs have changed a bit since the 1950s? Don't you think the newer designs, which are the only ones you can build because we know the "very first nuclear power plant" designs are woefully inadequate when it comes to safety? Not to mention, there's a bit of a scale difference between that first commercial nuclear energy plant at Calder Hall (60 MWe per unit, with 4 units built) and literally anything anyone would build today. Plus, the primary purpose was pluto
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Have you ever looked at those early nuclear reactors? The UK nearly had its own Chernobyl incident when the Windscale one caught fire.
There are no lawsuits over these European reactors. The ones in the UK are being built next to existing ones, all planning issues resolved long ago. They just take 20 years because they have to be built right, and the builders are used to doing a bodge job. Replacing materials is fine when it's just an ordinary building, not so much when it's a nuclear power plant.
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Always remember that the very first nuclear power plant took less than four years from "hmm, wonder if we can make this work" to fully operational.
The only reason it takes 20 years to build one now is the lawsuits that spring up whenever one is proposed.
Please be specific. Are you talking about EBR-1? Which produced less power than 1 large wind turbine? Which also suffered a meltdown at one point? Or were you thinking of one of the other early power plants with output measured in the single digit megawatts? If so, then the same basic math about how fast you could put up an equivalent renewable power plant relative to the nuclear plant still applies since you can build a 10 MW wind farm in a couple of months.
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The only "lawsuit" over Hinkley Point C was the European Union investigating if it was benefitting from state funding. In the EU governments are not allowed to give state support to their industries in a way that gives them a competitive advantage over other EU nations.
It didn't slow anything down, it was done in parallel with the other planning and was resolved in under a year. The reason for the investigation was that nobody wanted to built it, so the government had to bribe EDF and a Chinese investor to
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It's hardly just "looney lefties", no community wants a nuclear power plant in their back yard and pretty much everywhere one would ever be built is somebody's back yards. As long as the lawsuits are allowed nuclear plants will take decades to build.
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Look at the projects in the UK, all legal issues sorted out long ago, infrastructure in place because there are already nuclear plants at those locations, and it's just expansion. It still takes 20 years.
Indeed. Hinkley was a standard EPR design. It had all been preapproved. It still had massive delays and cost overruns.
The same thing happened in America at Vogtle and Summer. They were both built next to existing reactors. They were both standard Westinghouse AP1000 preapproved "cookie-cutter" designs. Yet they were both financial debacles. Summer was canceled and mothballed after squandering $3B.
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Well that's what happens when government views people as an expendable resource.
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Nobody is seriously planning to fix this right now. Not even in 20 years. Because replacing energy infrastructure takes tens of years. It is not proper to nuclear. Big fields of wind turbines also take tens of years to install. One of the problems we see in the western world is for example the lack of good blue collars that can work with concrete: That affects everything that uses concrete: hydroelectric dams, tidal wave plants, and also wind farms (they use 14 times the amount of concrete as nuclear plants
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Wind farms typically take 1-2 years to come on stream. The turbines are build on a production life and assembled on site.
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Large scale deployments, think country wide, take way more. Germany still have finished theirs.
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You are comparing the building of a single nuclear power station to deploying country-wide wind farms. Why?
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To give two large scale examples. even if i admit they are unequal. The average output of a nuclear plant, or a large hydroelectric dam is much higher than your average wind farm. My point is building gigawatt-scale energy production is never fast in the Western world.
Of course these examples have a flaw: some types of energy are dispatachable, others need to be paired with fossil fuels. But that is another point.
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Yes, it can take years to complete a large wind farm install.
No, you don't have to wait until the last turbine is installed to get any energy from the first one.
I'm not sure why you are trying to draw an equals sign between the construction time of a nuclear plant and a wind farm.
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...Nuke fans need to get on board the fight against global warming and suck up the fact that nuclear power takes too long to build and is too expensive to be the solution.
