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
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Compared to nuclear, renewables are:
Why would anyone waste money on the worse option? An analogy: you need lunch and you can choose between a nutritious and tasty $5 sandwich from an independent deli or a $10 expensive mass-produced sandwich from a chain. The independent deli is tastier, cheaper, more filling, and healthier, and it’s easier for you to get since it’s on your way to work. Why would you ever get the $10 sandwich?
According to you, I'm an idiot, and yet no one has debunked a single one of my arguments. No one has even tried to, they immediately crumple like a tissue as soon as they're asked directly to disprove the FACT that nuclear is more expensive, slower to provision and more environmentally damaging than renewables. If I'm so stupid it should be pretty easy to correct my errors?
Either that or you can loftily declare yourself above this argument, state that I am somehow moving the goalposts, say that “there’s no point, I’ll never change your mind” or just somehow express some amount of increduiity at my absolutely abhorrent behaviour by asking you such a straightforward question? You may also choose “that’s not the question I want to talk about, we should answer MY questions instead!”
The criticism is extraordinarily simple and justified.
Which is better, Renewables and Nuclear or Renewables and Fossil Fuels?
Germany could have had an almost entirely fossil free grid by now, but instead they chose renewables & fossil fuels.
Please provide a source for your claim that 100% renewable energy is not possible.
Actually you can save yourself the time, because here’s two sources which show it is possible.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261920316639?via%3Dihub
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-05843-2
Or (as this is in the context of Germany) one of the studies even modeling different acceptance levels of renewable energy in the transitioning until 2050:
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/paths-to-a-climate-neutral-energy-system.html
You forgot:
Renewables have their place, but they cannot sustain the entire grid. At this point, going all in on renewables means either prolonging fossil fuel usage, or condemning vast swaths of the population to brownouts and energy poverty.
How are renewables more responsive to changes in demand? I don’t know how to make the sun shine brighter or the wind blow harder. That seems like one of the weakest points for the case. And how much much safer are they as a function of unit of power generated?
In any case the argument between renewables or nuclear baffles me. Both are, in my view at least, an improvement over our current primary fossil fuel power generation systems.
Edit: I mistyped fossil as fissile, which while funny undercut my sentiment.
By angling the wind turbine blades, rotating the turbines, pitching the rotors, using breaks, gearboxes, etc.
It doesn’t really matter how weak this point is, to be honest. It’s just a bonus. The ultimate trifecta of “renewables are cheaper, better for the environment and faster to build” mean that renewables always win.
They’re both an improvement over fossil fuels, sure, but one is clearly the superior choice and resources are limited. It’s very important that we push for the right choices to be made to reduce the impact of climate change as quickly and effectively as possible. It’s literally one of the most important issues facing our species.
Every $1 spent on nuclear power is basically stolen from renewables. $1 spent on renewables generates 150%-200% more power than nuclear and it does it safer and cheaper. Why invest in nuclear at all.
Well I suppose there is a lot to unpack there but I want to hold to the one point. Renewables are absolutely in no way more responsive to demand. I’m not sure where you got that, but it seems clear you don’t even want to defend it when challenged.
It is in fact their Achilles heel, and regularly pointed out as the one reason why they are an incomplete solution requiring other solutions like batteries, or other storage and distribution.
Simply pitching blades cannot increase power in accordance with demand spikes. One would expect the current brake, blade pitch, and other controls to be set for current maximum generation capability given the current wind.
It’s easy to turn off wind turbines. It’s much harder to turn off nuclear reactors. That’s what responsive to demand means.
Without disputing any of your other points, you're just dead wrong about this one. Look up dispatchability. Turbine driven power can go from zero to full multimegawatt power and back in very little time since we control the fuel. You cannot turn up the wind, nor the sun at night.
Nuclear power can be shut down very quickly, even more quickly in gen4. You have good points and you need not disrupt them by claiming renewables are good for demand response.
To clarify, I mean steam turbines but the same is true of wind turbines. Like you said, easy to disconnect them from generation. The difference is maximum power is limited by fuel rather than nature.
Again, I am talking about NUCLEAR VS. RENEWABLES. If you bring up fossil fuels once more I will just block you.
Provide a source of a nuclear power plant in operation which is capable of going from 100% to 0% in seconds.
Threatening to block somebody for challenging your statement? Okay. I didn't bring up fossil fuel there. Nuclear power requires fuel too. And I didn't claim a reactor could be powered down in seconds, but quickly. In any case, generation can go to zero even more quickly as just like a wind turbine a steam turbine can be disconnected from the generator.
The point is very simple though, nuclear can increase to full power when decided upon by plant operators. Renewable energy cannot; it can only increase to current maximum potential given natural conditions. I'm still pro renewable energy, I just don't like misinformation.
