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…
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?
they’re turning their coal power plants back on after shutting down their nuclear power plants. oh, and planning on converting existing natural gas pipelines to carry hydrogen instead… likely generated by natural gas.
Sure… they turn up coal power to result in the lowest coal use ever.
Just like they shut down reactors that produced laughable 2,6% of all electricity that year, yet those reactors (ones that were replaced by renewables even) could have single-handedly reduced their emissions by massive amounts.
Just like they never actually used more than a few percent of gas in electricity production (because they only use gas as short-time peak burners to compensate supply/demand spikes and that’s really expensive even when gas was cheap) but somehow were so completely dependent on gas to not sit in the dark that they started to burn even more coal… again while actually massively reducing coal.
I don’t know if it’s magic or advanced quantum mechanics allowing them to do the polar opposite of the popular narratives every single time…
…or you are just brain-washed to believe every lie about Germany again and again. Hmm… No, that sounds unrealistic. It’s probalby the magic thing.
Natural gas is a byproduct of gasoline refining, so I’d rather see it converted to hydrogen than have it get burned, whether for use or disposal.
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Well not a bad idea tbh, as most state owned and controlled companies tend to go belly up.
China still is the ONLY country in the world to have met the super meager Paris Climate Accord goals.
China has absolutely not met the Paris accord goals. Check climate action tracker for a good breakdown of countries policies and actions and the projection it puts them on. No country is anyway close.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/08/climate/cop27-emissions-country-compare.html
New York times reported China is ahead of pledges
Fair enough if we’re going just on pledges on total emissions change by 2030 than China and many other countries like India, Sweden, Denmark and Morocco are in line for the pledges taken. This is just a component of the Paris Accords the main pledge was to take action to limit warming well under 2 degrees. No countries action or policies are in line to meet that pledge. That can be seen in the article you linked showing how far off all four emitters are to 1.5.
Climate action tracker and the CCPI they put out are the best sources for accurately tracking countries actions. China and pretty much all other countries fall down on their net zero targets rooted in fiction and missing NDC targets.
… did you link the correct article? It seems quite critical of China’s emissions?
None of the world’s biggest emitters – China, the United States, the European Union and India – have reduced their emissions enough to meet the Paris Agreement goals.
Over the past two decades, China’s emissions have surged as the country has developed economically at a breakneck pace. Mainly because of its reliance on coal, one of the highest-emitting fuels, China now accounts for almost a third of all human-caused greenhouse gases — more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined.
Granted, the article says that China’s emissions are projected to peak in 2025, but that still means emissions are estimated to increase every year for another 3 years. They have not (yet) actually reduced their annual emissions, let alone achieved anything close to net-zero.
According to projections from Climate Action Tracker and other monitoring organizations, China’s emissions are nearing their peak, years ahead of when China’s government had pledged to reach that goal. Analyses show China’s rate of emissions neither growing nor declining from now until 2025, before gradually dropping off. China’s peak will occur at a far lower per capita emissions level than countries like the United States.
The goal that China has beaten, it would seem, is their own internal peak date goal. It’s good that they set and kept a goal, but keeping an internal goal is not the same thing as keeping the Paris Accord goals. The Paris Accord represents the bare minimum for avoiding a climate catastrophe and should continue to be the primary bar which we measure countries against.
They literally have a graph showing their paris accord goal as of now, where they as of now, and a 1.5c goal. They and India are ahead.
Also
China’s emissions are nearing their peak, years ahead of when China’s government had pledged to reach that goal.
Every country has different pledge responsibilities it would be drastically unfair to ask more of developing countries to reduce at the same rate as non, especially taking into account the looting the west has done and the offshored emissions on their behalf.
I’m not anti-China. I’m just pro-clarity.
When someone says “China has absolutely not met the Paris accord goals” and you respond “New York times reported China is ahead of pledges”, it creates the impression that you are correcting the former statement with a contradictory source. The source is not actually contradictory, however, because it explicitly affirms the original point.
They literally have a graph showing their paris accord goal as of now, where they as of now, and a 1.5c goal. They and India are ahead.
That is excellent. I’m very pleased to hear this. Perhaps you could share that graph next time instead?
