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Yarasin t1_j4zitvy wrote

Reply to comment by EbonyOverIvory in Germany says it is no longer reliant on Russian energy by scot816

No. Sourcing nuclear fuels isn't clean and building NPPs is a behemoth undertaking. By the time you've approved and built a single plant (10+ years) you could've covered half the country in wind-turbines and hydro-plants, all of which are built and operated independently.

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EbonyOverIvory t1_j4zj8db wrote

Do. Fucking. Both.

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Yarasin t1_j4zjazg wrote

Nuclear and renewables do not synergize. Wasting money on nuclear energy is a dead-end. The ship has sailed long ago.

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EbonyOverIvory t1_j4zjni6 wrote

Wind and solar are not baseload. Unless we replace fossil fuels with hydro, geothermal, or biomass, we’ll still need to burn coal. Nuclear is the only viable large scale alternative to coal for baseload power. Wind and solar should absolutely be built, but they are not a total solution.

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mrspidey80 t1_j4znsys wrote

That's bullshit. Renewables supported by Power-To-X
storage will work just fine.

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EbonyOverIvory t1_j4zoyay wrote

Okay, so now you need to build not only vast quantities of wind and solar plants in your ten year plan, but also energy storage.

Bear in mind that in the past twenty years, in the US, renewables have gone from providing a negligible portion of the total grid power to providing 20%, and that includes hydro power, which provides about 8% of that total.

So you’re looking at building out 4 times (being generous) what was built in the last twenty years in the next ten, plus massive amounts of storage.

Now I don’t disagree with that as a goal, but it’s probably going to be quicker to divest coal power by building nuclear plants, which can actually be built in five years, not ten. Small modular reactors could potentially be built in an even shorter time frame.

The main barrier to building them is backlash from the public due to misinformation about risks and pollution. So like I said at the start of this, advocate for nuclear power. It needs people championing it if we’re going to get off coal before we all burn.

But by all means, advocate for renewables also.

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mrspidey80 t1_j4zz1ko wrote

You're forgetting that this kind of storage is basically gas tanks and pipes. We already have plenty of those. They just need to be repurposed and extended.

Also, we would not get a single new NPP up an running in 20 years, even if we tried.

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SaltyMudpuppy t1_j51v7sl wrote

Yea, this is nonsensical. The type of storage needed would be batteries, or something like molten salt. You can't store electricity in a fucking tank.

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Hexokinope t1_j4zomeb wrote

Excellent points. Germany (and Japan) are different though because they're sitting on many perfectly functional nuclear plants that used to supply much of their electricity until people freaked out about Fukushima and governments replaced it cheap coal and a mix of other fossil fuels which is obviously awful across the board for everything but cost. Germany and Japan could easily slash their emissions and gain more energy independence just by turning them back on. It hasn't been that long either, so they still have much of the needed expertise.

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Yarasin t1_j4zq8mm wrote

The anti-nuclear sentiment is much older than Fukushima, going back to the 80s and earlier. An official exit was already ratified in the late 90s/early 00s, but then Merkel and the CDU unilaterally decided to stop it due to lobbying from energy producers. It was only picked up again when Fukushima lit a fire under her ass and she caved to public pressure.

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Hexokinope t1_j4zr2wr wrote

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? Obviously there's a longer history behind the nuclear power opposition (the bit on the Sierra Club in Freakonomics ep 516 is quite interesting), but Fukushima was the trigger that caused the CDU to cave (and Japan's LDP to reverse course). More to the point, they can restart their reactors to both dramatically cut CO2 emissions and to reduce reliance on foreign fossil fuels with minimal lead time.

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