The Coming Energy Turnaround In Germany

An anonymous reader writes "Germany has decided to close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 and embark on an energy turnaround that focuses on large increases in sustainable energy production. What will it take in terms of investments, and will it mean cost hikes for German consumers? Will it really mean more jobs in the 'green energy' sector? Quoting: 'Total investment over the next decade for such an energy turnaround is estimated to be roughly €200 billion (or almost $290 billion). ... At the moment, more than 20 new coal-fired power plants are being planned or already under construction; together, they would achieve a total output of 10 gigawatts and could, in terms of power supply, replace nuclear power plants that are still operational. But coal-fired power plants do not fit into the concept of the sustainable energy turnaround that the government has put forward.'"

Comments

Be patient

[elrous0]

coal-fired power plants do not fit into the concept of the sustainable energy

You're just not thinking long-term.

Re:Be patient

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just not thinking long-term.

I think the German government has the same problem, like that time where they decided they should shut down all their nuclear power plants.

Re:Be patient

[Chas]

Sure! Let's bury a few billion tons of plant and animal matter today. Put it under high pressure. We'll call for it in a couple million years.

Or not..

Re:Be patient

[interkin3tic]

"Long term" in politics means "after my next term." To a politician, 2022 seems like a million bajillion years. They are in fact thinking "long term." Specifically they're thinking long term in the way they always think: it will be someone else's problem by then.

Re:Be patient

[VitaminB52]

They are in fact thinking

Why do you say politicians are thinking, given all the evidence to the contrary?

Re:Be patient

[interval1066]

I hope your tag line is a joke.

Re:Be patient

[hot soldering iron]

Close, but you're thinking like someone untrained in technology. You did get the "Put it under high pressure" part right, though. You put it in a pressure cooker, and after initial startup, the generated methane and other hydrocarbons will power the process. The current iteration of this technology is called "Thermal De-polymerization", and can convert raw bio-waste into number 2 diesel fuel in about 24 hours. There was a pilot plant set up outside Jefferson City, Missouri, to process waste from a turkey processing plant. It was shut down due to "the smell that came from it". Have you ever been around a poultry processing plant? I would have shut the poultry plant down first, if that was a legit reason.

Another technology, called "producer gas" during WWII, will take just about any bio-waste, and by controlled combustion, create carbon monoxide, a fuel that burns at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The modern version of this is currently being explored by "fringe science enthusiasts" as "Bingo fuel". They use a carbon arc for rapid breakdown of water and bio-matter into hydrocarbon fuel. Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen. That was the "secret" of the urban legend of the Water Engine. Put in water, and the destruction of the carbon electrodes by the arc created gaseous fuel.

These technologies exist, in economically viable forms, right now. Unfortunately, vested interests (energy and petroleum) could afford to "influence" politicians to shut down this dangerous competition with pocket change from their couch cushions. If Germany gets hold of this, and develops it into "plug and play bio-reactor refineries" to use instead of waste treatment plants, or land-fills, they'll become major energy technology players.

Re:Be patient

[Third Position]

"Long term" in politics means "after my next term." To a politician, 2022 seems like a million bajillion years. They are in fact thinking "long term." Specifically they're thinking long term in the way they always think: it will be someone else's problem by then.

One more argument for monarchy.

Re:Be patient

[Stephan Schulz]

You do realize plants and animals require a minimum of 220 ppm to survive, and the more the better they grow.

While plants do, of course, need CO2, things are not as easy as you claim. CO2 concentrations dropped to about 180 ppm several times during the ice ages in the last 800000 years, and plant life as a whole survived pretty well. So 220 ppm is not a hard limit. Also, while increased CO2 can benefit plants, it's not universally good. On the one hand, many plants are not limited by carbon availability, but by other nutrients, like phosphorus, usable nitrogen, or trace metals. And secondly, different plants cope differently with varying CO2 levels. So a change in CO2 can change the competitive advantage from one plant type to another, potentially disrupting ecosystems.

Re:Be patient

[Eunuchswear]

Kid, your Granny is a bad bad lady for taking advantage of your little mental problem for laughs.

Re:Be patient

[rtfa-troll]

So wait; we have a choice between a set of power sources which provide indefinite quantities of energy; where the installation, once done, is pretty much forever and just needs small scale maintenance; where the major influence on the environment is extremely localised and quite easy to understand and reduce and another power source which provides energy now but where later we have to look after nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Where the major cost is decommissioning and clean up which happens at the end and where almost all cost estimates basically assume the tax payer covers that for free.

Let's be absolutely clear where we are in clean energy at the present moment. The cost of wind power ($97 / levelised MWh)* , which has been a practical power source only in the last decade or two, is already lower than the cost of nuclear energy ($113.9 / levelised MWh)*. Whilst nuclear is a mature generation technology which has been optimised since the 1960s, wind development is barely started. Further, since wind is simply available for free in many locations there is no clear absolute natural reason why there should be any particular cost level. The questions are simply technological development.