EDIT: Content warning for the next reply in this comment chain: it contains a prank image featuring pig genitalia and feces. If you’re on desktop, the image is hidden within a collapsed spoiler toggle that you can choose to expand if curious. If you’re on mobile, please know that spoiler tags are not well supported in most apps yet, so this is your opportunity to stop scrolling if you happen to have issues with the described content.
It’s in the article.
spoiler
How is your reading comprehension so poor?
This graph, correct?
It doesn’t seem much closer to the blue Paris Accord goal compared with any of the other graphs in the same article, as far as I can tell.
As for India, I don’t see how beating a goal of **+**25% emissions with +20% is any cause for celebration. I actually agree with you and the article when you say that they don’t need to be held to the same standard as fully developed economies, but in that case we probably shouldn’t be talking about them at all when it comes to meeting emissions reduction goals.
Hopefully they wake up to reality and follow Sweden’s approach
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
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.
It’s actually the worst time to get started on nuclear. Costs keep going up. There’s a reason why countries overwhelmingly prefer to invest in renewables over nuclear. This includes nuclear companies. EDF is one of the largest investors in renewables, and it’s actually the profitable side of the business. It’s going to be the taxpayer that’s going to pay for nuclear, and they’re not going to get their money’s worth, as opposed to renewables.
This just in, when you arbitrarily raise the barrier of entry to a market, the price goes up.
You can’t go cheap on nuclear. Otherwise you’re looking at a myriad of political corruption and safety concerns, which in part will cost you a government, where you’ll eventually have to start all over again. Or you could just invest in renewables. Like what China is overwhelmingly doing.
But that’s excactly not was it happening. Keeping the remaining reactors alive (they provided ~2,6% of the generated electricity btw…) just for the sake of keeping them would have slowed down renewables (as those old reactors are definitely not fit to adapt to fluctuations well) and would also have bound a lot of money then missing for renewables and infra-structure (why upgrade the grid to better renewable fluctuations when the reactors can’t anyway).
So they actually start right now and massively so to build up renewables and the matching infra-structure. Unlike countries with alleged nuclear plans, that all still plan to start building soon™ and in most cases not even close to the actual required numbers for the projected demand in two decades+. Because completely decarbonising transport, industry and heating means a massive increase in electricity demand as we basically shift all primary energy demand over to electricity. Yes, in some cases electrity will be more efficient and will save some energy. But we are still talking about all primary energy, with electricity today often only making up 20-25% of the primary energy demand in most countries today.
PS: But yes, if you want to build nuclear. Start today. But do it on a scale that you will be actually able to cover the minimal required base load of your projected electricity demand in 2050+… Fun fact: No country actually does. They all just pretend and actually sit the problem out for someone else by loudly planning nuclear but not in amounts that make sense mathematically. France is basically the only country with a somewhat reasonable plan. When they scrap the “8 optional reactors” bullshit and build the bull set of 14. That’s their required baseload. And they will need to keep their aging fleet functional until the majority of them are build. They will also not be trivial.
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?
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?!
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?
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.
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.
Awww, poor German people. Never learned to think for themselves. Just learned how to follow orders.
You don’t realize how incredible funny it (or sad… depned 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-factula 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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=07w9K2XR3f0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Hey, the FDP has the most ambitious climate policies of all parties! At least so they said.
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.
Luckily we will get rid of coal soon.
I hope so…
getting rid of nuclear power for russian gas was always a bad idea and this is why
Hey, Schroeder got paid so it also wasn’t totally bad idea.
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.
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Electricity could be used for heating (via heat pumps) if Germany had an abundance of clean electricity in the winter.
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
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.
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.
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.
maybe hydrogen
Definitely hydrogen. We need, as in require, it for various things form steel smelting to chemical feedstock, either hydrolysed on-shore or brought in via ammonia tankers, in the country it’s going to be transported via pipelines (part of the network already are getting switched over from natural gas… fun fact Germany’s network started out as a hydrogen network), and those pipelines can store three months of total energy storage (not just electricity). That’s not even including dedicated storage, that’s just high operating pressure vs. low operating pressure. Fraunhofer thinks it’s the best idea since bottled beer.
