Germany is shutting down its last nuclear power plants
It boggles the mind.
For 35 years, the Emsland nuclear power plant in northwestern Germany has reliably provided millions of homes with electricity and many with well-paid jobs in what was once an agricultural backwater.
Now, it and the country’s two other remaining nuclear plants are being shut down. Germany long ago decided to phase out both fossil fuels and nuclear power over concerns that neither is a sustainable source of energy.
Nuclear power seems very “sustainable” to me – unless a country decides to shoot itself in the foot by not sustaining it.
More:
…[W]ith energy prices stubbornly high and climate change a growing concern, some in the country and abroad are branding the move reckless.
Ya think?
And the claim in bold seems like wishful thinking [emphasis mine], except for the fact that they will legislate it to make it so, no matter what the reality:
“Right now, existing nuclear plants are a critical source of carbon-free baseload energy,” said Peter Fox-Penner, previously a senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy and now with the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy. “Energy efficiency, wind, and solar energy will soon become dominant sources, but in the meantime, it is wisest to continue to run existing nuclear,” as long as safety is the priority, he said.
The anti-nuclear movement rests on exaggerations of accidents that have already happened, one of which occurred in a plant such as Chernombyl with ancient technology that is quite different from and far riskier than today’s plants in Germany:
“Nuclear power remains a risky technology, and in the end, the risks can’t be controlled even in a high-tech country like Germany,” Environment Minister Steffi Lemke said at a news conference ahead of the shutdown.
She cited the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima atomic power plant in 2011, when a tsunami knocked out the power supply leading to a catastrophic meltdown, evoking memories of the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl that remains a pivotal event for Germany’s anti-nuclear movement.
I’ve written about both of those events on this blog, and the propaganda surrounding them (see this as well as this).
Also:
While Lemke’s environmentalist Green party is most closely linked to that movement, it was former Chancellor Angela Merkel — then leader of Stegemann’s Christian Democrats — who pulled the plug on atomic energy in Germany following Fukushima. The decision led to a greater reliance on fossil fuels that has kept Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions stubbornly high compared to neighbors such as atom-friendly France.
Fancy that.
Germany expects to rely on hydrogen, which I know little about but which doesn’t seem nearly ready at this point to take up the slack: “some people have joked that hydrogen is the energy of the future, ‘and always will be.'” In the meantime, we have the next goals of the anti-nuclear movement:
Campaigners like Vent have now shifted their focus to nearby facilities that process nuclear fuel for reactors elsewhere in Europe.
“We need to stop enriching uranium,” he said. “We need to stop producing fuel rods for all the nuclear plants outside Germany.”
For of the foolishness of radical greens, there is truly no end. Cheap and abundant energy is the sine qua non of any advanced modern industrialized economy, and for the moment (until such time, quite possibly never, as fusion is available, the reality of ITER being hardly imminent) nuclear is the best option. The Germans, who have been harmed by the destruction of Nord Stream (in all likelihood, as implied recently in Trump’s interview with Tucker, by our “Deep State”), are behaving very stupidly indeed.
For thoughts on the importance of energy, and the nature of the attacks on the West’s energy infrastructure, see my article at Quillette from last summer:
https://quillette.com/2022/07/21/steam-electricity-slavery-and-societal-sustainability/
the greens were a soviet active measure, from the outset, they had that general and his paramour as their standard bearers,
In your link about hydrogen, they talk about “free hydrogen” as if the energy required to break it from its compounds doesn’t cost anything.
One way they describe is cracking ethane down to create ethylene with hydrogen as a by-product. But where does the ethane come from?
Ethane is isolated on an industrial scale from natural gas and as a by-product of petroleum refining. That nasty petroleum is involved here.
The other way to produce hydrogen is through electrolysis of water. Where is the large-scale electricity coming from to do this?
It looks like Germany is going to grow poor, cold and dark quickly.
eeyore…it is argued that hydrogen can be produced from water using ‘cheap’ electricity from solar/wind. The problem with this is that the capital costs of the electrolyzers are significant, and the more intermittent the electricity source that feeds them, the higher those capital costs will be on a per-unit-of-output basis.
