With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
It’s a cheap, non intermittent, easily scalable, and highly available source of energy compatible with existing infrastructure. When the choice becomes rolling electricity blackouts/shutting down factories, or coal powered electricity due to extremely poor planning for the future, coal will win every time. I wish we just started getting renewables running decades ago. Most of the limited electricity in South Africa is produced from coal power plants or diesel generators.
I’m typing this during a rolling electricity blackout. Really not looking forward to my cold shower in the next few minutes
Why “going back to it” have we ever stopped?
I was going to say, coal remains around 1/3 of our electric generation worldwide (as of 2022): https://www.statista.com/statistics/269811/world-electricity-production-by-energy-source/
Coal can’t be reused, created, or otherwise obtained outside of mining. Until we remove our dependency on coal, mining will continue.
No. Among other things it remains the linchpin of energy security for industrial countries like China and Germany that lack adequate domestic oil or natural gas reserves to power their economies with those.
Germany had plenty of nuclear energy but decided they wanted to shut them all down. Now they have to use coal and LNG.
Yes. And even before the Russia mess they were going to replace nuclear with LNG, which is still pretty bad.
While in hindsight not all the decisions of the German energy policies seem right and it would have been better to keep the nuclear power plants operating for a few years, there was never the plan to replace nuclear with coal. All of the nuclear power generation has been replaced by wind and solar power generation. In fact, the plan was to phase out nuclear and replace the remaining coal generation with natural gas power plants. This definitely got more difficult in the time of LNG. The plan in any case is to phase out coal as well and with 56% renewable generation in 2023 Germany is on track to do so.
If only 56% is renewable, what exactly was nuclear replaced with, if not fossil fuels?
I hope this is a serious question, obviously this depends on your baseline. In 2013 Germany had a 56% share of fossil fuels, 27% share of renewables and 17% share of nuclear power generation. In the current year, the shares are: 59% renewables, 39% fossil fuels and 2% nuclear power generation. So in the last ten years there has been a switch in generation from both nuclear and fossil fuels to renewable generation. Could it have been better in the wake of the looming crisis of both climate and energy? Yes, I think it would have been better to keep some newer nuclear power plants running. But Cpt. Hindsight always has it easier.
In the long run every successful economy will generate its major share of electricity from renewables. Some countries will choose to generate a part with nuclear, others will choose to use a mix of hydrogen, batteries etc. to complement renewables. We will see what works best.
Hydrogen isn’t a fuel source. It’s at best an energy storage technology, and you know you generate hydrogen? Electricity so if 56% of your electricity is renewables, then 44% is fossil fuels, and that is still WAY too much.
Why replace nuclear and not coal though, seems like a pretty stupid choice
While I agree that it would have been better to phase out coal before nuclear power plants, I also think that those decisions have to be viewed in context and are more nuanced than ‘pretty stupid’.
For example, as other in this thread pointed out, nuclear power plants can be pretty safe to operate IF there is a good culture of safety and protocols in place. Which of course need to be followed and supervised by a strong regulatory body. Two of nuclear power plants in Brunsbüttel and Krümmel were missing this kind of safety culture in the opinion of the regulatory body. They were both operated by Vattenfall. If you lose trust in the operator of such critical infrastructure, then a decision to shut down nuclear power plants has to factor in all the arguments at hand.
That’s a fair point
When did they stop?
Obligatory: we didn’t stop.
There’s also good reasons to have a fistful of generation plants with coal or natural gas.
To put it simply, nuclear is clean, far cleaner than just about anything else we have. If you compare the waste product with the energy produced… It’s just not an argument that nuclear loses versus something like coal. Where coal puts out its waste mainly in the form of smoke, nuclear waste, like discarded nuclear power rods, are a physical and far more immediately dangerous thing. The coal waste kind of blends in, and lobbyists have been throwing around “clean coal” for a while… Although coal use has gotten a lot more efficient and produces less waste than before, it’s still far more than what nuclear could do. “Clean” coal is a myth, it’s just “less bad” coal, with good marketing.
Regardless, coal and natural gas fired plants can ramp up and down far quicker than nuclear possibly could. Where nuclear covers base demand and can usually scale up and down a bit to help with higher load times, to cover peak demand, coal and natural gas can fire up and produce power in a matter of minutes. With nuclear, they have to ramp up slowly to ensure the reaction doesn’t run away from them, and to ensure all the safety measures and safeguards are working as intended as the load increases. It’s just a fat more careful process.