What's important to realise is that China has now realised this and is doing the sensible thing; investing strongly at this point in the development of green energy sources. At the same time, by increasing rare earth costs, they are attempting to reduce other people's lead in green energy by putting those companies out of business. This becomes essentially an economic war to see who can be the first to get green energy costs so far below conventional energy prices that the other sources become useless. My guess would be that this will come about in about the next five years.

We've also all heard that the argument that wind energy is intermittent; that it doesn't produce sufficient power when needed. That is, in part true, but what's not understood is that it's an opportunity. The price given above (levelised MWh) already includes this; more wind turbines are installed than required and this is done in many different locations then at the moment of need enough power is available with the same or better availability characteristics as a conventional plant (N.B. the whole point of a large scale power grid is the fact that power sources can and do go offline unexpectedly). However, once we have done this install, what are we left with? Extremely cheap power supply in local areas at certain times. Very simple and somewhat inefficient power storage schemes, such as converting electricity to hydrogen, storing it suddenly become entirely sensible. If you do this next to the wind generators then at times of high wind you can make hydrogen; at times of low wind and high power demand you can burn the hydrogen for profit. This is the kind of scheme Slashdot readers should be thinking about.

By getting into the green energy game strongly, Germany becomes the logical place to develop these technologies. Long term, say over the next 100 years, this is really clever. The accusation that the Germans aren't thinking long term is clearly wrong.

* these numbers come from a DOE study which you can find broken down on Wikipedia's Cost of electricity by source page. Note that these figures are somewhat biased against wind since they include very high transmission costs. This is only true because new wind tends to be differently located from existing nuclear and conventional plants. Conventional plants claim cheap costs simply by pretending to be reusing the existing connections. In fact, if capacity is to be expanded then new connections have to be built somewhere. You will notice that sometimes nuclear is presented as cheaper than wind by

Re:Be patient

[DrBoumBoum]

"Calculating" would probably be a better fit.

Re:Be patient

[Pino Grigio]

A bit like Trigger's Broom. It's had 5 new handles and 7 new brushes, but it's still the same broom. Amazing to have been using the same broom for 25 years!

Backup and fill-in

[msobkow]

Most of the green energy sources are not viable by themselves. They're too unstable. Wind gusts cause surges for wind power. Solar doesn't produce anything at night. The only one that sounds like it might be viable is wave energy, and that only on shorelines that are never flat.

So to fill in, you need nuclear, coal, or gas plants.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[NFN_NLN]

Solar doesn't produce anything at night.

Don't limit yourself to solar panels. They have solar collectors that concentrate energy onto molten salt that never cools. Energy is added during the day but small amounts of heat are used to power turbines throughout the day/night.

http://inhabitat.com/worlds-first-molten-salt-solar-plant-produces-power-at-night/

Re:Backup and fill-in

[rahvin112]

Wind gusts do not cause power surges. Modern Turbines and windmills (the ones with the hundred foot long wings) spin at very low RPM. In high winds brakes are applied to keep the speed down because rapid rotation would destroy the windmill.

I just don't understand why people like you bring up a couple weaknesses of renewable energy then walk away like the only answer is non renewable fossil fuels. The real answer is sustainable energy production that uses multiple renewable sources. Base load from geothermal and nuclear, then you handle summer peak air conditioning load with PV and solar thermal, add in some wind for ~10% of base load, maybe some wave power for a few more percent. Some renewable gas generation from waste digestion (sewage or other organic waste), throw in Hydro where it's available and you have a system that's no entirely dependent on a single source of fuel. Not only that but you don't export several hundred billion dollars a year to hostile countries buying dino by-product to burn.

Energy generation is a national defense issue. Burning coal has made fish uneatable due to mercury content. Fossil fuels will run out someday and it is in the national interest to move away from non-renewable sources of energy because in the long run they will run out.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[Guspaz]

Right, because nobody ever solved the problem of "how to clean a mirror", and plants like SEGS that have been operating for over a quarter century without a significant drop in efficiency, they're just lies and propaganda.

In fact, the *newest* section of SEGS is 21 years old, and still going strong.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[Ex-MislTech]

They do cool down over time especially if you are pulling heat off them.

There are other options for power as well such as Tidal, Ocean Currents,
the Jet Stream, and Geothermal seems to be working pretty well in Iceland.

The "Geysers" geothermal station have been running in California for many years as work well.

The Antarctic Circumpolar current alone has 100+ "TIMES" all the flow of all
the rivers on earth combined.

It alone could power the southern hemisphere.

The Aquanator was how it could be done fairly easy.

There is no large scale development of it thou because the green agenda
is fake, and they do not push for real sustainable energy, its all a ruse and scam.

Thus this small scale rollout and blocking wind farms like T. Boone Pickens.

It is going to have a very rugged price in the not too distant future.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[geekoid]

Yes, modern nuclear plant is better. Base load, security, etc.

Yes, it is expensive for older plants. However modern design don't have those long term problems previous generation plants have.

There are reactor design that run off old waste, and the end product has return to background radiation level in 200-500 years. You could, quite literally, build the storage facility for it's wast as part of the plant.