Too long was never a valid excuse when spending years developing advanced jet fighters,
Wow, this is one of the best whataboutisms I've seen. Usually there's at least a pretense of some connection, but your "whatabout military fighter jets, they take a long time to develop too!"... complete non sequitur.
Of course, the whole point of whataboutism is to change the subject... but one usually tries to hide that.
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You failed to make any points. It can take years to make a new jet fighter, because you already have a factory building current jet fighters, and a fleet of existing jet fighters that are already as good or better than what anyone else has.
We're trying to get rid of coal, gas, and oil here. We can't take 30 years to get that done while we fiddle-fuck around trying to perfect the next generation of overly complex and massively expensive nuclear plants, which still put us in the exact same place that nuclea
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Please feel free to ignore anything drinkypo says on the subject of nuclear power. The users only goal is to spread FUD on the subject through miss-information, outdated data, and false statement. The user currently knows nothing about the state of nuclear research only relying on old data that has been demonstrated to be false every time.
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When did you demonstrate what I said to be false even one time? Post a link.
Re:Save some time and energy (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuke fans need to get on board the fight against global warming and suck up the fact that nuclear power takes too long to build and is too expensive to be the solution.
No it isn't. France built their plants in 5-6 years in the 70s [wikipedia.org]. That we can't do it now somehow, despite immense progress in computing, sensors, material science, machining and everything else, is a direct result of policy choices that had been made due to the nuclear panic.
Ten-15 years ago nuclear was cheaper to build than renewables, but it still wasn't being built. If we did it back then, we wouldn't have to worry about grid CO2 right now.
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The plant you linked to is an old PWR type reactor, which proved to not be uneconomical. That's the main reason why they don't build them anymore. They are expensive to maintain, and their lifespan is limited by the fact that they use boric acid in the coolant loop. That stuff is corrosive.
The are now building EPR reactors. The first design didn't work very well, so EDF went back to the drawing board to try to fix it. Thus far every EPR built or started work on has been over budget and late, with no sign of
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Permits for Vogtle units 3 and 4 were applied for in 2006, building on a site next to two operational reactors. They just started the initial fuel load into unit 3 literally four days ago [wikipedia.org] to be followed by startup testing. Unit 4 still isn't there yet. They were supposed to start in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Instead, these projects drove Westinghouse into bankruptcy complete with an $8.3 billion dollar bailout courtesy of the taxpayers.
Something tells me that Southern Company and Westinghouse were
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Summary of the opinion of the normal, reasonable people who bothered to do 10 seconds of research:
Nuke fans need to get on board the fight against global warming and suck up the fact that nuclear power takes too long to build and is too expensive to be the solution.
Not relevant in this case as the plants are already there.
It is very late to be building new plants due to the lead time but since we don't even have a known lead time for alternatives (i.e., mass power storage to buffer renewables' variability) we have very little in the way of short- to medium-term options. Long term, perhaps we can come up with the mass storage solutions or some way to clean coal/oil/gas generation.
However, this situation is the result of wildly optimistic projections about what renewabl
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The existing plants are all reaching EOL. They can't be extended forever. The French ones are pressurised water reactors that use boric acid in the cooling loop, which corrodes everything. The reactor vessels themselves are showing cracks that cannot be repaired.
Replacing the reactors alone isn't practical. The new ones need different cooling systems, different control equipment, different containment building requirements. Many of those buildings are themselves worn out and in need of extensive renovation,
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Nuclear fans should invest their own money in it. Prove that it can be done as cheaply and as quickly as the alternatives. If SMRs are the key to success, they can put their money into those.
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That would be the thing. But also require full insurance, you know, like any power station or large industrial installation is required to have...
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Oh yes, of course they would have to get their own insurance. Haven't looked at the premium on a trillion dollar policy lately, but I'm guessing it's pretty high.
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We are talking about nuclear energy solving climate change. These plants are having their lives extended to help with the gas crisis, but they are at the end of their lives and the extension can't go on for much longer. The reactor vessels are cracking and safety had to be sacrificed even to get these extra few years.