No, a nuclear power plant turbine can’t just get disconnected and reconnected in seconds. Provide proof of your claim. The turbines are fucking huge and disengaging them is an extremely complex process that takes a lot of human intervention and a long time to do safely.
I assumed you were talking about combined cycle turbines because I hadn’t considered that someone would make such a wild claim about nuclear power, so I apologise for overestimating you.
Nuclear power plant energy output is controlled in a few ways - varying the amount of fissile material, varying the amount of control rods, adjusting coolant flow, and adjusting leakage. None of these processes can be safely performed quickly. Going by the most favourable estimates, modern reactors are able to respond at rates of around 0.3% to 2% per minute. So to go from 30% to 100% would take at least 45 minutes. Which is about 45 minutes slower than wind turbines.
I remind you that my original claim was that wind power output can be lowered faster than nuclear power plant’s output is. That was my claim. You have completely misinterpreted what I wrote, wilfully or ignorantly, and you accuse me of spreading misinformation. Yet you continue to post falsehood after falsehood, just a bunch of absolute propaganda. I see right through the bullshit astroturfing.
Again, I have not made any claim about seconds. I have nevertheless almost certainly misunderstood, and likely as a result of ignorance. I apologize; I've been to hasty. You're clearly well spoken on the topic, and I appreciate your sentiments. I found it a bit surprising that one of you primary claims was typically the only significant downside presented about renewable sources. In that way, I happen to think your stated value of 45 minute transition is still faster than we can make the wind blow harder.
However, with further thought I suppose if you have enough renewable generation equipment to generate 100% demanded loaded even at minimum natural capacity, then you would indeed have a much better response to demand. I hadn't thought of that before, but that is the dream and something for which we should strive.
I'm not actually sure the specific numbers for gen4 reactors, but I feel until none of the pie graph is fossil fuel, all research for improved generation methods is a worthy endeavor. I was a bit accusatory, but I don't think I'm alone there. I didn't mean to spread propaganda, and I don't think you have either. What I meant was strictly that the information seemed incorrect. I'm probably wrong; I often am.
Also, happy to continue to peruse nuclear research and development, I agree that it’s worthwhile to try to improve the technology and to hope for breakthroughs in the field, I’m hopeful that nuclear fusion break-even and beyond can be achieved in my lifetime. But we need to take drastic action now to reduce fossil fuels and that means investing heavily in renewables asap.
I appreciate the apology but you’re still getting mixed up - I think we have a differing definitions of the word “responsive to demand”. You seem to have taken it as meaning, “we can scale up power generation when demand increases, and it’s dispatchable” which wasn’t what I meant - although I probably added to the confusion by improperly using the words “flexible”. I know that wind and solar PV aren’t dispatchable - solar thermal can be, same for solar electrochemical, but those are a bit oddball. For dispatchability, pumped storage really needs to be brought in to the picture, though I think hydrogen should be used much more for transport.
All I meant was that wind turbines are better at reducing electrical output and managing power grid frequency response than nuclear is, not that a given wind turbine is better at producing electricity at any given moment that we need more of it. I think that with scale and distributed power grids, the disadvantage of the variability of renewables becomes less of an issue anyways, but yeah, with all of the options available, there’s really no reason at the moment to increase the installed base of commercial nuclear power plants, and that’s all I really care about - reducing co2eq emissions as quickly and cheaply as possible. Whichever technology achieves that has my full throated support.
I’m no longer mixed up. I mistook your meaning. You’re just right. Thank you for clarifying and helping me understand.
I was rummaging this is probably the main reason for which they are pushed back in an excessively popular narrative in favour of nuclear: of course it is way harder to exercise capitalism when you can't centralize power and control, with renewables instead it could probably only exist a form of cooperative enterprise with the business of managing the energy production, immagine the loath of some individuals even acknowledging some utterly leftist term such as "cooperative" even exists, let alone even works. Better.
(I am German, so please excuse my grammar mistakes. If you are a German, too, the humanist party has a great position paper on nuclear energy: https://www.pdh.eu/programmatik/kernenergie/)
While reading your list, several points stood out for me.
I assume you are talking about the inherent costs of the technology, but that is not where the costs come from. Nuclear power plants are not mass produced and there is constantly changing regulation. The petrol lobby is partly to blame for that, as they have a strong interest in making building nuclear power plants difficult and expensive. https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/why-nuclear-power-plants-cost-so-much-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/ https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/
https://www.blog.geoffrussell.com.au/post/nuclear-may-or-may-not-be-expensive-but-it-s-much-faster-to-build-than-renewables
Additionally, the low hanging fruits (the places that can easily be used for windparks) were already picked in Germany. It's becoming more and more difficult to find more places where windparks can be built.