Naturally, you should include the clean up as part of the price.

Personally, I would like to see the government start to build, operate and maintain these types of plants. Sell the energy at cost. Include take down as part of the cost.

Remove bonus incentive, C*O Pay, and board member approval will drop the cost to operate substantially. It will also make it safer, since there isn't an incentive to cut corners.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[ubergeek65536]

All you say is very interesting but how does it get me re-elected?

Re:Backup and fill-in

[interval1066]

Wind gusts cause surges for wind power.

This isn't a problem in modern turbines.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[rhakka]

are we glossing over that the "fraction of the time of current nuclear waste's lifespan" STILL exceeds the current lifespan of nearly every... modern nation?

It would be like if the "West Francia" had to bury nuclear waste. What, never heard of them? well gosh. I'm sure that pile of deadly, weapons-grade nuclear waste they left behind is around here *somewhere*.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[Anonymous Coward]

The Canadian CANDU reactors can extra huge amounts of energy out of the waste from American reactors, and even more from disused nuclear weapons. The newer CANDU designs are even more efficient, less expensive (do not require enriched fuel) and have twice as many safety layers as other designs. They also attain higher uptimes because they can be refuelled without a shutdown (this part of the design also means that they cannot melt down, because new fuel must be constantly added to maintain criticality)

Re:Backup and fill-in

[Grishnakh]

I just don't understand why people like you bring up a couple weaknesses of renewable energy then walk away like the only answer is non renewable fossil fuels.

I can't speak for the other naysayers, and instead of fossil fuels I believe nuclear is the way to go for base loads despite the idiots in Germany. However, when someone brings up a "weakness" of a particular renewable energy, while you use the word "weakness" to make it seem like a small problem, it may actually be a deal-killer. I'm not totally familiar with the climate in Germany, so let me make up a different example: what if this article were about Finland? If someone brought up solar power in Finland, they'd rightly be called an idiot, because solar power simply wouldn't work there very well. It's too far north, and there isn't much sunlight. In fact, since it's roughly at the same parallel as Alaska, I would assume that they have the same problem Alaska does with sunlight, where for half the year, there's almost no daylight at all. The molten salt idea isn't going to get around that problem.

Same goes for wind power. Only certain places are windy. Putting up a giant wind generator in a place where there's never much wind is a stupid thing to do. Google "USA wind map" and you can actually see which parts of this country have a lot of wind, and which don't. Not surprisingly, wind farms are generally built in the windier places. Locations near the ocean are great for wind; there's lots of wind over oceans, which is why sailboats were the primary means of long-distance human transportation for so long. Other locations, not so much.

Or how about wave power generation? (That's where you generate power from ocean waves.) This works great for places where there's an ocean nearby, but what if this article were about Switzerland? You can't generate power from waves in a mountain lake. Germany doesn't have a whole lot of shoreline either.

This is the problem with a lot of renewable energy: it's extremely locale-dependent. What may work great in one country or region won't work at all in another.

The real answer is sustainable energy production that uses multiple renewable sources. Base load from geothermal and nuclear, then you handle summer peak air conditioning load with PV and solar thermal, add in some wind for ~10% of base load, maybe some wave power for a few more percent.

What do you do in the winter? Your suggestion sounds great for where I live, Arizona, except for the bit about wave power (I can assure you that won't work here). The vast majority of our power usage is during the daytime, especially in the summer, when it's sunny, so it's really quite shameful that we haven't advanced solar technology more than we have. However, I'm pretty sure this isn't the case in Germany: it's farther north, it's not that sunny, it probably doesn't get that hot in the summer, and it gets cold in the winter and at night.

But you're right: electricity needs to come from multiple sources, but for base loads, nuclear is easily the way to go: it generates tons of power, it's not variable like solar or wind, it doesn't pollute the atmosphere that we have to breathe, if you're not stupid (like the USA) you can reprocess the waste and get lots more use out of it and have very little radioactive waste left over; the only problem is it needs to be located somewhere safe and seismically stable (not next to the ocean where a tsunami will hit it! and especially not next to the ocean and right near a fault line that causes a tsunami!), and you need to be able to dump the waste heat somewhere, usually into a nearby river, which really isn't great for the ecosystem there, but it's still a whole lot better than coal. As for renewables, I'm not from Germany or all that familiar with the climate, so I don't know which ones would work well there, but I think it's safe to say that wave power is probably out except maybe for the very northernmost cities. Denmark could make much better use of it though.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[Grishnakh]

Some humans ARE wise enough for nuclear. They're called "French". They've been doing it well for decades, and don't show any signs of shying away from it like their neighbors in Germany and Italy.

