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All the infrastructure is in place, it's a great site.
It would also be a great site for some kind of power generation system, using a tiny amount of material to generate an enormous amount of power. Too bad such systems have recently become very unpopular in Germany.
Smugposting aside, nuclear is a heinously expensive thing to build, and from my understanding not a particularly cheap source of energy.
Its not super cheap to build, but it's very cheap to run, and a lot more environmentally friendly than the several browncoal plants that Germany chose not to close when it shut down its nuclear plants.
You are wrong - nuclear is not cheap to run. It only used to be because the state limited the possible liability the companies faced in case of a malfunction and due to the fact that the nuclear waste costs were not part of the equation.
For Germany the price per kwh for a newly constructed nuclear plant would be around 45-63 ct/kwh - according to the power companies themselves. They aren't interested in running these any more for a reason.
So how do you explain France having such cheap electricity, mostly through nuclear power plants? https://www.sfeninenglish.org/nuclear-electricity-price-gap-france-germany-2026/ The issue is not the technology, it's the implementation. Just like in the US, Germany overegulated the industry, causing prices to increase. France can do it safely and cheaply. What's the excuse? I don't get it.
The French highly subsidize their nuclear power. It is not cheap at all and according to the French president, it only makes sense because they are a vital component of their nuclear arms industry.
Thank you for responding.
Can you provide a source for both of those claims? What I'm seeing is that it's profitable on its own, and generation isnt behind subsidized.
The construction is state funded, and the majority state owned operator has high debts because it isn't actually profitable on its own, and those debts are ultimatly underwritten by the state so another form of subsidy.
And that doesn't even account for insurance costs which because it is owned by the French state are not done at all or not realistically priced. And decomissioning costs and nuclear waste disposal costs are also not priced in.
The French state pays a lot to keep up the false public opinion that everyone benefits from the cheap nuclear power, when in reality it is a heavy burden on their state budget and only done for national security reasons (and sunk cost fallacies).
So, exactly like the brown coal mines Germany keeps operating? Those don't deal with the waste at all, simply pumping the CO2 into the air. They also don't pay for the massive destruction caused by browncoal rooftop mining, or the immense opportunity costs of just having an immense hole in the ground.
But those still run, ruining the planet for everyone, while the nuclear plant "isn't profitable", because they actually do account for all the waste, and under incredibly strict requirements.
I'm not suggesting nuclear instead of solar/wind/battery, I'm suggesting nuclear instead of the second worst form of energy right after literally burning down rainforests for power.
The nuclear power plants shut down were all over or very near their design lifespan and would have to be shut down anyways.
There was no new nuclear powerplant construction in decades in Germany for various reasons (mostly due to them being uneconomic).
If Germany would decide to build new nuclear powerplants now, it would have to continue burning brown coal regardless for the next 10-15 years it would take to complete the construction of these nuclear power plants.
Investing in renewable power generation and battery storage gives immediate return in using less brown coal.
Technically true, in the same way that a car is near the end of its lifespan when the fuel pump is worn out. You can't keep using it after that.
Of course, you could replace the fuel pump and hugely expand the lifespan if you wanted too. But then you'd have to want to.
And yet, they're still digging up lignite and burning it right now. Those plants could have been shut down, but they weren't
This is plainly false. The plants where at a age where they had to be practically rebuild, with only components like the power connection or the cooling towers still usable with newly build reactor blocks. And the OP example shows that the power connection can be better reused for grid battery storage.
And the total amount of nuclear power in Germany was never enough to entirely replace coal burning. So at best the ongoing phase out of coal burning would have been slightly faster, but in reality the necessary reconstruction of nuclear power plants would have bound investments for at least a decade. All the while the coal buring would have also continued, but at a higher level because the urgently needed funds for grid extensions to serve renewable energy would have been wasted on building new nuclear power plants that produce no energy at all in the decade they need to be constructed.
You really need to stop riding a dead horse π€·
Were German NPPs especially poorly built? Every other country is happily running plants from the 70s and 80s.
The fuck are you talking about? Before the phase-out started in 2009 Germany was producing about 20 GW from both nuclear and lignite. They produce basically no nuclear power and lignite only very recently dipped below that number. Quite plainly, those numbers could have been reversed.
Everything you posted after that is speculation based on wrong data.
You need to stop lying. This was a political move, made to appease like you who dislike nuclear and are unaware that lignite is significantly worse for the entire planet. It was a popular political move and you agree with it, which is quite visible in your username.