The grid is hugely complex, and I’m simplifying significantly. But from the best of my understanding, nuclear can’t react fast enough to cover spontaneous demand. So either coal or natural gas needs to exist for the grid to work as well as it does.
Wind is unpredictable and solar usually isn’t helping during the hours where the grid would need help with the demand. The only viable option is with grid scale energy storage, which can hold the loads while the nuclear systems have a chance to ramp up.
There’s still far more coal fired plants in the world than we need for this task alone, so there’s still work to be done… But I suspect coal use will diminish, but not be eliminated from grid scale operation for a while.
Aren’t most base-load nuclear plants typically paired with an energy storage solution like a gravity battery to habdle burst loads?
To my knowledge, apart from very new battery-based systems, the most common energy storage used for grid scale applications is pumped hydro, and even that is pretty rare… Either you need geographic features that make it viable, which is relatively rare in proximity to all the geographic features you would need for a nuclear plant, or you need to build such structures which is insanely expensive.
The main issue with grid scale anything, is that until very recently, most energy companies have been living on insanely long timelines, far longer than most industries. Infrastructure, when built, almost always has multiple decades of lifespan if not longer. Most energy storage tech that’s old enough to be considered for the time that many of the nuclear were built, did not have multiple decade lifespans and would need full or at the least the majority of their working material replaced within a decade at best. For an industry where a new facility will last 50+ years, that’s not a good investment. The only long term solution that would last is pumped hydro. This is changing and new grid-scale storage tech is reaching a high level of development, aka, almost ready for large scale production.
Simply put, if you think about the technology that was available when these facilities would have been built, around 50-80 years ago for many, energy storage wasn’t something that people really thought about, you either had live delivery of energy (from generator to device in micro-seconds) or primary cell batteries, like alkaline. Without much in-between, and most of what was there wasn’t grid-scale, not even close.
Sure, there are newer reactors than that, but a remarkable number of nuclear energy facilities are many decades old, most of the viable grid scale energy storage tech has been developed in the past decade or so.
To be clear, nuclear plants usually have conventional generators, often diesel, but that energy isn’t for export (for sale to customers), it’s used to restart the pumps and power the facility for a cold start of the nuclear generation systems. And that’s about it. 50 years ago, you didn’t have viable energy storage for the grid, everything was generated as it was used, when the load increases, fire up more generation capacity. So base load was handled by plants that needed to run 24/7 like nuclear, since it’s difficult or impossible to turn them off, and they would ramp up when demand increased, and any gap would be filled by plants that can go from off to making energy in minutes, like coal and natural gas.
To summarize, with the exception of pumped hydro, nothing is capable of handling that much power for the grid. We’re not talking a few minutes of energy storage, this is more like an hour+ as reactors heat up and more turbines come up to speed. The only energy generation that can meet that demand that quickly is coal/gas-based plants and pumped hydro, with pumped hydro being so difficult to build, coal and gas are used. Of the gas-powered plants, natural gas is the most economically viable.
This is changing, but the infrastructure in use is usually significantly older than the technology you’re mentioning.
Actually I thought it’s maybe because our crazy “friend”, who recently decided to show how it never actually left from behind the red curtain, had no problem shelling multiple nuclear power plant sites. Just saying.
Over here (Australia) we never stopped. Our coal lobby is simply too influential with our government.
Because the ecofanatics focused on fighting nuclear power for 50 years instead of fighting fossile fuels.
Fast forward to now, renewable are not ready at all and they need fossile fuels anyway to provide steady energy. But geopolitics is making oil too expensive, so countries are mining coal again.
In brief, ecofanatics were stupid (and still are) and war in Ukraine.
Were they stupid or deliberately misled, propagandized and manipulated by the fossil fuel industry? Sure some of them were stupid, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.
I’m an eco-fanatic and I am extremely pro-nuclear.
Yeah but that wasn’t the case in previous decades. Environmentalists have protested just about every nuclear power plant opening for the last 60 years. It might even still happen if we bothered to open more plants.