Maybe everyone else should just hire the French to build and operate all their nuclear plants, because everyone else has shown themselves to be utterly incompetent (Russia->Chernobyl, Japan->Fukushima, USA->Three Mile Island). Even the Italians voted to not use it, but instead to purchase nuclear-generated power from the French, because they knew they were simply too corrupt to be able to do it safely. The French don't seem to have all these problems everyone else does. Corruption? Doesn't seem to be a giant problem there unlike Italy and their Mafia. Shitty old reactor designs? Not a problem unlike Russia and Japan. High costs from having every single plant being a totally unique design with no standardization? Not a problem unlike the USA. Refusal to lower costs and reduce waste by reprocessing fuel? Not a problem unlike the stupid USA where they've never thought of using armed guards to protect nuclear facilities, even though they do it all the time for military nuclear installations. Reactors located on seashores next to fault lines so that an earthquake shuts down the reactor and then causes a tsunami flooding it? Not a problem either, the French have enough foresight to locate their reactors inland.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[HornWumpus]

Not to worry about Scandinavia. It will continue to be powered by clean, green, sustainable Vodka.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[tmosley]

Those fish aren't actually inedible. The mercury in 99% of saltwater fish is in the form of a non-toxic insoluble salt (it combines with selenium). This is why fish-eating nations like Japan aren't all dead of Mercury poisoning, and don't even exhibit the symptoms of low level chronic poisoning. Mercury on the land is much, MUCH more toxic and dangerous.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[inviolet]

[Environmentalism is a scam that led to] this small scale rollout and blocking wind farms like T. Boone Pickens.

There is a LOT more to the Pickens story than environmentalist meddling, tax breaks, and ROI. The whole project was a smokescreen, behind which Pickens was attempting to build a water supply business. Do a bit of googling, you'll be amazed at the guy's chutzpah.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[Nos9]

Honestly I'd find a good subduction point and toss it in there, sure it'll piss of the Morlocks... But a little sunlight takes care of them.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[Rockoon]

Just because Rome has fallen, that doesnt mean that we forget where the Colosseum is.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[SwedishChef]

Most of the green energy sources are not viable by themselves. They're too unstable. Wind gusts cause surges for wind power. Solar doesn't produce anything at night. The only one that sounds like it might be viable is wave energy, and that only on shorelines that are never flat.

So to fill in, you need nuclear, coal, or gas plants.

So which part of "hydro-electric" are you not thinking about. But you're right... we do need some "legacy" power generation to act as a battery. But if we can spread the wind and solar around enough we shouldn't need much more *new* legacy power sources. Just imagine what 15kw of solar power on every roof of every family home in the USA would produce. Most of it without also upgrading the grid. Add some actual batteries at those homes so they can be self-sustaining most of the night time hours and you can have the ultimate in UPS systems everywhere feeding any excess power into the grid.

And most importantly, no one has ever had to evacutate a city because the solar panels broke.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[EvilAlphonso]

Maybe, but Germans are still trying to find their nuclear waste that East Germany "treated" before the fall of the wall. They do know it is buried somewhere, nobody has a clue where.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[Pooua]

Oh, and 60 million euros for 5 MW comes out $12/watt. Contrast this with a nuclear power plant at about $2/watt. Then, there is the land use. Anything using 3 square miles is *huge*! And, for 5 MW?!?! You would have to be nuts to use this in place of conventional power sources.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[teh kurisu]

[Solar plants] probably wouldn't work all that great in the UK either; that island is famous for its fog and clouds and generally nasty weather.

Cloudy, yes. But the UK's reputation for being foggy comes from the 19th century when our cities were heavily polluted, due to coal-fired steam power being the primary source of energy. Fogs were frequent because they would form around the soot particles produced. It's not the case today.

Besides, we have a long coastline for our land area compared to the US, a bunch of strong tidal races, plenty of opportunity for wave energy, and in Shetland we have the most efficient wind farms in the world. Solar isn't even on our radar.

Re:Backup and fill-in

[DrBoumBoum]

I don't see how you could possibly argue that a modern plant design, with safety mechanisms in place that would have withstood the Japan quake and tsunami by passively stopping reactors in the quake -- yeah, they don't melt down because a loss of power causes things to shut down, they actually require power and stability to keep them going instead of needing those to stop -- and reactors that would turn our hundreds-of-centuries-dangerous nuclear waste into hundreds-of-years-dangerous nuclear waste, could possibly be a bad idea.

The problem is that the reactors you're talking about do not exist yet. Yes they are very neat on paper and everybody would like to have these, however you don't have in your briefcase the plans for a 1GW such reactor that one could start building tomorrow and operating in 3 years. So what you're really advocating is research, arguing that the benefits will be tremendous. Well I'm all for research, but then going this way I can't help thinking that solar power too has a tremendous potential and would benefit a lot from research. Sun is bathing the Earth on average with 5000 times the current total energy consumption of humanity, so if we could tap 0.2% of that input somehow we would kind of have solved the energy problem of humanity once and for all. Isn't this a nice perspective too? Sure there are technical challenges along the way (energy storage, long-distance distribution, smart grid, etc), but not necessarily infinitely more complex or impossible to solve than with nuclear power. So unless somebody comes with an argument convincing me that renewable energy cannot possibly be a solution to our energy needs, I will lean towards them because they have one hell of an advantage: they are intrinsically clean, renewable and safe, contrary to nuclear power which may become almost clean and safe after risk mitigation.

