German poll: Majority for return to nuclear energy
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No. Take a good look at France and their nuclear strategy. Both maintaining old reactors and building new ones is extremely costly. Building times are to be measured in decades. Nuclear power is not economically viable nor is it a solution to the climate catastrophe.
Returning to nuclear power in Germany is nothing but a pointless waste of tax money.
One way or another you need grid-scale turbines to maintain grid frequency. Solar power can't set frequency and wind power is too variable, so power grids use some sort of turbine to do it.
Nuclear reactors are also necessary to generate things like medical isotopes and tritium for industrial processes, and fusion research. Someone, somewhere on Earth needs to keep their fission reactors going.
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No. Take a good look at France and their nuclear strategy. Both maintaining old reactors and building new ones is extremely costly. Building times are to be measured in decades. Nuclear power is not economically viable nor is it a solution to the climate catastrophe.
Returning to nuclear power in Germany is nothing but a pointless waste of tax money.
Keep looking at things from a money perspective and the solution become obvious : kill everyone and be done with it.
Today, nuclear energy is a reasonably safe, efficient source of energy. Is it the energy of the future ? Probably not. But is it an efficient option for smoothing the grid while planting renewable all around it? It's definitely better than the other alternatives. Does it cost money to develop? Sure. Everything costs money. But there are benefits that won't show up in an accounting book that can't be brushed aside.
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in retrospect, i understand France's long-held stance around 2000 that it wants to rely mostly on nuclear. it wasn't clear, back then, how long fossil fuels would be available (it was predicted they would last another 40 years) so they thought "oh well, uranium will be available for a longer time. renewable energy wasn't an (economic) possibility at that time. now that we have cheap solar energy, i suspect the last nuclear power plant worldwide will be shut down sometime around 2040.
2040 huh?
My prediction is a record number of new plants going online in 2040.
Especially as there are literal factories being built to specifically crank out Small Modular Reactors.
We're looking at a future where every small town can have their own reactor, providing enough power for that town but not large enough to ever melt down.
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2040 huh?
My prediction is a record number of new plants going online in 2040.
Especially as there are literal factories being built to specifically crank out Small Modular Reactors.
We're looking at a future where every small town can have their own reactor, providing enough power for that town but not large enough to ever melt down.
i suppose you're also thinking that's because we need steady output?
which is a fallacy; we had constant generation in the past so consumption adapted and became constant; consumption would not naturally be constant, it would be higher in the daytime.
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Because everyone knows there's literally only fossil fuels and nuclear energy, nothing else.
Cool, so continue to pretend that you didn't see the chart in this very thread? Here it is again:
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Cool, so continue to pretend that you didn't see the chart in this very thread? Here it is again:
There is more to the calculation of risk than just looking at this data. You know very well how large the impact of individual disasters is.
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Sodium ion backup batteries and other backup tech. This also helps to decentralize the grid if you place these batteries in neighborhoods.
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It’s just more FUD trying to keep away from it. We’re still a ways off of 100% renewables and nuclear can very much help fill in that gap without reliance on foreign oil or fossil fuels.
plants take an extremely long time to become operaitonal, also face regulatory issues, plus very expensive. 5-10years, and then you need to hire people.
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The issue is nuclear reactors become more expensive the less load they have.
As we build more renewables, nuclear energy will decrease in cost efficiency as renewables and storages start handling base loads.
The problem isn't so much that it can't work, it's that it will not be cost efficient long term.
How can they start handling base loads if there is literally no sun or wind (as happens reasonably frequently). You either need a ton of storage which is its own environmental can of worms or nuclear
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Keep looking at things from a money perspective and the solution become obvious : kill everyone and be done with it.
Today, nuclear energy is a reasonably safe, efficient source of energy. Is it the energy of the future ? Probably not. But is it an efficient option for smoothing the grid while planting renewable all around it? It's definitely better than the other alternatives. Does it cost money to develop? Sure. Everything costs money. But there are benefits that won't show up in an accounting book that can't be brushed aside.