While environmental concerns, primarily regarding nuclear waste management, are probably the more public face of nuclear opposition, it is the economic burdens that have shut down nuclear plants before they even produce waste, as is the case with a number of canceled nuclear projects around the US at least.
Ukraine war plays a big part of it
It’s never really stopped.
But from the actions of those in power it seems they’re just plowing through climate change and making money whilst they can. Imagine the decision is we’re fucked anyway so let’s get mine whilst I can and see if it helps me survive.
People will do everything that givesthem an advantage in anykind of way. If coal is an affordable resource to fulfill a need it will be mined and put to use.
You may change the view on a thing for a few persons, but never of all of them.
Same reasons we won’t solve the climate crisis, democracy and capitalism are not great at dealing with long term, side spread problems.
If you re-open a coal mine in a depressed community, you’ve earned a lot of votes while the people who were on the green side of things are diffused throughout the world.
Socialism into communism has been disapproval far worse from an environmental point of view. Well from nearly every metric.
Even with the best form of political and economic systems, people still will use every resource possible if it makes their life that much more comfortable.
I’m not saying democracy is a bad thing. But, it is important to understand flaws that are inherent to it. Long term problems are a particular weakness for democratic governments as there is almost no incentive to deal with them instead of short term “sugar high” projects.
I disagree with much of China’s strategy but the sort of moves being an autocracy allows enables it to simultaneously pursue a policy of economic growth while planning for the future. (You also get stuff lile the belt and road initiative, which was an incredibly ambitious program.)
Again, I am not saying China is better or democracy is bad. There are a BUNCH of huge flaws to autocratic governments like China’s. But, democracy is going to particularly struggle with these sorts of long term threats.
Countries like China can certainly enact unpopular opinion with little opposition. That can get policy thru that may be beneficia at times. You can see this with their recent energy policy. They are bringing online coal power production at a rapid rate. I can understand how that will help them from an economic standpoint. It is certainly something democratic countries would have a tough time implementing where as they can do this with little opposition.
Yup. That same ability to do things without public input also allows China to better multi task. So, while China is building more coal power capacity (much like America is doing with oil) China is also backing it up with an insane amount of renewable projects; China approved 106 GW of coal capacity in 2022 but for comparison has some 379 GW in solar currently under construction and 371 GW of wind power on track to be built by 2025 (which would double the world’s wind capacity.)
That ability to multi task is why they’ve been able to reduce air toxicity by a dramatic 40% in under ten years. While the coal is regrettable, parts of the infrastructure simply aren’t constructed for intermittent energy yet (same is true in America, transitioning the grid to be entirely renewable is going to be a Herculean task and there are almost no plans to do so there) so to keep the lights/factories on, coal is a cheap, quick stopgap to meet those needs while they build more renewable capacity than the rest of the world. The ability to over ride popular demands is also why you could easily see those plants being shut down before their natural life cycle.
Out of necessity probably. In Germany for example they’re turning off nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal because nuclear is dangerous apparently. However you still need to produce the power somehow to run the country. Not even the most hardcore climate activists want to sit in a dark, cold apartment with no power.
Germany is not replacing nuclear plants with coal. They are replacing them with renewables and the plans to phase out nuclear are 10 years, respecitvely 20 years old, but thanks to nuclear lobby meddling they went back on phasing them out and then back on going back again because of Fukushima. So because of pro nuclear we got less renewables and more coal than if we just had sticked to the initial plan in the first place.
They’re burning coal to produce the energy they otherwise would have done using nuclear so I don’t think there’s anything wrong about what I said. If you turn off a nuclear power plant you’re going to need to produce that energy by some other means. They’re not building new coal plants to replace nuclear but they’re continuing to use/reopen coal plants that shouldn’t have to be used anymore. Germany is the world’s 4th biggest coal consumer.
“Replacing” implies that there is usage of coal plants, that before weren’t used. And that is not the case. In the first half of 2023 the share of both lignite and normal coal went down by 21 and 23%, while the share of renewables increased.
So renewables took up the slack, not coal. If you want to say, that the nuclear plants could be replacing coal plants, that is a different argument, but that does not imply the reverse relationship.
At least 20 coal-fired power plants nationwide are being resurrected or extended past their closing dates to ensure Germany has enough energy to get through the winter.
While this all isn’t necessarily directly linked to the phasing out of nuclear energy and is more related to the war in Ukraine it still shows that Germany is continuing to use coal plants it didn’t intend to anymore.
