I understand that it’s supposed to be a shitty comic and not a balanced, reasonable take, but if you’d like to hear a German perspective anyways:
I’m not aware of any official representative lobbying other countries to end nuclear, except of course in nations that build their totally safe reactors near our border. I’m also not aware of us being awarded or recognized for our stance. Individual Germans, like me, will of course have been fed different propaganda than you and will argue accordingly.
No one here likes the coal generators. And with how much cheaper solar is these days, they’re definitely on the way out. But we don’t have a dictatorship anymore, luckily, so even obviously good paths will face pushback, like from entire regions whose jobs are in the coal industry.
We’ve just been able to get a consensus on abolishing nuclear much more quickly for multiple reasons:- Chernobyl directly affected us, including the people running our country. Russia also attacked nuclear reactors in the Ukraine, which certainly reminded people of Chernobyl.
- At the start of the Ukraine war, it was unclear whether Russia might also launch attacks on us, including our nuclear reactors.
- Russia also cut off our natural gas supply. We have practically no own Uranium deposits either, so reducing dependence on foreign nations was definitely in our interest, too.
At the start of the Ukraine war, it was unclear whether Russia might also launch attacks on us, including our nuclear reactors.
Russia hasn’t attacked any nuclear reactors in Ukraine for obvious reasons. The notions that Russia would attack nuclear reactors in Germany is pure absurdity that no sane person could believe.
Russia also cut off our natural gas supply. We have practically no own Uranium deposits either, so reducing dependence on foreign nations was definitely in our interest, too.
That’s a straight up lie. Russia never cut off gas supply to Germany, and in fact has repeatedly stated that one of Nord Stream pipelines is operational. German government is choosing to buy Russian LNG through third parties instead of buying pipeline gas directly.
Well, I don’t know what to tell you. These things have been broadly reported here in Germany. Whom of us was mislead, doesn’t matter for explaining why us Germans have a different stance on things.
Here’s two random articles, but I can send a whole list of links, if your search engine isn’t turning up anything:
Ah yes, “Ukrainian officials say”, very credible source. Weird how IEA never found any evidence of Russia shelling ZNPP though. And yeah, once you stop paying for a product the delivery stops. That’s how business works.
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Russia stopped delivering gas to 5 european countries in May 2022 because those countries refused to pay in rubels.
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Then they announced in June 2022 that they would only deliver half of the agreed-upon volumes to Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia and Italy.
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In September 2022 Russia stopped gas transfers via Nord Stream 1 completely, “because of technical difficulties”.
Those are facts. Russia stopped these gas transfers. No one else.
Russia stopped transfers because Europe refused to pay in a currency Russia could use. Funny how you forgot to mention that the west froze Russian foreign assets there.
Now, Europe is still buying Russian gas, but via resellers while lying to the public.
Those are the actual facts.
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I’m all for use of nuclear energy, and mining uranium from seawater, however, there are externalities that need to be addressed, at least in the USA, there are serious issues with on-site storage in pools, with no plans on what to do with the waste. This is a serious issue that needs considered.
I’m personally a fan of investing in thorium which is cheaper and safer. Thorium reactors also happen to use molten salt for cooling meaning that you don’t need to build them next to large bodies of water. The only reason uranium is used traditionally is because it doubles up as weapon material.
Yes, that’s a great point. 100% pro thorium. China is leading commercialization of thorium reactors. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/thorium-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-china
I’m really excited about this tech too.
Yeah but the aura coming from the nuclear reactor might turn everyone in the vicinity into tankies. Bet you didn’t think about that
that’s right, what Germans really fear is that GDR will make a comeback.
Idk why they’re worried though, seems like a great time to me
sure better than the shit show that’s currently unfolding in Germany if you ask me
Yes, let’s reverse that and and make ourself dependent from Russia again…
Also, coal production has been doing nothing than falling since we made the switch. Renewables have been the major energy source 2023, for the first time, and are only prosepected to grow, while Germany is transitioning away from coal. One of the main reasons for the increase in coal in 2022 were the outages of frech nuclear plants…
After coal-fired power plants in Germany ramped up their production in 2022 due to outages of French nuclear power plants and distortions in the electricity market caused by the war in Ukraine, their share in electricity production fell significantly in 2023. Due to the drop in exports of coal-fired power and this years favorable wind conditions, electricity generation from coal-fired power plants in November 2023 was 27% below the generation in November 2022.
You can look at the graphs here to see how coal is already back to where it was pre-shutdown.
And as can be seen here, Germany has been able to cover their baseload only with renewables more and more. This is expected to increase, as renewables are growing and battery technology advances.
Germany is still entirely dependent on Russian LNG, so not sure what you’re talking about there. Also, seems like you conveniently forgot that Germany imports electricity from France where most electricity production is done using nuclear power
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/germany/electricity-imports-and-exports/electricity-imports-france
Germany imported Electric from France during summer 2023, due to lower energy costs in neighboring countrys and high Co2 certificate prices.