I
Sad. The Germans were once know for their technical prowess and their superior use of physics. Now the physics is going to bite them in the ass.
The most efficient and cheapest way to use wind power is to pump water behind a dam. But that doesn’t put taxpayer money in people’s pockets because the dams are already built.
Building a new system of using electricity to generate hydrogen will put a lot of taxpayers’ money into things that people can see which will draw praise from all the Right People. And what people cannot see, what that taxpayers’ money would have done or built and the jobs produced if the taxpayers were allowed to keep their money, will be lost and never commented on.
There is a brilliant German sci-fi series called Dark, which I strongly recommend for its atmosphere and depth, emotional and philosophical. Two fairly large reservations:
1) It deals with time travel in the most wildly complicated way I have ever encountered–multiple characters meeting each other and themselves all over the timeline. It’s really hard to follow the plot. I thought it was worth it but many may not.
2) A nuclear power plant is the source of all the trouble, having pretty much supernatural powers–not consciously, but just due to its nature as a nuclear power plant. It’s absurd, and obviously you have to just say “ok” and suspend disbelief if you’re going to watch the show. But the way it’s used probably provides some insight into the way some Germans look at nuclear power.
Hydrogen is an energy storage medium, much like batteries, not a fuel. It uses more electricity to produce it from water or methane, than it yields in a hydrogen-based power plant. It’s advantage is that it produces only water and can be scaled down sufficient for transportation, or small buildings. Besides being an inefficient use of electricity, it is extremely explosive. Imagine the results of a wreck in a downtown area.
Thorium-based molten salt nuclear power is fourth generation, as are several other types. The US alone is estimated have 1000 years supply. Its advantage is that it produces no new radionucleotides, generates xenon, which could be recovered, generates heat which can be utilized for greenhouses, for instance, or other uses. The reactors are small, in the 50MW range, cannot melt down, and are designed to be mass produced. Its major disadvantage is NIMBY ism; at 50MW, the energy grid based on this reactor would need to be highly decentralized.
The first demonstration reactor is being built in Idaho. It requires doping with plutonium or other heavy radionuceltides, so can be thought of as “disposing” extremely dangerous substances.
All this is common knowledge, easily researched on the internet. See Next Big Future Energy, for instance.
There is no excuse for people developing energy policy to be so ignorant.
Yes, nuclear power is dangerous. However, the Unites Staes Navy has been using nuclear reactors to power its ships since 1961. And without a serious accident. Nuclear power, when handled responsibly, is nearly as safe as coal or gas fired plants. This example is constantly overlooked or concealed by the anti-nuclear forces.
The technology has only gotten better, but few new plants are being built because the pre-construction hoops that companies shave to jump through have made the construction long, very costly, and marginally profitable compared to a natural gas plan.
Natural ga plants are relatively low carbon and are the plants we should use while we gear up to transition eventually to nuclear plants.
As to the climate change cult. New information just released by a team at NOAA shows that their past satellite observations have been too warm. They now agree with those of the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) observations.
“Now STAR agrees with the UAH series very closely — in fact it has a slightly smaller warming trend. The old STAR series had a mid-troposphere warming trend of 0.16 degrees Celsius per decade, but it’s now 0.09 degrees per decade, compared to 0.1 in UAH and 0.14 in RSS.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/04/14/ross-mckitrick-the-important-climate-study-you-wont-hear-about/
We should panic over warming of .09C per decade?
No way Jose!
The story is bad enough on the face of it, Germany scrapping clean energy in a time of energy privation and failed policy, but it’s actually even worse than just that. These plants represented a fresh-sheet approach to nuclear energy that had originally been planned on a much grander scale, although only 3 ended up being constructed. And as I read it, the design is actually a rather brilliant one, designed not only for electrical powergen, but also for urban steam heat and high nuclear fuel efficiency. It’s the equivalent of junking a high-end, expensive long-life car with about 15,000 miles on it. And not just getting rid of it, but having it crushed. You have to shake your head at the monumental investment stupidity of it – a triumph of nonsensical, jingoistic policy-making over actual, easily assessed, public requirement.