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No matter how condescending you try to be, it doesn't change reality; you cannot run a nuclear reactor forever. The reactor vessel will become embrittled over time through constant exposure to neutron flux and it will rupture eventually, with really big problems to follow after that.
Keeping these three reactors running in the short term is the right move by Germany to solve a prompt energy problem. But it will not be a solution they can still use 20 years from now - they will need to be replaced and decom
Aaaand,,, (Score:2)
Sorry, I worked for a German Nuclear company (though I was IT) until we all pretty much got laid off. Your (my former company) knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima without any research was the stupidest thing you ever did. Don't worry, the US one upped you in 1996 with the Integral Fast Reactor (ya know, the one that burned nuclear waste as fuel, but was canceled because it created nuclear waste - IQ -20 Dems that did that - IQ -200 Republicans are promising they can control inflation statewide - when stupid mee
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It was hardly knee-jerk, Germany had been trying to phase out nuclear power since the late 90s. All Fukushima did was speed it up very slightly, and by slightly I mean 11 years later and those plants are still operating.
The writing was on the wall long ago. Anyone with half a brain could see that projections of 10 years and â10 billion to build a new nuclear plant was unrealistic, and sure enough here we are in 2022 with EDF having proven that the real timescale is 20 years and the real cost is at leas
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The federal reserve doesn't control inflation. They didn't control the economy shutting down and then roaring back to life. They don't control the world oil markets or the supply chains. Those, along with the sainted American people spending out the whazoo and American companies gouging because they could, are what drives inflation the U.S. There was a minor addition from the stimulus packages Congress passed, and there was a big addition from the Republican tax cuts of prior years. The ongoing deficit spen
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Why? Nuclear waste is simply not a problem. I'll lease some space in my back yard.
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there is still not even one final nuclear disposal site on this planet?
That isn't a big problem.
Our current solution is to store the waste on-site in cooling ponds and then move it to dry cask storage. We have enough capacity to continue that indefinitely.
We will need a longer-term solution eventually, but we can put it off for a century or two. In the meantime, the waste is becoming less radioactive, and our knowledge of robots, geology, and everything else is improving.
Now we know who took out Nord Stream. (Score:2)
Charles Montgomery Plantagenet Schicklgruber "Monty" Burns.
Its time we got over the anti nuclear nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Its not the 1980s any more.
Is nuclear perfect? No, it has serious (but manageable) waste issues.
Is it better than burning fossil fuels? Hell yes.
Sure , in a perfect world it would be renewables all the way but the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't shine at night and tidal power isn't much use for landlocked countries.
Its really time people dragged themselves out of the CND mindset. Thats yesterdays protest, climate change trumps a tiny amount of radioactivity which is actually less than emitted by unfiltered coal fired stations anyway.
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... in a perfect world it would be renewables all the way but the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't shine at night and tidal power isn't much use for landlocked countries...
Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ... since you are clearly unaware of it's existence.
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Wow, you're so insightful!
Do you know how much undersea connectors cost and how much current they can transport? Go read up on it.
The UK already has quite a number of them but its single digit percentage of the amount of power the country needs.
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It's got nothing to do with any of the things you mention. The two big problems with nuclear are
1. It's by far the most expensive form of generation.
2. It currently takes 20 years to build a new plant in Europe.
The usual response to this is "but SMRs will fix all that!" There are exactly two grid connected and operating SMRs in the world, one in China and one in Russia. Neither are in mass production, and the Russian one looks like a dead end as they haven't build any more.
After that the argument changes to
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HSR in California is simply a way to transfer government money to wealthy Dem donors who will pretend to create a high speed rail system while dragging their feet for years to keep the money flowing. It was never meant to actually build anything useful.
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In Europe wind farms are currently around 1-2 years from being approved. Most governments pre-approve a site, then auction off the rights to develop it. Lowest cost electricity wins.
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Indeed it is. You just need lots of over-capacity and a bit of demand shaping. Since wind is so much cheaper than every other source, in the region of 1/4th coal and 1/6th nuclear, and offshore the capacity factor is pretty decent, it's all doable.