In total, Germany has been a net Exporter for Energy in 2023.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/germany/electricity-imports-and-exports/electricity-balance-france
And while Germany has been an importer from France in general, this switched in 2022 when France nuclear reactors had to be shut down due to a record warm summer, showing how nuclear is not fit to withhold the stresses of the climate crisis upon us.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/germany/electricity-imports-and-exports/electricity-balance-france
As too your other statement I’d like to ask for a source. I found nothing pointing towards this.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-imports-from-russia/
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-28/russian-oil-is-still-powering-europe-s-cars-with-help-of-india
- https://ieefa.org/resources/eu-turns-blind-eye-21-russian-lng-flowing-through-its-terminals
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-01-27/europe-s-energy-security-at-risk-due-to-reliance-on-us-natural-gas-exports
- https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-energy-secretary-claire-coutinho-eu-showdown-russia-gas/
- https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/lng-imports-russia-rise-despite-cuts-pipeline-gas-2023-08-30/
- https://euobserver.com/green-economy/157627
- https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-countries-continue-import-1bn-russian-arctic-lng-every-month
While up to a dozen EU countries have received Russian LNG since February 2022, the key importers remain Belgium, Spain, and France, which together account for 88 percent of the EU’s Russian LNG imports during the last 10 months.
Not a single link even mentions Germany…
It’s like you believe Germany exists in a vacuum and can’t comprehend that LNG that EU purchases also goes to Germany. 😂
It like you are not able to provide a single source for that claim. I am happy to admit that it does (I honestly don’t know), but at the moment youre source is “Trust me bro” and given the quality of your replies in this thread to me and others I, very politly, choose not to do so.
If you’re gonna troll at least troll about something that people can’t google in like 2 seconds 😂 https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-dependence-imported-fossil-fuels
Last summer France imported large amounts of electricity from neighbours. Dry hot summer make rivers run dry which causes reactor shutdowns while demand is high because of airco. More solar in the french mix woild have filled the gap.
There is no 1 single magic bullet in the energy situation. It’s an energy mix and always will be a mix. Nuclear is not the one magic fix it all today solution.
Nobody is advocating for any silver bullet here. I think there needs to be an energy mix from different sources. Nuclear and renewables complement each other. It’s also worth noting that China is already experimenting with thorium reactors that use molten salt for coolant and don’t need water.
We can not use nuclear energy as long as we do not know what to do with the waste. IMHO it’s as easy as that.
Putting it in the ground is a viable solution. And it doesn’t damage the environment for it to be in there and it’s not like it’s going to escape.
At some point in time will develop the technology to do something else with it but for now putting it in big concrete containers underground is a viable solution.
Yes, but there is no such facility in Germany.
Because Germans choose not to built it being ideologically driven imbeciles that they are.
So now you’re attacking a whole people, without offering arguments.
I’ve literally explained the argument in my comment. Germans CHOOSE NOT TO BUILD such facilities. The fact that you feel attacked when people state basic facts about your people is frankly hilarious.
Basic facts like all Germans are imbeciles? These are opinions, not facts.
Yes we chose not to build such facilities and that’s why we should not produce more nuclear waste. This is exactly my argument you failed to respond to.
It’s a fact that investing in coal while dismantling nuclear power infrastructure is not a sign of intelligent behavior.
We’ve known what to do with the waste for a long time now. Also, when you use fossil fuels you’re just directly polluting the environment.
There is no current facility for storing nuclear waste in a safe manner in Germany. Most of the high level waste is stored on the surface near the waste production sites. Let’s take a look at the dangers of plutonium-239: If inhaled a minute dose will be enough to increase the cancer risk to 100%. If ingested a minute dose is almost as dangerous because of it’s heavy metal toxicity. It’s half life is about 24k years. “It has been estimated that a pound (454 grams) of plutonium inhaled as plutonium oxide dust could give cancer to two million people.” (1) So IMHO it’s very irresponsible to create more nuclear waste, as long as we as a society have no way to get rid of it in a safe manner. 100% renewable is achievable and I think we should concentrate on this path since it will be safer and also cheaper in the long run. (2)(3)
Sources:
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239
2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Ok, so instead digging up coal mines, Germany could’ve spent time making a facility for safely storing processed nuclear fuel like many other countries have done. The amount of fear mongering about nuclear power while it’s being widely used around the world and having been shown as one of the safest sources of energy is mind boggling. I guess in your opinion what we should do is keep destroying the environment by using fossils while ignoring practical alternatives.