Which brings me to the other reason why I think nuclear reactors are a bad idea: what is going to happen once I say "ok nuclear is the way of the future, let's build NPP all over the world"? What "they" will build is not the nice and shiny reactors that you're talking about, what they are going to build is the cheapest piece of crap they'll be able to get away with, cutting as many corners as humanely possible, bribing as many politicians as necessary along the way, twisiting as many regulations as the creativity of their lawyers will permit. It's even worth than that: their gauge to decide how much "over-security" they are doing at any particular point in time is wether any serious accident happened lately or not. If not, some pointy-haired boss will show up with a plan to "cut costs" that will basically boil down to grind security measures until the next major accident happens, at which point the cycle restarts, just like it did with Fukushima, Deep Water Horizon, Bophal and countless others. The Mafia will keep on dumping nuclear waste in the ocean, in fact they're going to do it more and more, and China will start doing it too, trust me on this, western countries did dump a lot of nasty things in the ocean too in the past. And heck why on Earth wouldn't they do it?

So this is why I argue that even "a modern plant design, with safety mechanisms [...]" is very probably a bad idea: the scientists and engineers that promote and push for these technologies and would like to see the world covered in NPP are definitely meaning well and understandably frustrated at the current status quo which is the worst possible situation, and I personally trust (most of) them; however the guys who ultimately will be in charge of the completion of the plan I do not trust, I know these guys don't give a single molecule of shit about me, my children or my grand-children, they will do whatever to line their pockets and let us die face in the mud; they

Re:"Ahem"

[sycodon]

Candle makers across Europe are building up their inventory.

Folly

[Pino Grigio]

There's no "sustainable" energy supply large enough to replace them without massive subsidies. Here in the UK we can expect 30% rises in bills over the next few years directly attributable to Green policy AND STILL we will need to build peak capacity using traditional sources. Moreover, this extra capacity cannot just be switched on or off. It needs to be running more or less constantly. In other words, the "sustainable energy" initiatives we are implementing are an extremely costly folly. To replace one coal fired power station with wind, for example, would require covering an area the size of Greater London with turbines. Total insanity. Regardless, Germany will build more coal fired plants and buy French nuclear generated capacity to replace its own.

Clean baseload = science fiction

[sjbe]

Unless/until we can develop some form of industrial scale fusion, any of the base load options (nuclear, gas, coal, oil) are going to be necessary and will come with a serious environmental price tag attached. Solar and wind need to be developed and widely used but absent some miracles in battery technology and/or transmission losses (high temp superconductors) they will have limits.

If Germany wants to use fossil fuels instead of nuclear that is their prerogative but they are simply trading one problem for another one, possibly worse than the original. I don't really understand what they think they will accomplish other than to mollify people who are (reasonably or unreasonably) terrified of nuclear fission.

Re:Clean baseload = science fiction

[Xtifr]

I don't really understand what they think they will accomplish other than to mollify people who are (reasonably or unreasonably) terrified of nuclear fission.

I think that's exactly what they think they'll accomplish. Nuclear power simply has bad PR.

Me, I've been hoping for more work on solar power satellites ever since I read Gerard O'Neill's book a couple of decades ago. (Note that part of what killed government interest in O'Neill's plans back in the '80s was the declining cost of energy!) But I agree that no one solution looks likely to meet our needs.

Re:Clean baseload = science fiction

[symbolset]

Nuclear does not just have bad PR. It also has no plan to dispose of the radioactive waste created - not just the fuel, all reactors create many tons of radioactive steel or concrete also. Or if there is such a plan, I don't know it. Please feel free to post it in reply.

Re:Clean baseload = science fiction

[Nemyst]

Nuclear is expensive, there's no denying it. Decommissioning a plant will cost money, will be complicated, there's no way around it. That's why nuclear plants tend to be built for the long term. If they can run for 50 years, their initial and final costs are amortized and the plants can even turn a profit.

If costs are not an issue, proper plans do exist to store the radioactive materials off in sealed containers. No, it's not ideal, but we're not supposed to destroy nuclear plants every 5 years for whatever reason politicians can think of. I'd still gladly trade even hundreds of hard steel containers buried under some area of a desert than all the pollution of coal/gas plants. Remember though that the structural materials make for a small part of all waste currently generated, though a lot of that comes from not being able to reprocess spent fuel.

That's the thing people need to realize: there is no ideal energy source. Everything is a matter of tradeoffs, and which tradeoff we wish to take.

Re:Gah

[zzen]

I agree. This story is such an excellent example of why environmentalism can be so dangerous and *must* be subjected to intense criticism, not adopted automatically "because that's what we should all do, right?".

It plays on people's fears, causes them to act irrationally and in the end can achieve environmentally negative results - as in the case of Germany introducing 20 new coal power-plants - the same that we've been so fighting so many years to get rid off, since they pollute the air and deplete non-renewable resources. (Yeah, my country neighbors with Germany, so I actually care about the resulting pollution.)