Germany is firing up old coal plants, sparking fears climate goals will go up in smoke
Germany to reactivate coal power plants as Russia curbs gas flow
Energy crisis fuels coal comeback in Germany
Germany Reopens Coal Plants Because Of Reduced Russian Energy
Yes. And as you see these articles are from 9 month before the nuclear plants were phased out. But since Germany didnt start the war in Ukraine i don’t think it can be considered a failure of the German energy policies in general. And incidently, if it wasn’t for the resurgence of nuclear in the 2009 government, the original plan to expand renewables that was formulated with the decision to phase out nuclear power by the 2002 government, would have made it much easier for Germany to react to the Ukraine war.
It is always painted as if the debate and political alignments would make it coal vs. nuclear. But the reality of German politics and economic interests in politics is that nuclear and coal are both on the same side and acting against renewables. It is the existing fossil lobbies and energy companies heavily invested in fossils that are against renewables. For them it doesnt matter, if they can run a nuclear plant or a coal plant longer, as either is an otherwise stranded asset form them. The argument, that we could reduce the amount of coal plants this way was only coming up, when the general debate started to acknowledge climate change as a serious danger and mitigation as necessary, so around 2015-2018. But it is not a sincere interest of the pro nuclear factions in German politics.
the problem with nuclear power is the waste. no ody wants it, nobody can agree on a place to put it. also the amount of power germany got from nuclear before shutting down the last plants was verry low.
In Finland we place it in a deep tunnel dug into the bedrock where it will be put into capsules and buried in clay. The waste however is a big issue, there’s no denying that.
Yes, countries like Germany are turning to coal as a direct result of nuclear-phobia.
The US, with all its green initiatives and solar/wind incentives, is pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia. The US has been the top oil producer on whole the planet for the last 5-6 years. The problem is getting worse.
Fantastic. We’re doomed
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Sorry, this is just false info. Germany is not turning to coal as a result of your called nuclear phobia.
I will repeat my comment from another thread:
If you are able to read German or use a translator I can recommend this interview where the expert explains everything and goes into the the details.
Don’t repeat the stories of the far right and nuclear lobby. Nuclear will always be more expensive than renewables and nobody has solved the waste problem until today. France as a leading nuclear nation had severe problems to cool their plants during the summer due to, guess what, climate change. Building new nuclear power plants takes enormous amounts of money and 10-20years at least. Time that we don’t have at the moment.
The article you linked isn’t very convincing in my opinion. “We could shut down our nuclear reactors because France has plenty of nuclear reactors” doesn’t explain why the switch to coal would be an advantage. The article also admits that in the winter the carbon intensive coal plants would need to switch on to supply power (but that happened not to be necessary last time).
Nuclear is expensive but not inherently more so than coal. Plants have become more expensive because of the nuclear scare in the 80s and 90s, but they’re still cost effective today.
The anti nuclear propaganda from the left is as strong as the anti solar propaganda from the right. I think everyone sensible agrees that solar and wind energy are the future, but grid storage is ineffective to this day and electricity demand will only go up. The fact Germany is
constructing newreactivating decommissioned coal plants proves that.The best moment to start building a new nuclear power plant was ten years ago. The next best moment is right now. I don’t see why we should accept the carbon footprint and toxic, radioactive exhaust of coal plants, especially for how little electricity were getting out of them in exchange.
Germany has not build any new coal plants. At least not in the last five years.
Edit: Why are people down voting a factual statement? Go ahead and provide better info if you got it.
If hasn’t constructed any new ones, but it has reactivated plants that were previously shut down. I suppose that means you’re right, but it also means the coal plants that have been activated are using older environmental norms, so I’m not sure if that’s an improvement.
Hmm I think what you mean is that some coal plants have been put into active maintenance. IIRC this was rather a countermeasure in case of absence of gas supplies. They are not part of the regular energy market.
Anyway, I think there is not only one way forward. Countries like France choose to use a big portion of nuclear, Germany does not. And every way has its own challenges. What is important is that energy supply should be independent of oppressor states and moving into a direction of carbon neutrality.