Oh yes, no argument there. We’re already using absolutely huge amounts of hydrogen that are mostly made from fossil fuels right now. Worldwide hydrogen production is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire country of Germany. We’ll have to turn that into green hydrogen and use a ton of renewable energy for that. If we make use of surplus wind and solar, it will help a lot with stabilizing the grid.
What I was thinking of was the idea of producing hydrogen through electrolysis, storing it and later turning it back into electricity through fuel cells. And I’m not sure if that will ever be cheaper and more efficient than newer and cheaper battery technologies like sodium ion or redox flow batteries.
Cheaper for everyday (and everyseason) operation probably no, but it’s still valuable backup capacity. Differently put you want to subsidise turning hydrogen into electricity just enough that it’s there when you really need it, maybe a task for the network operators. It’s already now the case that gas plants get bought by network operators because they can’t run often enough to turn even half a profit but the network still needs them for stability, and turning natural gas plants into hydrogen plants is nearly trivial (need to exchange burner nozzles, basically, unless a complete idiot designed the plant).
Now, 50 years down the line all those gas plants might be out of commission and we’ll have fusion but in the mean time, yep there’s going to be at least the capacity to turn hydrogen into electricity.
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.
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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).
And if you tell that lie annother million times it will become true.
Really! you just need to nelieve real hard in ti and then reality will adapt and the propaganda hammered into your head will finally become true.
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.
If you’re asking where stuff /could/ come from, why couldn’t we just build renewables. For Germany at least, the ship has sailed anyways. It is not currently legislatively and practically possible to build out the required energy infrastructure with nuclear to phase out gas in a timeframe that makes sense. With the beaureaucracy and everything, it’ll be at least a decade before even the first power plant would be connected to the grid.
“Recommendations” are useless when line must always go up.
Shit I had hoped we could leave the nuclear stans over at reddit.
What’s wrong with nuclear?
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.
I mean, in theory, coal burning could be made clean. Capture the carbon out of the exhaust, collect it into a solid block, bury it, done. Problem is the power plants will only pretend to do this, and not actually do it.
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.
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.
What’s your proposed solution for the energy storage problem?
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?
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.
Surely the next time they want to get rid of waste they’ll do better! Pinkie promise!
I have one axiomatic argument I stand by, although I recognize both pros and cons.
We’ve missed our targets and deadlines and climate change is happening faster-than-expected. Infrastructure is being brutalized by weather extremes. I believe it is reasonable to assume that many regions will decomplexify as a result of the changing environment reducing the carrying capacity and energy economy. Nuclear power plants are some of the most complex technology we have - even the supply chains and maintenance are extremely complicated. When we currently plan for these installations, it is with the assumption that society will be carrying on as usual. They would appear much riskier if we had to take into account situations where resources and/or personnel may be unavailable. Those situations will be almost inevitable for some regions, but determining where and how stability will collapse is still impossible to predict.
Where there are other solutions available (including degrowth), I would first support those.
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.
That’s going to happen anyway.
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.
Your horrid omnicidal wish will be
I have no such thing.
Why are you here, just to drop in on conversations and harass people?
If you want degrowth, you want to see billions dead, because that is what degrowth means.
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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.
It’s almost as if that’s why the gold standard is a nuclear baseline with renewable to meet demand spikes.
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.
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.
Man, the existence of batteries is going to blow your mind
Edit: Just realized I think you missed the main point. You want a (functionally) 100% reliable baseline to meet your energy needs. That’s why you don’t use renewables, at the moment anyway. You want as much renewable as possible on top of that.
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.
Oh good, biomass. Because there aren’t enough starving people in the world already.
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.
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%).
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?
Against it, not hostile. That’s a difference.
They even agreed to extend the shutdown date last year. Not exactly hostile behavior.
I wonder why your username is AggressivelyPassive. More like AggressivelyAggressive ha.
Dissent is extremely aggressive, yes.
How dare I not having the same opinion as you?
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.
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.
Nein!
Doch!
Ohh…
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
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.
The UBA is truly one of the funnier institutions. It’s a federal agency tasked with suggesting and studying how to cut emissions, so they propose goals for legislation, none of which ever have been listened to even slightly. It’s basically a welfare program and I don’t even mean that derogatory.