Neither of those points make it a smart move. Germany spent massive effort to eliminate by far the least bad fossil fuel, and kept by far the worst fossil fuel. It's great that they're moving the right way on production, but they started at the wrong end in the shut down.
They did become unpopular since such a system contaminated most of Europe in April 1986.
I get what you are saying, but there are some subtleties that make it seem a bit out or context.
Battery storage plants and power plants do not serve the same purpose. One is to generate electricity, the other is used to buffer and stabilize the net. They have to be used together.
Solar and wind are cheaper to build/run and also way more decentralized than a nuclear plant. Plus a nuclear power plant takes 1-2 decades to complete and should therefore be seen as a long term benefit, it's not a solution for the short term electricity problems Europe is facing.
Nuclear hasn't recently become unpopular in Germany. It was unpopular in the '80s and '90s, particularity after the Chernobyl accident. The decision to phase out nuclear was taken around the turn of the century. That's 25 years ago. Nowadays people have a more positive outlook on nuclear but it still has to make sense from an economic point of view before companies want to invest.
And yet, they closed one down.
As long as you don't mind occasionally not having power during winter nights. You need an insane overcapacity in both prodiction and storage if you want to get rid of all baseload generation. It'll take decades to build, we don't have that yet. Shutting down plants now is very premature.
This plant was literally already there. Not shutting it down took zero construction years.
I'm also not saying "don't build solar", I'm saying "shut down browncoal rooftop mining, keep nuclear open.
This is pretty much what the German government did. Which the exception of afaik two plants which were near their design lifespan, all the others were scheduled for decomissioning because of being over their intended lifespan already.
These were really old plants based on outdated designs, being both increasingly insecure and uneconomic due to their age.
The operators themselves were in favour of shutting them down.
True, because unlike the brown coal plants, who could just pump CO2 and particulate into the air without problem, the nuclear plants actually had to pay for the full lifecycle. Fossil plants don't have to. Hell, they windmills don't have to pay for decommissioning in advance, despite the low cost of that.
That's rather unfair. It's like saying the had to throw away my car because the tires were worn out. They could have been overhauled and stayed in use.
Somewhat in agreement with the first point, but not at all with the second. Most of these nuclear power plants are half a century old and had been overhauled already to the very limit of what was economically feasible. Continued operation would have meant building new reactor blocks next to them and decomissioning the existing ones.
In that case this sadly applies:
with enormous amounts of power comes an enormous amount of waste...
...which sadly needs to be kept safe for several hundreds of thousands of years.
But hey, that is a problem of future generations, am I right?
It's not. The amount of waste is extremely small. The amount of power your household uses in 100 years results in roughly a 1 inch cube of spent fuel. Including heating, cooking and an electric car. There's a frankly absurd amount of energy in uranium.
Yes, it will stay radioactive for a long time, but you know what's the also radioactive? The uranium we dug up to make reactor fuel. We could literally grind up the spent fuel and mix with the mining debris and toss it back into the hole to end up with a less radioactive area now, except that flies in the face of every method of dealing with hazardous materials.
The idea that nuclear power leaves "super dangerous waste forever" is basically just fossil fuel propaganda. We know perfectly well how to deal with it..
Source: I do hazardous materials handling regulations for a living, am also PhD chemist. Ama, i guess.
The amount of highly dangerous waste (e.g. fuel rods) may be small, but, well, it's highly dangerous and not only because of the immediate danger from radiation, but because it can be weaponized.
I agree and understand that converting mass to energy makes absurd amounts of energy available.
Aren't especially the fuel rods more dangerous than the uranium, that has been dug from the earth, because it's a mix of radionuclides with in parts complex decay chains?
Doesn't almost all uranium that has been dug up (according to wikipedia 99.3%) have a half-life of 4.463Γ109Β years (before being used as fuel rod)?
Which made the level of radiation smaller than for radionuclides with shorter half-life that are in the used fuel rods, right?
The propaganda from fossil against the dangers of radiation doesn't work well as long as especially coal plants emit vast amounts of dangerous radionuclides through their chimneys.
To be fair I could stomach continuing to use nuclear plants for some more time until the transformation to way more renawables and storage for electric energy has come a longer way.
After all it's no big difference, if you add some more nuclear waste to the already wuite big pile.
I'd be adamant if we were talking about starting the first nuclear reactor ever.
Building new nuclear reactors now seems like the wrong way given how dirt-cheap solar has become.