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German Chancellor Scholz speaks out against new nuclear power (www.reuters.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Growth in german wind capacity is slowing. Soo... then the plan is to keep on with lignite and gas? Am I missing something?

Installed Wind Capacty - Germany

German Wind Capacity

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's also common knowledge that the more often you build something, the lower its price tends to go as that knowledge spreads. It's part of the reason it's so expensive to build trains in the US and so cheap in South Korea and Spain.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago

This famously isn’t true for nuclear power. It just keeps getting more expensive.

The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526

And this research was done before Fukushima, which increased costs even further.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is just more reasons to prioritise the already cheaper renewables, isn't it?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like climate change makes this a yes and situation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It is not a yes and, because urgency favors renewables even more. If it wouldn't be for bureaucratic and political hurdles, from planning to operation is about 2 years for onshore wind and solar sites. For things like retrofitting a small solar plant on a residential or industrial building it can be as short as three months and for balcony solar power as a small hobby project it is as little as a day of planning + the delivery time + a day of installation.

Nuclear plants on the other side take minimum a decade, more likely two decades and that is despite strong political and bureaucratic support that is needed to get it going at all. Otherwise with citizens protest it would stay in court indefenitely.