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Will Germany serve as an international trendsetter? Or will this only put Germany firmly in line for economic woes or some other dire consequence from which it will surely never recover, etc.?
As someone who thinks the use of nuclear power is shortsighted, I hope for the former.
They’ve set themselves up for economic and ecological problems. They’ll be stuck either buying their power from other countries or be forced to go to coal. Nuclear power isn’t “shortsighted”; it’s rejecting it that is shortsighted. It’s all we have that can meet out energy needs without literally threatening civilization as coal does; renewable sources just aren’t enough.
I think their resources would be better spent replacing carbon-fuel burning plants with renewables and, if they want to get rid of nuke plants, just retiring them as they obsolesced. Germany isn’t exactly natural disaster-prone, so I don’t think there’s any huge rush to get rid of nuke plants even if at the end Germany wants to be nuke free.
I’m all for pursuing renewable energy, but at the cost of coal instead of nuclear. Seems rather knee-jerk to me.
The best result that could be hoped for is that Germany’s policy will stimulate advances in renewable energy and power transmission efficiencies that will reduce the construction and operational costs for wind & solar.
But I think this policy places Germany in a risk situation that will be increasingly difficult to mitigate. What Merkel is effectively saying is “We will plan to possess in 11 years technology which does not yet exist to attain power yields which are not yet achievable and for which exist no clear paths for development.”
Well, I’m not one of the nuke scaremongers, but there are legitimate problems with nuclear power.
The simple fact is that the majority of Germans want to get rid of it. The Green party won their first state election shortly after Fukushima and the CDU-FDP coalition is running scared. They reversed their decision to cancel the exit that was already put into place by SPD-Greens ten years ago. Of course the original exit plan with a longer lead time would have been preferable, oh well…
Anyway, the idea is to promote wind and solar power further along with grid upgrades and storage technologies, supplemented by coal and gas plants. It will cost more than operating the written-off nuclear plants for sure, but hopefully we’ll get some technological advantages out of it. And you’d never be able to build new nuke stations in Germany, so at one point shutting the old ones down is inevitable.
If Germany sites coal plants on the coast and they get hit by a tsunami larger than ever before, I doubt if the plant will be producing electricity while underwater and smashed to bits.
On the other hand, if they build a nuclear plant in the Alps, I doubt if a tsunami will be worth protecting against.
I’d say neither. They won’t be a trendsetter, and it’s not going to crush Germany in economic woes or whatever. Basically, they will give wind and solar a try, then they will build coal plants and buy energy from other neighbors like they are doing now.
Hope is always a good thing. Unfortunately, I don’t see how your hope is going to be fulfilled, but who knows? Maybe there will be breakthroughs in wind and solar or magic pony power and Germany will only have to try and bridge the gap between their energy needs and what they can possibly produce without nuclear for a few years or a decade or so. It might pay off for them. :dubious:
-XT
I don’t see how using magic ponies for power is an improvement on nuclear. At least nuclear fuel doesn’t look soulfully at you with big pastel eyes when you seal it up in the reactor core…
How many sunny days does Germany get on average.
I don’t picture Germany getting nearly enough sun to make solar a viable option.
That’s actually the best part, for us evil conservative types. It’s like when people ask me if I can taste the fear when I eat that hamburger. Oh yeah! That’s what gives it all the flavor!!
MUAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA!
-XT
(no actual ponies were harmed in the making of this post, magic or ordinary)
Their renewable power generation now is about equal to a third of their nuclear generation, and thats been built up in a fairly short period, so its not totally crazy that they could more or less replace nuclear with renewables over the next decade.
But if they kept the nuclear plants, at least for the short-term, and built the same amount of renewebles, they’d have over 50% of their electrical generation be Carbon free, which seems the better choice to me.
Germany has been very anti-nuclear for a long time. Their anti-nuke lobby (and their Green party in general) is quite powerful and popular. I don’t think the same can be said of their neighbours or the rest of Europe.
Their current hopeful magic pony is bio-fuel of various kinds and in various forms - they’ve been starting pilot projects along those lines all over the place. Which is probably safer than nuclear energy in absolute terms. It also generates a ton more greenhouse gas. ANSTAAFL.
But the question is, how what’s the price per megawatt if we use magic ponies? how well do they scale? Where does the magic hay come from? Wha about the carbon footprint?
It is Germany’s stupidest action since 1945.
Yeah they should have kept fighting!
It amuses me the way people continually overestimate the contribution nuclear power makes to countries like Germany and even the US.
Oh, oh, what about our burgeoning population and it’s incredible energy needs? What burgeoning population? What energy needs? Give me some numbers.
If you want to talk about China and India, two countries with lots of people who don’t have electricity now and probably aren’t going to ever need a particularly large amount of energy, talk about them.
Germany, Europe, the US - we’re already completely electrified. I don’t see any huge growth in demand; I see continual increases in efficiency and regular breakthroughs in renewable energy technologies.
What does a country like Germany need nuke for? It’s complicated, only gets more complicated, it’s expensive and only gets more expensive, it’s impossible to secure, and only creates bigger, longer term pollution, transportation, disposal and safe storage and handling problems, and encourages dangerous proliferation. There’s a 10-50 year lead time required to get even basic plans built. In this day and age, who would invest in multi-decades-long projects that will be obsolete decades and billions of dollars before they are even realized?
Germany remains at the forefront of renewable technology development and its cleaner coal technologies are also top-notch. Their feed-in tariff system has encouraged all sorts of ingenuity at the basic consumer and community level and has already helped them keep up with some of the most ambitious and supposedly “impossible” renewable clean energy goals among modern western democracies.
Trend-setter, most definitely.
It’s not that we (or Germany) already have a large number of nuke plants-- If we did, then we wouldn’t need to worry about building more. The problem is that we and them both have a lot of coal plants, and need to replace them with something else, and nuclear is currently the only technology that can do the job.
Whose overestimating? The linked article gives numbers for both.
Whose making these arguments? I’m pretty skeptical someone has referred to Germany’s population as “burgeoning”.
True, but a lot of us would like to move away from fossil fuel dependent electricity generation, which will require the creation of new power plants, even if the total amount of electicity required stays the same or shrinks.
To generate electricity without increasing greeenhouse gas emissions.
All forms of electricity generation have their own associated difficulties, but in anycase, we’re not discussing building new plants, but the possible decommissioning of already existing ones.
All good things. But again, it would be better from the standpoint of decreasing carbon emissions to use this increase in renewable energy to replace fossil fuel plants, which make up the bulk of German power generation, instead of nuclear plants.