My memory must be faulty, but I’d have sworn that when the Berlin Wall fell, it was East Germany that disappeared.
Germans are finding out the hard way that ideology doesn’t heat the house.
physicsguy on April 14, 2023 at 6:24 pm said:
Sad. The Germans were once know for their technical prowess and their superior use of physics. Now the physics is going to bite them in the ass.
I used to go pheasant hunting in South Dakota with my father. More recently hunting has been affected by the pheasants all running and never flying when hunted. The flyers all got shot.. The Germans with technical ability may have all died in the War and the children are showing the effect, like the pheasants.
They are cutting down the forests, just like in the 18th century.
Damn, and I thought “hubris” was from greek not german.
But then there was the quote from the ex Dept of Energy (DOE) official “Energy efficiency, wind, and solar energy will soon become dominant sources, …” energy efficiency doesn’t produce or provide any energy and isn’t a source of energy. Now Unicorn farts on the other hand are too cheap to meter.
@Mac
You beat me to it!
I, too, was coming here to say that while it’s only somewhat related, there’s a show about a nuclear plant shutting down in Germany and then the whole world gets…complicated. Heh.
But yes, this show is phenomenal, and while I recommend it to people all the time, I know very few who have heeded my advice. I’ve never seen time travel done so well, with zero plot holes I could find (not to say brighter minds couldn’t possible find some), and with such emotion.
Neo, I suspect you aren’t one for much tv watching, and I don’t imagine you to be too much into sci-fi. (This is just my guess, I could be wrong!) But I think this one show well worth your time. It’s on Netflix if you have it.
Re: German sci-fi series called Dark
I don’t understand those who evangelize for something then don’t provide a link.
Or those who just throw up a link without any, or barely any, explanation for why anyone else might benefit from viewing it.
Here’s a start on “Dark”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series)
Personally, I can’t be bothered unless a link and an explanation are provided.
That’s what you get when the greenies are allowed to run the country.
They were going to shut down those nuclear plants and go “all renewable” last year but delayed it because of the ban on Russian gas imports.
I’m amazed at the lack of common sense shown by the world’s leaders (actually, I’m constantly amazed these days). It’s not rocket science. How much energy does our country need to maintain at current levels? How much do we need for growth? What energy production can meet this? Can ‘green’ technologies cover the energy needs? Well, we should have the replacement power generation in place BEFORE we shut down the current energy production.
I’m amazed at the lack of common sense shown by the world’s leaders
JFM:
Agreed. However, I am aghast at all the scientists and engineers who have signed off.
I understand politicians going along to get along with insane crap. But, the little naive kid I was, who believed in Science!, will never understand my heroes lining up for 2+2=500.
Garrett Crawford at 6:57 pm: Its major disadvantage is NIMBY ism; at 50MW, the energy grid based on this reactor would need to be highly decentralized.
Those of us, like Richard Fernandez, who think systems can be more robust and reliable when their components operate as independent parts of the whole, would consider this an additional plus. And perhaps the power outages due to hurricanes and tornados would be more geographically restricted, to neighborhoods rather than whole towns or counties, etc. Plus the opportunity for greater competition among more companies would keep costs down and minimize the role of state oversight of the “utility model”.
I agree, decentralization is a plus, not a negative. We would have a much safer grid, that can share the load in a crisis.
}}} Chernombyl with ancient technology that is quite different from and far riskier than today’s plants in Germany:
This so woefully understates the point it makes.
Chernobyl says and said virtually nothing whatsoever about nuclear power in the West Not one damned thing at all
Chernobyl was build using THE absolute most primitive form of “nuclear power” known to mankind. It is essentially the same form of reactor design that Fermi used in 1942. It was “charcoal moderated”. You remember charcoal, right? That stuff that you use to fire up the barbie for the July 4th cookout? YEAH, they surrounded the nuclear material with that stuff :-S
SUCH GENIUS!! Why would anyone imagine that surrounding your super-hot source of energy with highly flammable material would be a bad idea?? Problems? INCONCEIVABLE!!
