Growth in german wind capacity is slowing. Soo... then the plan is to keep on with lignite and gas? Am I missing something?
Installed Wind Capacty - Germany
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Don’t import Reddit’s extremely ignorant takes on nuclear power here, please. Nuclear power is a huge waste of money.
If you’re about to angrily downvote me (or you already did), or write an angry reply, please read the rest of my comment before you do. This is not my individual opinion, this is the scientific consensus on the issue.
When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.
If you’re about to lecture about “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, save your keystrokes - the majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable. Again, this isn’t my opinion, you can look it up and find a dozen sources to back up what I am writing here.
This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream of thorium fusion breeding or whatever other potential future tech someone will probably comment about without reading this paragraph.
Again, compared to nuclear, renewables are:
Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. It is 100% worth researching for future breakthroughs. But at present it is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.
Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on nuclear power should be spent on renewables instead.
You can have this copy/paste from like 5 minutes of googling. You can also run your own study yourself by just googling "average kwh price nuclear" and "average kwh price wind" and see how it looks. You can also google "average co2 eq emissions total lifetime nuclear" and likewise for wind/solar PV. This is extremely simple stuff, guys. I am basically saying, "lentils are cheaper than steak" and you're asking for citations.
2022 Electricity ATB Technologies and Data Overview, annual technology baseline:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
Wow look isn't it crazy how nuclear is the most expensive one?
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report: "Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build. When you factor it all in, you're looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant."
Differences in carbon emissions reduction between countries pursuing renewable electricity versus nuclear power, published in nature energy: "We find that larger-scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to associate with significantly lower carbon emissions while renewables do. "
and this is a short intro to why a (60%/40%) split between renewables and nuclear may be the most accessible fossil free solution, and why the value of adding more variable renewables to a grid falls sharply the closer you get to 100%.
Also, the last article you posted is paywalled.
This chart is from the "Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems," I wonder whether they might be a wee bit biased. It also puts the "consequential cost to health, environment and climate" of nuclear as higher than coal, which is bananas, and their data on lifecycle carbon emissions from nuclear comes from a noted anti-nuclear group (and the article even admits as much).
"When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant." Cool, let's start building a whole bunch of them right now and then worst-case in 20 years we'll have too much electricity.
"In the next 10 years, nuclear power won't be able to make a significant contribution" I appreciate your optimism but we are deeeeeefinitely not going to come anywhere close to phasing out fossil fuels in power generation in 10 years; we're not even going to be done with fossil fuels on days that are particularly sunny in the solar cell areas and particularly windy in the wind power areas.
The Fraunhofer ISE is a reaseach institut with a focus on solar. It is very well respected and I would be very suprised if they where biased here.
Why would we waste money on nuclear when we could build renewables instead? It makes NO sense. Renewables are cheaper and cleaner.
Because nuclear is pretty cool whereas renewables are less awesome. Think about it, the nuclear symbol ☢️ is much more interesting and cooler than the renewable ♻️ symbol. We all know this is what really matters.
Well now you're back to arguing about new construction instead of keeping existing plants running.
Also, we can build both. Surely you appreciate that there are other factors slowing the speed of the energy transition besides the availability of capital, and that while nuclear has its own roadblocks, many of them are different from + don't overlap or compete with those standing in the way of renewables.
Capital (money) and capital (political) are the only roadblocks between us and a 100% renewable future. So no, there's no value to wasting either of those on nuclear when they could be more wisely proportioned to renewables. Pretty much the only resource that nuclear consumes that isn't consumed by most renewables would be uranium. I'm willing to just go ahead and say we can leave that one in the ground.
They’re really not, and if you think that then you need to read more. And “political capital” isn’t some big fungible pool of quatloos, it’s a lot of little tiny stupid slow fights.
Okay, go ahead and list the resources used for building nuclear reactors that isn't used for building other renewables.
And thats about it.
Not my optimism, that's a quote from an industry expert, actually. But sure, whatever you say.