Power to gas, water pumps, heat storage and battery storage are viable alternatives. There are many days already where we over produce green energy. Why sink hundreds of billions into nuclear plants when we could use the energy we already produce instead?
Nuclear power is all but efficient.
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Building times are to be measured in decades.
Should probably have invested more into developing their knowledge and experience then. Just have a look at China.
Littering vast spaces of land for wind and sun power generation is hardly a better long term solution.
Even China builds more renewable than nuclear. And I'd rather not look at authoritarian dictatorships for tips on how to handle building regulations.
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Summary
A new Innofact poll shows 55% of Germans support returning to nuclear power, a divisive issue influencing coalition talks between the CDU/CSU and SPD.
While 36% oppose the shift, support is strongest among men and in southern and eastern Germany.
About 22% favor restarting recently closed reactors; 32% support building new ones.
Despite nuclear support, 57% still back investment in renewables. The CDU/CSU is exploring feasibility, but the SPD and Greens remain firmly against reversing the nuclear phase-out, citing stability and past policy shifts.
just not true.innofact can f off.
if you keep asking the old people, you will get old people answers.when confronting the asked ppl with the numbers it costs to build a new one they all dont want a new one.
not to mention the insurance for a plant.
and from ukraine war we all learned nuclear ia stupid.or go ask any of those fuckwits if we can store the waste where they live. numbers prove that around the plants the number of kids with cancer did indeed exceed all expections.
NOBODY wants a plant or the waste anywhere close to where they live.
"would you like cheap clean nucular(!) energy"
or
"would you like a powerplant and final storage near you"?
fuck innofacts hate campaign.
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Well, if that's so rare and can essentially be ignored, I'm sure you'll easily find insurance for nuclear plants that will cover the cost of a potential disaster. I mean, after all, it evens out over all the nuke plants, right? The market handles it, right?
There's a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover. Modern nuclear generators just can't blow up like Chernobyl. Fukushima is a bit different, but maybe we shouldn't build reactors in places where they can be hit by a tsunami in the first place. And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.
And that doesn't change the fact that shutting down nuclear plants and replacing their energy output with coal caused more radiation in ash and other particles which are spread out of the chimney to the environment as a part of normal operation.
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Unlike china, Germany has a lot of environmental and safety standards it has to meet before it can operate any large plant, and it cannot just give the contract to the lowest bidder who mixes rubbish and toxic waste into the cement als filler material...
Yes, I'm sure reopening coal plants and displacing villages to mine coal is a better environmental policy.
And are you suggesting that the West wouldn't be able to build cheaper and faster nuclear power plants even if we had actually invested in the technology for all these years? Is nuclear technology some unicorn that can't be improved with experience and research?
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Would, should, could:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
Why didn't they bury it in impermeable bedrock then in this case. It will cost the taxpayer 3.7 billion to evacuate the rusty and leaky containers there. Which will probably start in 2033 and last decades. If they don't get it right the waste will probably leak into groundwater. That was already stated in a report from 1979 but declared as unscientific by managers of the facilitiy. The building time for Olkiluotos Onkalo was 20 years. You can search for other "End Storages" of nuclear waste around the world. Not many of them are even operating now. You can also look up facilities in Arizona making the same mistake as Germany in storing the waste in salt mines. You can also lookup the devastating effects of Uranium mining for the environment (e.g. in Navajo land).
Here's your baseload argument debunked:
Yesterday 58% of the energy in Germany came from renewables. It briefly had a day in January when renewables surpassed 100% of its energy demand. Energy is sold between the member states of the EU. Germany regularily imports about 2-5% of its energy per year. Not because the can't generate the baseload via coal or gas but because it's cheaper to buy. Only 0.5% of that imported energy comes from nuclear. The rest is also from renewables.