No, my opinion is that we can not use nuclear energy as long as we do not have a long term solution for our nuclear waste. There is no such facility in Germany and a large portion of the waste is currently stored on the surface, partly in heavily populated areas like Philippsburg near Karlsruhe, a city with ~300k inhabitants.
https://www.base.bund.de/DE/themen/ne/zwischenlager/standorte/standorte_node.html
Again, such facilities can be built. It’s a choice not to do so. Also, Germany could use alternative fuels like thorium the way China is doing now with their molten salt reactors.
There is no such facility in Germany. As long as there is no facility for storing the radioactive waste, I don’t think we should produce more nuclear waste.
It’s true that liquid salt reactors are more fuel efficient than light water reactors and the waste is more short lived, but still it produces high level waste with even more radioactivity in the short term.
“All other issues aside, thorium is still nuclear energy, say environmentalists, its reactors disgorging the same toxic byproducts and fissile waste with the same millennial half-lives. Oliver Tickell, author of Kyoto2, says the fission materials produced from thorium are of a different spectrum to those from uranium-235, but ‘include many dangerous-to-health alpha and beta emitters’.”
What part of such a facility could be built are you still struggling with?
Not just Germans btw. Danes are the same. Being anti-nuclear is considered a standard leftist view here and the fight against nuclear power was considere one of the 1980’s environmental movement’s greatest wins. Being pro-nuclear is coded as a right-wing message around here that you mostly have to trigger the left.
Being anti-nuclear is one of the most bizarre positions the western left has internalized.
I have that little suspicion that it was intentionally (efficiency) planted by USSR when it had connections to western leftists (all those “progressive youth summits” and so on), via emotional association with possible devastation of nuclear war etc.
Nuclear power is literally more expensive at this point than renewables. No, you can’t keep using the shitty, cracking, deadly waste producing nuclear plants of the past, not even the power companies want that, and building new ones takes over 10 years, not counting all the planning and beaurocracy you have to go through. And to become CO2 neutral after all the excavation, construction and mining necessary takes another decade. Nuclear power plants are MASSIVE engineering undertakings.
Meanwhile modern windmills can be mass-produced right now and take like 5 years depending on their placement to be both cost and CO2 neutral. After that it’s LITERALLY free energy for a good 30 years. And they become cheaper and bigger and more efficient every single year. And btw if you ever pull out an article or a calculation that is older than a year for any comparison, you are dealing with OLD data. They have become far more efficient and flexible in their placement and will likely continue to do so.
The anti-nuclear protests were completely right. Stop playing the people who wanted a safer world without nuclear waste and incidents against the modern climate movement.
TL;DR: Wheels on windmill go brrrr, nuclear power is not a short term solution and never has been.
Nuclear and renewables are complementary technologies, renewables are a much more volatile source of energy. Also, when people say renewables are cheaper they’re not counting the total lifecycle of things like wndmills and solar panels.
when people say renewables are cheaper they’re not counting the total lifecycle of things like… solar panels.
Yeah the LCOE of solar is likely ridiculously low because they still work decades after th started 25 year life used in levelised cost calculations
Nuclear in the west is so tremendously expensive we may as give up until China makes SMRs cheap
I mean China is already making all the solar panels at this point, so we might as well wait for them to role out nuclear globally.
Good news, the Chinese artificial sun has reached 403 seconds of stability. Up from 100 seconds 7 years ago. Once it reaches 1000 seconds at 50,000,000 Kelvin, it would mean it produces more energy than igniting the “sun” would cost.
I do think it’s very likely that we’ll see fusion working within our lifetimes. If China manages to get a fusion plant online then that really will solve all the energy problems for the foreseeable future.
All the comments about the nuclear reactor disasters remind me of a Vsauce video called Risk. . Michael talks about a hypothetical world where “one cigarette pack out of every eighteen thousand seven hundred and fifty contains a single cigarette laced with dynamite that, when lit, violently explodes, blowing the user’s head off. People would be loudly and messily losing their heads every day all over the world but in that imaginary universe the same number of people would die every day because of smoking that already do”. Nuclear disasters are messy, but affect less people than coal plants operating normally.
Nuclear disasters are messy, but affect less people than coal plants operating normally.
Not just that, but the disasters we do have with nuclear plants are with old ones. Fukushima was built in 1971, 40 years before the 2011 incident. The meltdown it experienced wouldn’t just be more difficult in modern reactors. It would be impossible by design. We should be building new nuclear partially to retire old dangerous plants.
Yeah, but the only choice isn’t between smoking cigarettes and smoking dynamite sticks. Coal being bad doesn’t make nuclear good. Meltdowns aren’t the only bad things that nuclear reactors can cause. Where I live, people are losing their heads talking about how we need more nuclear power so we can get bigger electric cars to replace bicycles and public transport (not to replace cars with internal combustion engines, of course, because how else would people get on board with building infrastructure for giant electric sports cars than to let pre-existing rustbuckets roam free and keep gas stations in operation).