Yay! Progress... :(

Badass expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Like all decisions driven by irrational fears, this is a bad move.
Germany already has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe (22 Cents/kWh versus 12 Cents/kWh in France, for example) and switching to super-expensive solar power and unstable wind turbines will prove to be eye-wateringly expensive, especially since there's very little energy storage capacity (eg. storage basins) and the existing energy transport infrastructure (ie. pylons across the country) is proving to be rather inadequate and has to be upgraded, naturally at huge economic and political cost (read: lots of NIMBY demonstrations).

Germans are very unrealistic about a lot of things (I'm German, BTW), and I think a lot of people are going to come down with a loud thump in this country when they're finally presented with the inevitable sky-high bills for all this energy utopia.

Hard figures: I'm reckoning on electricity prices of around 30 Cents/kWh in 5 years or so.

My 30 cents to the discussion.

Cheers,
Gerald

Re:Badass expensive

[couchslug]

You can buy electricity from France and put off the reckoning.

Short Sighted. The Cost of This is Going to be Bad

[RudyHartmann]

This will mean more and more hydrocarbons will have to be used to sustain the German economy. This is a hysterical political response from form uniformed and misguided environmental do gooders. I made an earlier post in another article about thorium reactors. These have no where the dangerous consequences of uranium/plutonium reactors. Thorium reactors have already been built in the US. But the reason why they never went commercial is because you cannot produce nuclear weapons from them in a practical sense.They better hope that fusion becomes viable soon. But I doubt it. People need to be more educated themselves and stop listening to lying politicians and self serving demagogues of fanciful ideologies.

Re:promoting green jobs

[interkin3tic]

Except that it's not a level playing field. Fossil fuels get heavily subsidized. According to this, (which I have not independently verified or checked sources on) solar would be cheaper if that was turned around.

At the very least "less optimal economy" seems like disingenuous or stupid way to judge the cost/benefit to me. The costs of global warming, asthma, coal-related deaths, and smog would massively tilt the scale in favor of green. We've let the economists and corporations convince us that fossil fuels' external costs will never ever ever have to be paid off though, just as we let economists and irresponsible politicians convince us that deficits don't matter.

China shows the way: one child family

[jclaer]

Easy: One child family for 5 generations, population drops a factor of 32. Revert to burning wood.

Re:Gah

[VitaminB52]

If you build the right type of nuclear fission power plants, then they can 'burn' the waste products from uranium burning plants. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_breeder_reactor .

They're not dropping nuclear

[afidel]

They aren't really dropping nuclear, they are exporting it across the Rhine to France. The analysis I've seen is the only way the Germans keep up with historic demand growth short of tanking their economy is to build more interconnects to France and let the French operate those horrible nuclear plants.

Re:They're not dropping nuclear

[antifoidulus]

Well there are serious doubts that, in Germany anyway, electricity use will continue to grow at all, let alone at historic rates. Increased efficiency combined with a population that at best has near zero growth means that really the only place increased demand can even come from is industry, but even that is unlikely. Although the German manufacturing base has fares better than most of it's developed world counterparts, it is still subject to the same prevailing trends. Ultimately I think that at least a couple of these plants will not be replaced at all as there simply will be less of a demand for electricity.

Re:Power purchase from france

[prisoner-of-enigma]

It doesn't seem very green to cancel your nuclear plants only to keep buying nuclear power from your neighbor.

Ah, but you're assuming Germany's anti-nuclear stance is evidence of a desire to follow a Green policy or to make power generation safer. It is not. It does, however, make for great political theater for the brainless masses to consume. "Nuclear BAD!" has become so ingrained on the consciousness of the masses that they just believe it without thinking.

Re:Gah

[MimeticLie]

That's why it's happening now, but it couldn't have happened without decades of attacks on nuclear power by some environmentalists.

Coal? Really?

[Frangible]

Wait, what? While I thought doing away with nuclear in the hopes that solar and wind will be economical in the short term and not throw Germany's economy somewhere south of Greece was a bit hopeful, replacing it with coal? Really? Coal?

This isn't even environmentalism. This is just poor, emotional decision making.

Yes, technically coal is "renewable" via long term geological processes but you can breed crazy amounts of fissile material and recycle spent nuclear fuel so that's really not much of an argument.

Japan's new PM also intends to close down all of Japan's fission plants (though I didn't see a timetable) and I'm sort of worried that will just end up making more coal plants as well.

Re:Wrong direction

[Grishnakh]

So, Japan got hit by an earthquake and the reactor failed, shit happens, without risk there is no gain...

There's acceptable risks and unacceptable risks. Locating a nuclear plant on a seashore, next to a fault line, is not an acceptable risk, it's downright dumb. We've done the exact same thing here in the USA with a nuclear plant in California that was on the shore and right next to a fault line.

If you're going to do totally stupid stuff like this, you shouldn't be using nuclear power at all. Leave it to someone smarter, like the French, who apparently don't do these idiotic things and have been running tons of nuclear plants safely for decades.

