German Chancellor Scholz speaks out against new nuclear power, Deutschlandfunk reports
www.reuters.com
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he is against a new nuclear power debate in the country, in an interview released late on Friday with German radio station Deutschlandfunk.

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

  • AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social
    4917·
    1 year ago

    All this debate and nobody brings up that, thanks to climate change, cooling nuclear power plants will become a roll of the dice? Same as it already happened in France?

    Droughts are really, really bad for nuclear power. Solar and wind don’t give a shit.

    Doesn’t even matter much which technology is better on any other point. If you cannot run it, it’s worthless. Especially at times with increased power demand for example due to AC usage spiking thanks to the same heat that just poofed your cooling solution into oblivion.

    • tooLikeTheNope@lemmy.ml
      16·
      1 year ago

      I’ve seen another video article instead that basically says sure nuclear is good on paper if:

      • power plans should be 4th gen… which are non-existent at the moment (if not at the prototype stage only) and which construction in case will take decades and which costs are huge and also hard to estimates, even for France who has built a lot of nuclear power plans along the years and has probably the better know-how resources on the matter
      • not everyone should go nuclear at the same time, because if everyone does:
        • fuel material market price will increasingly raise due to its demand making nuclear energy production inherently less convenient as time passes and the fuel stock gets depleted, in turns shrinking the offer
        • all known stock of fuel material at the current usage are estimated to run dry in 120 yrs (so immagine if you wanted to convert today a country to full nuclear power it will probably require 50 yrs and last only 70 at best), but the remaining stock will surely last a lot less if suddenly everyone should convert to nuclear energy production

      The article and the video are in Italian, so I’m afraid at best you can only translate the written article to your language of choice
      https://www.corriere.it/dataroom-milena-gabanelli/ritorno-nucleare-pulito-sicuro-cosa-vuol-dire/f9d58b1c-b200-11ed-8c7f-0f02d700e67e-va.shtml

    • hh93@lemm.ee
      124·
      1 year ago

      Not to mention that building new plants can take a decade and costs a fortune - if you invest that money into renewables and power storages you have working power much faster.

      Also OPs graphic is a real problem but it only goes until last year where we just got rid of Merkel. Her party was actively working on making it as hard as possible to work wind turbines while investing into gas from russia so with the new government the speed should finally pick up again

      Of course shutting down existing nuclear reactors is a bad idea (which also happened because of Merkel) but that decision was made so long ago that the companies running those plants prepared for them to shut down for a decade and have stopped hiring people, the ones working there are on retirement contracts and they didn’t invest into future proofing the plants anymore so they were kind of falling apart

    • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
      62·
      1 year ago

      Almost like we should’ve invested in nuclear power when it was first discovered instead of being blinded by oil propaganda saying it was extremely dangerous despite oil causing more deaths than any nuclear event in history combined, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    • Matthew@programming.dev
      45·
      1 year ago

      Honest questions:

      What’s the difference in water usage between nuclear and, Germany’s favored energy source, coal?

      Hope much is drought a concern for Europe?

      • AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social
        22·
        1 year ago

        I have no idea and coal sucks and is the result of intense lobbying and corrupt politicians being bought for pennies on the dollar for the last 25 years.

        The point isn’t the water usage of nuclear power, since most of it is evaporated and returned to the cycle, so I’d be surprised if it’s worse than coal in terms of actual consumption. However you need water in large quantities and the correct temperatures to be able to use it for cooling on nuclear.

        If there is no water or not enough water of sufficient temperatures, then you can’t cool the plant. It’s simple as that.

        Droughts overall are horrible for Europe just as much as anywhere else. We’re losing tons of valuable topsoil, forrests are dying contributing to the continual errosion. All this could lead to salination and eventual death of farmland. Crop yields are unpredictable. No country on this planet can exist for any prolonged period of time with droughts, unless it can import everything it can’t produce itself from elsewhere.

        Water usage is generally a huge issue in Germany. Farmers take out far, far more than they’re allotted already and there’s almost no oversight. Large cities like Frankfurt am Main are pulling in water from surrounding areas, leaving them dry. And this isn’t even touching on the basically free use of water for our industries at large. It’s a really bad situation.

        The only point where renewables would “rely” on water beyond their construction processes is either water generated power itself or energy storage (which comes down to the same).