German poll: Majority for return to nuclear energy
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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.
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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.
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I'm talking about Gravelines in France. The first reactor was plugged into the national grid 6 years after construction began. The 6th reactor in 1985.
The EPR2 is already designed, and in service in Flamanville. Flamanville 3 took a long time because we had to rebuild our whole nuclear industry, by lack of political vision back in the 90's-00's.
We're building it again, two by two this time, and hopefully in less than half the time and budget.
The EPR2 is already designed, and in service in Flamanville. Flamanville 3 took a long time because we had to rebuild our whole nuclear industry, by lack of political vision back in the 90's-00's.
Flamanville is EPR, not EPR2. Flamanville's delay is the reason for EPR2. EPR2 is not being built anywhere yet.
EPR is one of my go to examples of how long nuclear takes.
- Olikuloto 3 - Started 2005, Target 2010, Actual 2018
- Flammanville 3 - Started 2007, Target 2012, Actual 2024
- Hinkley point C - Started 2017, Target 2025, Expected 2031
- Taishan 1 & 2 - Started 2009, 2010, Target 2013, 2014, Actual 2018, 2019
- Sizewell C - Started 2023, Target 2032-2035
So I grant you that EDF needed to rebuild knowledge, but 12 years after they started the first plant they started HPC. They increased the timescale from 5 to 7 years construction, but are still going to be at least 6 years late and 35% over budget. On Sizewell they've added another 2 years minimum with a window up to 5 extra years over HPC....for the fourth site in the family. We should be accelerating now, right? Even in China the timescale was 9 years.
It's not just EDF. Westinghouse had similar problems with Vogtle 3 starting construction in 2009 and completing in 2023. 14 years construction again.
Can things get faster...sure, but 65% faster to get back down to 5 years. No.
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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.
from ukraine war we all learned nuclear ia stupid.
Isn't that what prompted this - Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons, and then everyone needing an energy source that isn't Putin?
"would you like a powerplant and final storage near you"?
Why would they put final storage near humans and not inside a mountain or something?
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FFS, people are stupid.
Proceeds to be pro nuclear.
"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
— some pro nuclear guy
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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.
There's a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover.
And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
Fukushima is a bit different
Yeah. And what's stopping other stuff to be "a bit different"?
And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.
Japan got damn lucky the wind blew everything seawards. If the fallout had hit Tokyo, this would have been a very different story.
replacing their energy output with coal
And who did that? Nobody. There were no new coal plants to replace anything. That statement is straight up misleading. The old plants were kept running, yes, and they kept emitting, yes. And that's always the thing that's being brought up, "they could have taken the coal plants offline sooner had they just kept the nuke plants running a little longer". But that's an entirely different thing than "they replaced nuclear with coal". Nobody did that. Had they not tanked the German market for renewables, the coal plants would have been taken offline earlier, too, but for some reason that's never the sob story. Instead, people keep bringing up nuke plants time and time again, which is just weird. Yeah, coal and nuclear both destroy the planet. Let's not see which one's marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that's actually good for the planet?
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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.
numbers prove that around the plants the number of kids with cancer did indeed exceed all expections.
Do you have a source on this? Not to be contrarian, I've just never heard this to be the case.
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There's a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover.
And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
Fukushima is a bit different
Yeah. And what's stopping other stuff to be "a bit different"?
And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.
Japan got damn lucky the wind blew everything seawards. If the fallout had hit Tokyo, this would have been a very different story.
replacing their energy output with coal
And who did that? Nobody. There were no new coal plants to replace anything. That statement is straight up misleading. The old plants were kept running, yes, and they kept emitting, yes. And that's always the thing that's being brought up, "they could have taken the coal plants offline sooner had they just kept the nuke plants running a little longer". But that's an entirely different thing than "they replaced nuclear with coal". Nobody did that. Had they not tanked the German market for renewables, the coal plants would have been taken offline earlier, too, but for some reason that's never the sob story. Instead, people keep bringing up nuke plants time and time again, which is just weird. Yeah, coal and nuclear both destroy the planet. Let's not see which one's marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that's actually good for the planet?
And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
Here's a list of one type of that kind of disasters where, despite of insurance, various kinds of environmental damage has been left behind which may or may not completely heal, or at least it takes a long, long time.
Here's a pretty public different kind of disaster which I guarantee was not 100% covered by insurance either. Here's another. I'm not building a comprehensive list, there's just too many and their impacts vary wildly.
Then there's the waste management in poorer countries which also cause immeasurable damage to the environment all the time by using a nearby river as a sewage for everything. Here's one example which made into the headlines back then. And here's a list of similar examples.
“they replaced nuclear with coal”
Go read yourself:
A 2020 study found that lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately €3 to €8 billion annually, mostly from the eleven hundred additional deaths associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.
And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it's also radioactive.
Let’s not see which one’s marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that’s actually good for the planet?
That would be really nice. We just don't have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet. Here in Finland, on a good day, renewables produce more than nuclear, but those are exceptions. Feel free to look up the data in finngrid service. There's currently over 7000MW worth of turbines around but it's pretty common to have even less than 200MW of wind power in the grid and that unreliability needs to be stabilized with something else.
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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.
You keep seeing these as "alternatives", despite the shortcomings.
I say they are complimentary, and as far as providing power to address these shortcomings, nuclear power is a good solution. How can you look at something that can single-handedly address all power requirements in some area, while providing supports to other, and say "nah", seriously.
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once you disregard polution
Including radioactive waste, which coal produces significantly more of than fission power.
Who cares when the commoners living next to the coal plant breathe radioactive dust? Its cheaper to run for the industrialists short term.