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climate change
With you right until you mentioned climate change. You can dedicate all resources you want to building nuclear power right now. The first plant won't be online until after we missed our climate target.
Yeah absolutely build nuclear. It's a great idea. It just won't solve climate change. For that we need something we can build now, tomorrow, and in the next 5 years. Not something that we may be able to bring online sometime in the late 2030s.
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I don't think anyone claimed it would solve it. But fossil fuels will still be being burnt in the 2030s so even if nuclear doesn't come online until then it'll still help. Climate change isn't something that will come to an end in the next few decades, its an ongoing process.
Re:Its time we got over the anti nuclear nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
"You're wrong. The wind always blows somewhere,"
Under a blocking anti cyclone that could be 500 miles away which really isn't much help. Here in the UK we had a number of days in the recent heatwave wherethe amount of power generated by wind was 0%. Yes, zero.
"Solar is great in hot areas"
Fantastic. And what about northern europe or canada midwinter when you get about 8 hours of sunlight during the day yet need a lot of power for heating and lighting?
" the evening wind picks up"
What evening wind? Just because this works where you are doesn't mean it works in other parts of the world.
Re: Its time we got over the anti nuclear nonsense (Score:2)
Old world problems IMO
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The wind never stops in the North Sea.
The UK had zero days with no wind in the North Sea, in all of recorded history.
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You didn't answer anything about from hand waving generalitities that only apply in a small area. And putting "concerns" in quotes demonstrates you don't have a clue about the real issues.
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Re:Its time we got over the anti nuclear nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
You're wrong. The wind always blows somewhere, you just have to build your transmission line to it. Where this isn't feasible (islands far from the nearest continent), tidal power is, so wind and tidal complement each other nicely.
In a fantasy world, where you can say "look, the wind is blowing in Denmark but no in Germany, just transmit the energy. It's not blowing at all? Well then solar is mostly inversely correlated and it will cover the gap"
This immediately falls apart the moment you actually think about it. This would mean that each distinct location "North Sea", "Baltics", whatever, would need to have the capacity to cover all demand in Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium, etc., where it might not be windy at the time.
And then you'll still have a few days or a week where it's particularly windy or sunny. So we're talking about over-provisioning capacity by a factor of 10, and also magically having 100s of TWh of storage.
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Unfortunately faith based renewables evangelists like him don't like and can't deal with reality and the awkward facts it implies.
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A continent-wide network of wind farms wouldn't need to cover all demand, it would only need to fulfill that tiny portion of demand that's perfectly price-inelastic. If it can do this 24/7/365 then it's suitable as baseload power.
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And where does the rest of the demand come from? Solar at 3am? Nuclear? Oh wait, we can't have that. So whats your non nuclear , non fossil fuel alternative when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine?
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You're wrong. The wind always blows somewhere, you just have to build your transmission line to it. Where this isn't feasible (islands far from the nearest continent), tidal power is, so wind and tidal complement each other nicely.
Solar is great in hot areas because electrical demand from air conditioners mostly coincides with when PV panels produce the most electricity. We just need to point panels more to the west to catch the setting sun, and supercool in the late afternoon to tide us over until outdoor temperatures drop and the evening wind picks up.
The wind always blows somewhere? Big deal. It needs to blow enough to provide for demand. You don't get to drain Africa of power because the wind is slack in Australia.
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I agree, it needs a smart grid to keep supply and demand in check. Germany's mistake with wind power was not building a smart grid, but they're fixing that now.
Re:Its time we got over the anti nuclear nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
The wind always blows somewhere, you just have to build your transmission line to it.
OK, so we build continent wide grids. And than pray so that some crackpot does not blow it up as it happened to Nord Stream. And hope that the political situation does not change in some country between us and the place where wind blows. Hopefully that new populist (or worse a dictator) who got in power does not try to use our electricity supply as a leverage.