That stood out as especially weird. How did you come to that conclusion? If you are referring to nuclear waste: "Nuclear power causes least damage to the environment, finds systematic survey" https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-nuclear-power-environment-systematic-survey.html
"Why I Don’t Worry About Nuclear Waste" https://archive.ph/ZJQCj or, if you prefer some informational tweets by the same author: https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856.
Last but not least, I highly recommend this book (I've read it, but it's German): "Atommüll - Ungelöstes, unlösbares Problem ?: Technisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Aspekte der Endlagerung hochaktiven Atommülls. Ein Versuch zur Versachlichung der Debatte." https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B09JX2ZRB3/
Also, take into account the land usage.
Non-issue. Nuclear fuel is virtually inexhaustible and will last us literally until the sun explodes. https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/nuclear-fission-fuel-is-inexhaustible/1257
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
You might also be interested in the discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36744699
Haven't you heard about small modular reactors (SMR)? One prominent company is Oklo (named after the natural nuclear reactor), another is Nuscale https://www.nuscalepower.com.
Also, we have vessels that are powered by nuclear reactors since several decades.
I assumed the data was well known: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh With newer designs ("walk-away safety") the nuclear death rate will likely continue to fall.
I tend to agree here. My main argument against nuclear power is the ongoing competence crisis. We need people that can maintain these plants for decades, but education and scientific literacy are in decline, while ideologies and social conflicts are on the rise. That is not a good environment for radioactive material with malicious use cases.
Could you elaborate?
How? Solar and wind have fluctuating production. One main challenge with solar is to get rid of excess electricity quickly, before it damages the grid. Germany already PAYS other countries to use their electric power on sunny days (i. e. the electricity cost becomes negative). That problem will become much worse. Plus, when it is sunny in Germany, it is likely sunny in surrounding countries, too, so they will have the same problem. There is a great talk by Hans-Werner Sinn touching this topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5trsBP9Cn4, see 23:04).
I am not favoring nuclear energy, btw.
Thanks for the reply, it means a lot that you’re willing to engage with my actual arguments.
When I say cheaper, I refer to a metric known as TCOE - total cost of electricity. It represents all of the various costs required to put a kWh of electrical energy onto the grid.
Regulatory controls obviously are a major factor to the cost of nuclear, but we can’t just waive all regulation to get cheaper electricity, that would be incredibly dangerous.
The thing is, with renewables, once they’re built, they continue to generate electricity for many, many years and require no fuel. Whereas nuclear power requires that a material be extracted from the ground, refined, handled and stored to very precise specifications, and then the waste products from that also have to be managed in a very particular (and expensive) way. You’re essentially arguing that nuclear could be cheaper than renewables if we removed ideological barriers to nuclear, but that’s just not true. Nuclear has very expensive costs associated with it that will mean it’s always more expensive than renewables. The gap will only widen with time as we get better at producing the renewables, too.
For your faster to provision article, it’s truly mind-boggling what the author writes. Did you actually read it or did you just copy-paste links)? Do you actually agree with everything written in that article?
The author has many cherry-picked examples, such as comparing how much electricity supply was added in a single year for various countries. That comparison obviously favours nuclear, because a nuclear power plant takes decades to build, but the year it comes online it provides a huge glut of (expensive) electrical supply. The obvious response to that graph is to divide each installation by the number of years needed to provision it. I checked that out manually for a few of the nuclear plants mentioned in the article and the energy gains essentially vanish into meaninglessness.
Also, maybe it’s a bit of an unfair criticism but the line where he wrote “Why does a nuclear power plant need multiple coolers for the reactor? An aeroplane only has one!” was one of the dumbest things I have ever read in my life.
No it isn’t. At present, 0.8% of German land area is used by wind farms and there are plans to increase that to 2%. For comparison, agricultural land uses over 50% of the land. Feel free to provide a source for your claim though.
For less environmentally damaging - there are a lot of factors. The us bconcrete, the use of water, extraction of uranium, the biodiversity loss of clearing land for a power plant, the large amount of industrial processes and traffic to commission. Same to operate. Same to decommission. The handling of waste products. The irradiation of water. The co2e emissions of nuclear. I could go on and on.
Your archive link didn’t work and I don’t use Twitter. But I’m not particularly interested in the biased opinion of individuals either way. The environmental impact of nuclear is a well known issue. If you want more information you can just look it up.
I don’t speak German but I did Google around and found this, translated from the German wiki:
The memorandum was partly criticized. According to the Green Party politician Hans-Josef Fell , the CO 2 savings potential is massively overestimated [26] , as the journalist Wolfgang Pomrehn calculates at Telepolis [27] , he only states a maximum initial savings potential of 4% of annual emissions . A publication by the IPPNW also accuses the authors of ignoring the study situation and market developments by claiming that there is only one alternative between fossil and nuclear power generation
Your book is written by a guy employed by the nuclear industry. That isn’t going to be an unbiased view exactly, is it?