In the West — even in the 60s, when trust in nuclear power was at an all-time high, the western plant designers almost uniformly rejected charcoal moderation for “PWR” — Pressurized Water Reactors.
I believe there were at most only 10 Western nuke plants ever built using charcoal moderation, and virtually every single one of them was shut down by the early 1970s.
So we don’t even need to get into the nitty gritty stuff about why we should be developing modern nuclear power using modern 4th generation designs (PWRs are, at best, a 2nd gen design, and little has been done to “upgrade” any of them to take advantage of modern fail-safely fault-tolerance).
Charcoal is not the same as graphite is not the same as diamond is not the same as Graphene. They are all forms of carbon. Sorry to have to remind you.
I remember the Union of Concerned Scientists making the argument that becauce the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was “caused” by the failure of an O ring all nuclear power plants were at risk because they also use O rings.
Otay.
its an old model, vver something or other, fukushima was newer, but there was a tsunami, a rare event like the 23 earthquake in tokyo,
the germans through siemens and mannesman, also kickstarted the iranian nuclear program under the shah, just they and the french through framatome did so for iraq,
I read this yesterday and spent the past day trying to summon up some sympathy for the Germans. There will be no Marshall Plan this time. Freeze
Meanwhile, in the United Arab Emirates:
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/united-arab-emirates.aspx
The UAE has embarked upon a nuclear power programme in close consultation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and with huge public support.
It accepted a $20 billion bid from a South Korean consortium to build four commercial nuclear power reactors, total 5.6 GWe, by 2020 at Barakah.
Unit 1 of the country’s first nuclear power plant was connected to the grid in August 2020, followed by unit 2 in September 2021 and unit 3 in October 2022.
But, but….. muh Chernobyl.
Garrett Crawford…”The reactors are small, in the 50MW range, cannot melt down, and are designed to be mass produced. Its major disadvantage is NIMBY ism; at 50MW, the energy grid based on this reactor would need to be highly decentralized.”
Why? Cluster several reactors together to feed a common turbine or set of turbines, also used common switchgear and transformers and.or HVDC converters. Also common control room.
Here’s a fact sheet from NuScale, a company focusing on Small Modular Reactors:
https://www.nuscalepower.com/-/media/nuscale/pdf/fact-sheets/about-nuscale-fact-sheet.pdf
One advantage of multiple small reactors as opposed to a single large reactor is that there are more companies that can fabricate the required pressure vessels.
@OBloodyHell
I’d also add that even with Chernobyl they had to fuck with it seven ways to Sunday in order to get what happened. It wasn’t “merely” that it was made using the most primitive form of basic reactor. It wasn’t “merely” that the design for the actual plant was spearheaded by an expert dam builder with minimal knowledge or instruction of physics. It wasn’t MERELY that they made the tips of the control rods with material that would accelerate a reaction temporarily.
It was all of that PLUS MORE (such as staggering corruption, lack of safety checks, and political intervention) that was necessary for the disaster at Chernobyl. Chernobyl and the RBMK Reactors were not exactly GOOD designs but if properly managed and respected they would do what they were intended to do without much hassle.
@huxley
I said it was on Netflix. Most people are probably reading this on their phones or ipads. Most people watch shows on their televisions. How much good would a link do in this situation? I can’t exactly turn your television on for you, nor can I subscribe to netflix for you.
I suppose the wiki article link you posted is more info than Mac or I left…but I’m guessing he wanted to include as few spoilers as possible, as did I.
Regardless, this is all I feel is necessary to say (which is essentially what I said in my previous comment): there’s a really good German show about time travel, and it involves a nuclear plant, since this post is on that topic. If you want to know more about it, check out the trailer on Netflix, which is the only place to watch it as far as I know. If you need me to hold your hand to get there, not sure if I can help you out.