There is no “nuclear lobby” stop making shit up. Nuclear isn’t profitable, that is why we don’t have it. If it’s not profitable, there will be no industry lobby pushing for it. The fact that it isn’t profitable shouldn’t matter. I care about the environment and if Capitalism can’t extract profit without destroying the environment (it can’t) then we need to stop evaluating infrastructure through a Capitalist lens.
Renewables are great until the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing.
And that’s more likely than enriched Uranium becoming unavailable or locally unobtainable?
If you haven’t noticed, the sun stops shining for several hours every day and how much the wind blows changes pseudo-randomly on a hourly basis. Are problems with uranium supply more common than that? Not to mention that uranium can be recycled.
As people pointed out in another thread, nuclear energy is NOT the future and also a really bad short term solution,so countries like Germany are going back to coal short term to make the transitions to renewables in the meantime.
It’s not a great solution, but without Nordstream, there’s really not much else more sensible to do right now, just to make the transition.
what makes nuclear energy a bad option?
A single new reactor takes decades to build and costs billions. Investing in solar, wind, the grid and storage instead will generate more energy, faster, and for less.
It’s not “instead of”.
You’re supposed to run nuclear along side renewables. Opposed to running fossile fuels alongside renewables. Either way, something has be running besides renewables.
Opposed to running fossile fuels alongside renewables.
But that’s literally what you’re gonna have to do for 20+ years if you decide to go both ways and also build new nuclear plants. Put all your budget into renewables at once and you instantly cut down on the fossil fuel you’d otherwise burn while waiting for your reactor to go online, all while you’re saving money from the cheap energy yield which you can reinvest into more renewables or storage R&D to eventually overcome the requirement to run something alongside it.
No 100% renewables is viable. You don’t need anything running beside it.
It’s just nuclear phobia.
It’s literally the second safest form of energy production we have only behind solar.
It’s literally safer than wind power.
Yeah there’s been a few disasters with older reactor designs or reactors that were put where they shouldn’t have been, but even with those it’s still incredibly safe.
- It takes 20 years to build
- nobody knows how much nuclear fuel will cost in 20 years
- you have to take out a big loan and make interest payments on it for maybe 30 years before you start making a profit
- if you don’t have enough water for cooling because of climate change, the plant must shut down
- if your neighbor decides to start a war against you, your nuclear plants become a liability, see Ukraine.
I think smaller, decentralized renewable energy is cheaper in the short and long run and has a much lower risk in case of accidents, natural Desasters or attacks.
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SMR (small modular reactors) are looking like they could become the next hip thing in nuclear power tech.
Basically a lot lower initial investment and offer a lot more flexibility.
The link has a lot of info on them
I really don’t see that as a good progression. We want to focus on renewables because that’s the most sustainable way to go. Why go back to nuclear again?
That said if you are saying that’s where the industry is moving even though that’s probably not the best approach, fair enough. My opinion has zero effect on the industry.
50+ years of fear from fossil fuel company propaganda.
“BuT thE WaSTe diSPoSaL PrObLEm”
Meanwhile coal:
“Oh that thing that’s more radioactive than nuclear waste? Yeah, just toss it in the air. Who cares”
I don’t necessarily agree, but the usual arguments against are cost, lead time, and waste.
Because renewable energy and nuclear energy require significant capital investment, which the private sector and governments in the age of ‘fiscal discipline’ are not willing to make.
Can we just… Cull all old people, start fresh? Make some new laws that aren’t based on ideologies from the year 1910?
Old people aren’t really the problem, capitalists are
I’m going to assume that you’re being facetious when you talk about “culling” them (otherwise that’s pretty concerning). many old people are annoying, many of them are downright hostile to any progress whatsoever, but they, and the viewpoints they hold, are the symptoms of a much larger problem.
Renewables (solar and wind) are actually the cheapest forms of electricity generation (see Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy report). This has been true since at least the 2016 version of the report, and it is true even when the cost of generation is not subsidized with government funding.
This is why Texas is investing so much in building new wind turbines, even though they’re not politically inclined toward “green energy” - the cost per MWh is lowest.
This is also affecting nuclear power projects. The cost of wind and solar has dropped to the point where building new nuclear power plants looks financially irresponsible.
yea but the report also mentions energy storage which is necessary for solar and wind because of its intermittent nature.
also cheaper electricity means potentially less profit. why would private sector want that?
electricity market must be destroyed and energy must be exclusively public sector