Re:"Ahem"

[arpad1]

I wonder if it's premature to short the euro? If Germany really does follow through it can't help but pull down the value of the euro which brings up the question of who'll bail out Greece the next time they spend their way towards oblivion?

Scams and Games

[Tom]

I live in Germany, and I've been following this closely.

First of all, a former government had already decided on a stop on nuclear power, at a much earlier date. The current government reversed that as one of the first major things. It took Fukushima and a huge public outcry for them to reconsider.

So that's the first scam - those who are now hailed as the ones leading Germany into a brighter, greener future had to be forced to walk that path.

The main replacements for the nuclear plants will be coal plants. Which, as everyone familiar with the subject, put out not only more CO2, but also more radiation. Their advantage is that they are less likely to fail catastrophically with nuclear fallout. That's the second scam - energy generation in Germany will actually be a lot less clean and less green.

The choice to go with coal is mostly due to the responsible people clinging to the "baseline" concept, which says you need a certain amount of power stations that output the same amount of electrical energy no matter what the time of day, climate, temperature, season, etc.
That's the third scam, because it is an outdated model. With 21st century technology and systems, the variability of alternative energy sources can be compensated over types or distances and easily create a reliable baseline equivalent. However, those are distributed, decentralized systems, and the technology and business models of big power corporations are designed for large, centralized power stations. They need time to change (if they even want to), and the government has been nice to give them that time. Did anyone yell "campaign contributions"? Please... you have such a bad image of politicians...

Viewed as a whole, the entire thing is a game to stay in power and to find a middle way to please both the corporate sponsors and the voting public. But it has no vision, no conviction and no drive. With the next election, or if public opinion changes, everything will be up for grabs again.

When you read something about politics that mentions a far-future date, always count how many elections are inbetween now and then...

Re:promoting green jobs

[Solandri]

Fossil fuels get heavily subsidized. According to this, (which I have not independently verified or checked sources on) solar would be cheaper if that was turned around.

Alas, I wish that were true, but it isn't. The subsidies for fossil fuels appears huge because the vast majority of energy generated comes from fossil fuels. Once you normalize by the amount of energy generated (p6, table ES5), you find that the subsidy for fossil fuels is about $1.10 per MWh, while the subsidy for solar is around $24.34 per MWh. You could completely eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and it would have almost no impact on solar's cost-competitiveness.

At the very least "less optimal economy" seems like disingenuous or stupid way to judge the cost/benefit to me. The costs of global warming, asthma, coal-related deaths, and smog would massively tilt the scale in favor of green.

Nobody seems immune from this. When pro-nuclear people point out the cost of renewable technologies in terms of deaths (wind kills approx 4x more people per kWh than nuclear, solar is around 10x more once you factor in rooftop installation, and the worst power-related accident in history by far was a hydroelectric dam failure) or materials (wind and solar require approx 3-4x more construction materials per TWh than nuclear), renewable advocates likewise pretend these problems can simply be ignored.

Germany and a few other EU countries have recognized the danger from wind, and established exclusion zones around wind turbines where people are prohibited from entering (600m radius for Germany, 500m for others). But if you calculate the area of the exclusion zones, you find that it's much larger than the evacuation zone of an equivalent-power nuclear plant during an emergency, only these are permanent while the wind turbine is operational. Oddly, most renewable advocates are surprised when they hear this. They shouldn't be. If you advocate a technology, you should learn everything you can about it - benefits and drawbacks.

There is (probably not surprisingly) a widespread tendency for people to see primarily the benefits of the technology they favor, while ignoring or downplaying the drawbacks. In my experience, this is true of advocates of for fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear - none are immune. (I am pro-nuclear, and about a third of my posts are correcting other pro-nuclear people who are under-emphasizing the risks of nuclear.)

Molten salt thorium

[Anonymous Coward]

The world has settled on very very very expensive, highly highly highly radioactive uranium to power nuclear reactors, so that we get neeto byproducts like being able to build nuclear bombs and blow other people to kingdom come! This has left us with a nuclear power grid that is fragile (one worker in Arizona switches off a single piece of equipment and 4 states go dark), dangerous, expensive and unable to scale into the 21st century. World war 2 started --in part-- as a fight over oil, and was ended with --in part-- nuclear weapons. Since that time, nuclear power has been used to power the world. Very expensive uranium. Thorium is wildly cheaper to build a plant for, burns much more completely, can be made intrinsically safe (if there is any kind of failure, reactions automatically stop with no external intervention, produces a million times less waste, and the waste that is produced has very short half lives --one reaction product has a half life of 12 minutes, the other about 90 minutes). We have tried one of the more dangerous types of nuclear power for about 50 years. No one wants to try a safer way.

Re:Gah

[gorgonite]

That's a really dumb remark. Germany has shut down the oldest, most Fukushima-like reactors. They cannot be magically remodelled into fancy new reactors.
From there, there are options:

• build reactors according to present designs, unsafe, expensive, prabably you would call that dumb, too
• wait for the next nuclear generation. That's not even dumb if you need power now
• build fossil power stations. If they use natural gas, that can be sensible
• develop renewables

From a german point of view the last option is more attractive than from an US point of view, because Germany has lots of experience with renewable energy.
Gorgonite

Re:"Ahem"

[Eunuchswear]

fed printing dollars = EUR worth more dollars.