A bit offtopic but related: Mr. Habeck the previous much scolded economy minister had a big part in the rise of renewables and his further plans would have been to build out hydrogen production via renewables to act as a future CO2 neutral baseload capacity. Now Germany is in the hands of old white man again who want to burn the world. Just yesterday a headline was that the conservatives want to restrict the influence of the buero against monopolies in pursuing suspected cases of price agreements between fossil fuel cooperations.
Always those inconvenient facts, right nukecells?
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Summary
A new Innofact poll shows 55% of Germans support returning to nuclear power, a divisive issue influencing coalition talks between the CDU/CSU and SPD.
While 36% oppose the shift, support is strongest among men and in southern and eastern Germany.
About 22% favor restarting recently closed reactors; 32% support building new ones.
Despite nuclear support, 57% still back investment in renewables. The CDU/CSU is exploring feasibility, but the SPD and Greens remain firmly against reversing the nuclear phase-out, citing stability and past policy shifts.
I'll just comment about one thing that keeps popping up in the discussions: grid-level storage. There is no such thing yet really that would last a full day cycle, and the 100MW or so units we are building are mostly for frequency stabilization and for buying enough time to turn on a base-load plant when the renewables drop out. I'm not arguing against storage - it is absolutely needed.
The problem is the scale, which people don't seem to get. Largest amount of energy we can currently repeatedly store and release is with pumped hydro, and the locations where this is possible are few and far between. Once the batteries reach this level-of-capacity, then we have a possibility to use them as grid-level storage that lasts a few days instead of hours.
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FFS, people are stupid.
There was a huge hysteria about nuclear when Fukushima happened. A clear majority was for immediate action. Merkel's coalition government would have ended if she hadn't done a 180 on nuclear and decided to shut down nuclear as soon as possible, which was 2023. I was against shutting it down back then but I thought you can't go against the whole population, so I get why they did it. People didn't change their mind until 2022. Nobody talked about reversing that decision in all these years when there was actually time to reverse the decision.
Now, that the last reactor is shut down, the same people that were up in arms in 2011 are now up in arms that we don't have nuclear. Building new plants will cost billions and take decades and nuclear doesn't work well with renewables because of its inflexibility. It makes no sense at all. It was a long-term decision we can't just back away from. What's done is done.
You don't miss the water until the well runs dry.
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I suspect that we will utilize a gas peaker plants for the last 5% for a long time; i couldn't think of a much better option.
Irs batteries. Today's car batteries become tomorrow's grid storage feed stock. Also battery tech is getting a cost decline through scaling so every year a nuclear plant isn't built the math gets better for grid storage.
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i suppose you're also thinking that's because we need steady output?
which is a fallacy; we had constant generation in the past so consumption adapted and became constant; consumption would not naturally be constant, it would be higher in the daytime.
Wind and solar cannot set grid frequency.
They just can't. You need a turbine to set frequency.
And yes, the grid frequency matters.
So yes, we will always need a base load. And what better way than a small modular reactor, keeping the grid local and modular.
Or we can build out so much wind and solar that we have to have massive transmission lines running across the country, and then we would still need to curtail that power during peak supply, while also not getting enough generation when solar and wind fail.
And then you still need a turbine to set the grid frequency.
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No. Take a good look at France and their nuclear strategy. Both maintaining old reactors and building new ones is extremely costly. Building times are to be measured in decades. Nuclear power is not economically viable nor is it a solution to the climate catastrophe.
Returning to nuclear power in Germany is nothing but a pointless waste of tax money.
What do you mean? The cost of an old nuclear reactors' MWh is 40-50€, that's really competitive.
And unlike solar and wind, it produces anytime. As a French person, not only do I think we were right to build them in the first place, I'm annoyed we stopped in the 2000s after the Chernobyl scare campaign, it's safer than Germany's coal, which also produces radioactive waste and isn't properly regulated, unlike nuclear.