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That reminds me of how, during the Battle of Britain, some crackpot kept bombing the radar towers along England's coasts, but England would always fix and put them back into service in no time.
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The US has a national grid. Does the US worry about crackpots blowing parts of it up, or the political situation changing and some state deciding to cut everyone else off?
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"The fact nuclear is barely usable as base-load"
Wtf are you smoking? Its perfect as base load.
" The fact it is exceptionally unreliable, as the French are currently finding out?"
Drivel. The French have safely and reliably been using nuclear for 75 years.
" Your usual mode of operation: Lies, lies and more lies."
I suggest you get your CND office to give you a new script grandad. While you're at it drag yourself out of the last century.
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"The fact nuclear is barely usable as base-load"
Wtf are you smoking? Its perfect as base load.
A direct lie. Probably from incompetence.
" The fact it is exceptionally unreliable, as the French are currently finding out?"
Drivel. The French have safely and reliably been using nuclear for 75 years.
The French are currently unsure how to keep the lights on come winter because their oh so reliable nukes are down because of safety issues. You were saying?
" Your usual mode of operation: Lies, lies and more lies."
I suggest you get your CND office to give you a new script grandad. While you're at it drag yourself out of the last century.
Well, no bunch of lies by a nuclear asshole is complete without an AdHominem. Please note that I have no AdHominems in my statements, "liar", "asshole" and "scum" are merely accurate descriptions of people like you.
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"A direct lie. Probably from incompetence."
Well fill us in on why they're not then. Obviously the french must have been relying on something else since the 1950s that they've kept secret.
" oh so reliable nukes are down because of safety issues"
Its not safety issues, its standard maintenance that was stupidly put off during covid. All the ones requiring it were built at the same time hence requiring heavy maintenance at the same time.
"Well, no bunch of lies by a nuclear asshole is complete without an AdHomin
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The French have safely and reliably been using nuclear for 75 years.
Actually, France has had a bit of a nightmare this year with their nuke plants overheating.
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Certainly applies in his case.
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Nuclear is not "widely unpopular" in Germany:
https://www.energymonitor.ai/p... [energymonitor.ai]
Just because a bunch of people who don't have jobs decide to protest in the streets doesn't mean there's "widespread support" for something. Don't be fooled by vocal minorities.
Political easing. (Score:2)
This move is of little utility other than political easing to prepare for a return to research and funding in feasible transitory nuclear fission with modern mini-reactors should the need arise and a net positive ROI for nuke fission actually need possible with rising energy prices and the increase in usage of electricity.
This is not a complete u-turn and running Brockdorf and Co. any longer makes little sense other than the reason mentioned above.
Germans will continue to do the arithmetic on nuclear fissio
Check everything the literal russians spies did (Score:2)
Then revert it, pretty simple.
Just consider it as if you got a city bombarded by russian planes, you just rebuild the thing.
Reality hits Germany in the Face (Score:2)
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C'mon, let them have it, it's not like he was right that many times.
Re:Some chuds will be sorely disappointed. (Score:5, Insightful)
C'mon, let them have it, it's not like he was right that many times.
The sad thing about this is that the "they're all going to freeze"idiocy which is wrong takes away from the simple plain message that Trump gave which was right. Consistent with what Obama had said too, so it should also be a general chance for Americans to say "we were right" and demand more support with the fix. That message a) don't make more gas connections east and give money to Russia they will use it for bad things and b) you need to start spending on your military instead was exactly what Trump (and Obama) had been saying for years. German consumers will not freeze to death but billions and billions of Euros will be lost that didn't need to be and tens of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of thousands of Russians will die who didn't need to.
Germans (and France which was also trading lots with Russia) were mostly wrong for the "right" reasons - they had good intentions and wanted to help Russia develop into a peaceful nation. Good intentions don't 't take away from their responsibility to fix the consequences of their mistakes. The simple message to both German and France now should be something like "you funded Russia who are using that now to kill Ukrainians and now it's your duty to put in a much higher percentage of help to make that good". If you look at the tables of donations relative to GDP [statista.com] you will find that Germany to some extent and France to an even greater extent are lagging compared to many other European countries like Latvia, Norway and Poland. That's even after the fact that those countries were also the ones that prepared better for the problems with gas. In fact even by GDP they are lagging compared to the USA and Canada.