Please short Euro if you want to.

Re:real numbers

[Pooua]

Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada, might not agree with that assessment.

Re:I don't think you understand

[Eunuchswear]

After 50 years of neutron bombardment, even the concrete and steel of the containment is radioactive. What are you going to do with THAT?

Leave it on site for the 15 - 20 years it takes to cool.

You could of looked that up you know.

Re:Wrong direction

[TheTurtlesMoves]

At the time, the idea of plate tectonics was just gaining traction in academic circles. Knowledge of a that fault line simply did not really exist back then.

Re:"Ahem"

[vtcodger]

"Candle makers across Europe are building up their inventory."

As indeed they should be. If any large country in the world has the will and technical ability to make renewable energy work, it is Germany. But I simply don't see how they can pull this off. Wind has major limitations. Germany is too close to the pole for solar to provide much power in Winter. They don't have large undeveloped hydro resources. They don't have that much in the way of oil. They might have 20 years worth of natural gas at current consumption levels (and might not), but they will burn through that pretty quickly if they use it to replace existing power sources. Germans are already pretty energy efficient.

I wish them luck. Really. But I don't think this is going to end well.

Re:promoting green jobs

[olau]

Germany and a few other EU countries [caithnesswindfarms.co.uk] have recognized the danger from wind, and established exclusion zones around wind turbines where people are prohibited from entering (600m radius for Germany, 500m for others).

That surprised me. I tried googling for exclusion zone and windfarms without finding anything conclusive (the information in the link you gave is incoherent and produced by a organization "run by a group of people concerned about the proliferation of windfarms"). I'm sorry, but I think you are misinformed.

I can tell you that there's no such zones in Denmark, which has been a frontrunner of wind energy until the right-wing parties assumed government ten years ago. It's true that you can't today build a wind turbine next to a residential area because of noise and shadow issues (and possibly safety), but there's no problem standing next to one of those fellows. I've done so myself on several occasions.

Not to downplay noise and shadow issues, it's actually a problem in a so crowded country as Denmark where the nearest neighbour is never far off. Current thinking seems to favour enormous off-shore wind turbines.

Re:promoting green jobs

[angel'o'sphere]

Exclusion zones are mainly for offshore wind parks. I can not find any source for an exclusion zone in germany as you claim. A huge amount of wind mills are just build on fields for wheat or corn. The farmers just farm their land like usually ...

Re:Good grief....

[Commontwist]

A quick wiki look shows that, yes, you are right that part of Germany has earthquakes up to the 6 range. (6.5 is the current max, it seems).

However, given that the Richter scale is based on magnitudes, a 7.0 being ten times stronger than 6.0 so a 9.0 is a thousand times stronger, comparing the strength of quakes in Germany to the one that damaged the nuclear reactor in Japan.... Plus, it was the tsunami that caused the problem not the 9.0+ earthquake. Given that an old design was able to handle a 9.0 quake I would think Germany is relatively safe unless they are even older or someone's skimping safety measures. If they don't like the old designs then build one of the much more safer reactors of the newest generation not coal!

Not to mention that apparently mining for coal in Germany seems to trigger those same earthquakes enough for local people to protest. >_ So, not only does burning coal release more radiation per day than a new modern nuclear plant MINING it via blasting triggers earthquakes in Germany.

Yeah, that ought to get votes...

Re:Good grief....

[angel'o'sphere]

Plus, it was the tsunami that caused the problem not the 9.0+ earthquake. Given that an old design was able to handle a 9.0 quake I would think Germany is relatively safe unless they are even older or someone's skimping safety measures.

It surprises me that you can correctly point out facts but still draw wrong conclusions.
The quake in Japan in the seas east of the plant was 9.x ... The quake at the plant side was perhaps 6.x (and that is what we are talking about) The quake in Japan destroyed the power lines connecting the plant to the national grid. Hence it could not use external power for cooling. Hence it was relying on its emergency power generators. The Tsunami destroyed those emergency power generators.
If we have a magnitude 6.x quake in germany we can expect also that some of the power lines fail.

So, not only does burning coal release more radiation per day than a new modern nuclear plant MINING it via blasting triggers earthquakes in Germany.

First of all this are not earthquakes. It is collapsing mine shafts hundreds of years old that cause those problems.
Secondly, as pointed out often enough: german coal plants dont emit radiation, basically none in the western hemisphere does, except perhaps in the USA. The ages old reports, how dangerous coal plants are, are all debunked since decades. German plants use air filters to scrub out all dust, that includes uranium. Above that we mainly burn coal that contains not much uranium.

Finally: it is a difference to weather an 6.x earthquake that is dozens or 100ds of km away or to weather one that is directly below you and causes chasm directly under your plant (the latter is the situation in germany)