NS:
Sorry to annoy you. It’s a general bugaboo of mine.
No one is obliged to abide by my preferences. Though I do suspect that if one wants others to follow up on a recommendation, a ready link to click would make it easier.
Turtler:
You didn’t fisk O Bloody Hell’s rant about the BMK reactors being moderated by charcoal. They were not.
They were moderated by graphite. Graphite is not charcoal. Graphite is not “coke.” Graphite is not graphene. Graphite is not diamond. Graphite, charcoal, coke, graphene, and diamond are all forms of carbon. The Soviets proved that they could disable all safety systems and engineering controls and cause the graphite to burn. Mother Russia wins again.
N Reactor was the last of 9 graphite-moderated plutonium-production reactors operated by the US. The first, B Reactor, produced the plutonium for Fat Man. N Reactor was the most modern, (1963) and the only one to produce electricity, all the others generated no power, only Pu. N Reactor had significant inherent safety features and had just undergone significant safety upgrades when the Soviets did Chernobyl, but to no avail, it was shut down after the Soviets crapped up Ukraine with their usual behavior.
The other plutonium production reactors used by the US employ heavy water as a moderator. They are at the Savanah River site, I don’t know if any there are still in operation.
“Germany long ago decided to phase out both fossil fuels and nuclear power over concerns that neither is a sustainable source of energy.” So Neo cites.
But it was NOT Germans who had a plebiscite to cancel nuclear reactors or fossil fuels for electric generation. It was Angela Merkel, raised under East German communism, who made those decisions. She is/was a member of the “Christian Democratic Union” aka CDU, which ran post-war Germany (remember Konrad Adenhauer?) for decades, who is not a Christian at all. She encouraged several million young male Muslims from Syria and elsewhere to migrate to Germany, where many remain on the dole, and native Germans were evicted by their government in order to house Muzzies.
Germany has willingly become the future Eurabia. The native German birth rate is minuscule, so humans must be imported to serve as factory workers for Siemens, BMW, etc.
Germany seems prone to nutty thinking, today as well as in the 1930s.
antinucleat propaganda in the west, see the cnd, (the hour paints it the most luminous way) soviet designs were among the worst,
there’s a simpler question, is there anyone in European leadership who is sane, certainly in the West? Sweden was sane when it came to covid, but crazy in nearly every other way,
If you burn hydrogen in the atmosphere–which is about 70% nitrogen–what do you get besides water? Note that water vapor is a very effective GHG.
So, do we have to burn it in oxygen? Imagine tooling down the road with two cryogenic tanks heavy enough to contain enough juice to go, say, sixty miles.
The new EV need a half ton of battery to take a sedan two hundred fifty miles. This is going to be worse.
It’s not sanity. It’s not lack of engineering knowledge. It’s money. The Russians have long funded the Greens and continue to do so. They hire retired pols to lucrative no-work jobs.
It takes political courage and capital to stand up to the propaganda. It’s much easier to stand there and say, but my safety!
Grid crashes happen down the road. The now-wealthy pols will be in someplace warm by then.
“This is going to be worse.”
Um, Richard, it’s SUPPOSED TO BE WORSE.
(But “Biden”—and Justin and Klaus and Greta et al.—gotta save the planet, SOMEHOW!…And if anyone objects, they’re just dumb, trog, Gaia-hating Deplorables…with no sense and no feelings of responsibility for the planet. OUR planet. So of course they deserve whatever they get…)
Oh look: A few hours before shutting down their last power-gen nuclear reactor, the German utility announces a 45% rate increase.
https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647581891485392897/photo/2
“HOURS BEFORE CLOSING REACTOR, GERMAN UTILITY ANNOUNCES 45% PRICE RISE
As Eon closed nuclear, by far its cheapest reliable power, it announced a big jump for many customers from what are already some of Europe’s highest prices.
https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647581891485392897
Really hard to understand why the German people are sitting still for things like this…but I guess it’s also hard to understand how much of these policy decisions are Democratically decided.
Somewhere up there my WW2 vet and holocaust survivor dad is smiling.