Nothing is infinite, so that’s a dumb claim right out the gate.
“identified uranium resources [would last] roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total”. Including undiscovered sources. I don’t need to tell you that todays current consumption of nuclear power is really, really low in comparison to other forms of energy, approximately 10%. If we used even 30%, that 240 years becomes 80 years.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/
Breeder reactors aren’t available and can be dismissed the same way cold fusion is. Worth investing in research in case it’s useful in the future but for now it is not viable.
For decentralisation - smaller reactors is more decentralised but even more expensive and higher environmental impact per kWh. And it’s still less decentralised than renewables.
Even your own link shows that renewables are as safe or safer than nuclear, dude, what the fuck are you thinking about. Additionally, the sources of the data on fatalities caused by renewables are the most ridiculously cherry picked examples I have ever seen, you should look up the paper as it’s genuinely hilarious. And looking exclusively at death rates per kWh is not exactly the whole picture. When it comes to accidents, according to Benjamin Sovacool, nuclear power plants rank first in terms of their economic cost, accounting for 41 percent of all property damage, more than even fossil fuel plants. I couldn’t find information on the number of injuries but I’d bet any amount of money that nuclear causes more injuries than renewables.
More reliable - it’s kind of a “sum of its parts” thing. The sun is always there, so is the wind and the waves and the oceans and geothermal energy. If we don’t have one of those then we’re all fucked anyways. Uranium is a resource which can run out, have shortages, have breakages in the supply chain, and so on. Fewer accidents, less of a target for people who want to disrupt it, if a bunch of them are destroyed in an earthquake then it wouldn’t cause huge disruption, and so on.
And finally, responsiveness. It’s very easy to turn on and off wind and hydro generators on demand, for example. You can look up “smart grid” if you want to learn more. Nuclear is much, much slower than Solar to turn off and on, so Solar can be though of as baseline power and wind/hydro provide conditioning.
https://smartgrid.ieee.org/bulletins/june-2019/maintaining-power-quality-in-smart-grid-the-wind-farms-contribution
Final question: If you had the choice between buying magic power banks that fully charged your phone once a day for free, no questions asked, for $50 each, and you can buy one a day, or a regular one you have to buy uranium for to fill your phone with, which costs $150 and you can buy one every 10 years, which would you choose?
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Why do people have diverse stock portfolios?
Hedging and diversification is important. Unforseen consequences and unknown future conditions can screw up your long term plans for 100% renewables. The more diverse our energy portfolio is, the unknowns become easier to weather.
That is the answer for why we build and research something that is more expensive and may divert resources away from better options. To argue that there is literally no place for energy development other than purely renewable is a difficult position to defend.
Your sandwich analogy is lacking because we're talking about far future consequences of our decision. Maybe you plan to eat the sandwich a week from today. Which do you buy? You don't have enough information to determine which will be better in a week. Do you pick the chain store's because it's full of preservatives? Do you decide to buy both in case one of them gets moldy just to make sure you have anything to eat?
The consequences of developing or not developing potential viable solutions to energy requirements can be far reaching. Completely dismissing alternative options is just not rational.
I support continued research and development into nuclear power, but I oppose the construction of nuclear power plants for reasons beyond scientific research. My very first comment in my thread said as much. Perhaps you should read more closely?
I agree that diversification is important. Luckily, when it comes to renewables, we have an absolute feast of options:
You say that we should consider the long term implications of our decisions, and I wholeheartedly agree with you. That is another reason to favour renewable sources. The sun is the only thing we can be 100% sure that will always be there for humanity. If it’s gone, then so are we. Likewise for the wind - it’s guaranteed as long as the sun shines and that physics continues to work as expected.
Meanwhile, nuclear fissile material is a limited resource with extremely complex supply chains involved, with huge disruptions potential at any point in the extraction, refinement, handling, shipping, use and disposal of the material. Not to mention all of the things that can go wrong with a nuclear power plant - mistakes in maintenance or operation can leave it inoperable in a way which is extremely expensive and complex to fix.
Solar panels and wind turbines are so easy to install, maintain and repair that you could do it safely by having a high school level understanding of electronics and following a 20-minute YouTube tutorial.
A thought experiment for you: Can you describe a scenario where either solar power or wind power are no longer viable sources of electrical supply, without a mass extinction event also occurring?
Why would we limit our hedging to non-world destroying scenarios? It seems we're already on track for a mass extinction event anyway. The reason you hedge is exactly for the worst case.
Are you serious? The reason I said that is because if we’re all fucking dead it doesn’t really matter what power plant we have because no one will be around to use it…
Yes.