Re:Some chuds will be sorely disappointed. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Some chuds will be sorely disappointed. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't recall him warning about that but I didn't pay much attention to him anyways, however I do recall the two previous administrations warning Germany to stop depending on Russian energy, because they could see what Russia's endgame was from a mile away while Germany headed blissfully into the gulag. They laughed in our faces when those warnings were issued and kept building Nord Stream, and now they're the biggest sponsors of Adolph Putler's wehrmacht.
Don't forget your tannembaum on the way out.
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And all the lobotomies nodded in agreement that this can be the only reason why someone would be skeptical of a fuel for power and heat generation where a continuous and reliable supply is a necessity, because you have no control over most of the supply chain. It's like 101 logistics stuff, but nooo, it's because people are Russian hating racists (a kind of reductio ad hitlerum, w
Uranium vs Gas (Score:2)
And all the lobotomies nodded in agreement that this can be the only reason why someone would be skeptical of a fuel for power and heat generation where a continuous and reliable supply is a necessity, because you have no control over most of the supply chain. It's like 101 logistics stuff, but nooo, it's because people are Russian hating racists
...and it's probably the same lobotomites who are now busy pointing out that uranium also come from countries which aren't terribly stable.
And completely missing the point that one of the above tech absolutely relies on a few giant pipeline constantly pumping crazy amounts of gas in, because you need such insanely large amounts of it that you can't easily store enough reserves for a large country, and the other requires the equivalent of a couple tonnes of fuel enabling you store several years worth of rese
Re:Uranium vs Gas (Score:4, Insightful)
In some some cases even anti natural gas, like extraction of natural gas through hydraulic fracturing, which Germany could theoretically do to some degree, but has banned any commercial endeavor, only allowing a few research projects.
In that case I'm even in agreement and don't see much of a future there for natural gas use since Germany is densely populated and "NIMBY" - concerns are quite valid from my perspective in this case.
But I've never heard that many good arguments against nuclear other than "it's unnatural", "Fukushima", "nobody knows what will happen to nuclear waste disposal sites in 100 years". There could have been some interesting discussions, I suppose if people were willing to discuss.
But since you're usually dismissed very quickly, that rarely comes up outside of groups that aren't already into agreement, where you then of course run into the risk of ending up in an echo chamber, where the resulting dialogue is more of a circle jerk.
Re:Uranium vs Gas (Score:4, Interesting)
The good news is that the rebuttal to those lobotomites is "the number 3 and 4 exporters of uranium in the world are Canada and Australia, so yeah."
Canada alone exports almost double what Russia does. And Kazakhstan quadruples Canada. And the really good thing about uranium? You don't use cubic kilometers of it per day like you do with natgas so you can stock up a bit and outlast a multi-year conflict if necessary.
Re: (Score:2)
You may be the only sensible European left on Earth for all I know
By Spring a lot more of them will have magically appeared, and will be inviting Bill Gates to do a speaking tour explaining what he has been doing in Wyoming.
Re:Some chuds will be sorely disappointed. (Score:5, Informative)
Facts suck.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Try again?
Re:Some chuds will be sorely disappointed. (Score:4, Informative)
I think it's clear that I'm no fan of anything Trump did, but I have to give him this one. He was 100% right, and they sure look fucking stupid laughing now.
Re: Some chuds will be sorely disappointed. (Score:3)
That'd be a weird sales pitch on his part if it was about pitching US energy. I say that because he cited Poland's Baltic pipeline as the right step, even though that line supplies gas from Norway. Norway, among other things, is notable for not being a US state.
Re: (Score:2)
So the Bavarian assholes are the reason? Again?