[pthreadses]

There were great strides in increasing the overall percentage of renewable power. If the proportion of nuclear power had stayed constant, that would mean usage of coal could have been reduced even further than it already has been, which helps fight climate change.

[lispm]

That's not how it works. Energy production is a huge market with lots of political corruption and huge amounts of money involved.

Nuclear AND coal is both owned by a few monopolistic companies. In Germany there were four regions for electricity production and these four companies each owned one: basically all production and distribution of electricity.

None of these companies had any interest to invest in renewable energy or to open up their markets for competition. Politicians were given jobs in these companies after their political career.

It took literally decades to break up this system and the Energiewende was the first movement towards open energy markets, competition and renewable energy production. It's a system which takes decades to reform and rebuild. Whether nuclear or coal is first to go out is a minor issue over that time scale.

The money invested into renewable created a lot of effects which will drive down electricity prices in many other countries much faster than nuclear will do. Germany served as a first example how to build up technology, increase efficiency, etc. For example, the real benefit for solar will not be in Germany, but in many other countries which have lots of sunshine and lots of ways to deploy that kind of lower tech - compared to extremely complex nuclear technology.

And this was kickstarted here.

[pthreadses]

It’s not at all a minor issue. These are real emissions that will continue to exist which didn’t need to. You’ve made zero argument to refute that fact.

[lispm]

> These are real emissions that will continue to exist which didn’t need to

They won't continue. Renewable will replace them much faster than nuclear could. Nuclear simply does scale much slower and much more expensive than nuclear.

[close04]

While the statements you made might coincide with reality, you don't support any of them with an actual credible source. And you ignore the fact that you keep comparing bleeding edge tech to 50 year old tech to prove that the old one shouldn't be researched and improved, a line of argumentation that makes no sense. You insist nuclear should be gimped by not doing any research and then use that as an argument for it not performing well enough now. The tech is old because politicians are weary of promoting research into improving nuclear tech (not talking about "holy grails" like cold fusion) due to the stigma associated with the "nuclear" label and losing their average Joe constituents.

By your own line of argumentation research in renewables should stop because coal and oil are cheaper and scale much better than them. If you can't keep your reasoning consistent it's not much of a reasoning. 20 years ago people like you insisted that electric tech in cars doesn't make sense because it was tried around the 1900s and didn't take off, proof that it should not be researched further.

In the meantime in 2013 the BARD Offshore 1 400MW wind turbine farm cost 3bn Euros and for a long time it cost ratepayers 2m Euros per day by not supplying most of the planned energy. So you see, anything can be disastrous if you don't do it right. If you don't invest in technology don't complain that it's not up to date. You don't blame technology for the blunders of mega-project management unless you're doing it in bad faith or truly have little understanding of the topic.

[lispm]

The World Nuclear Report:

> Renewables Continue to Thrive

> * A record 165 GW of renewables were added to the world’s power grids in 2018, up from 157 GW added the previous year. The nuclear operating capacity increased by 9 GW6 to reach 370 GW (excluding 25 GW in LTO), a new historic maxi- mum, slightly exceeding the previous peak of 368 GW in 2006.

> * Globally, wind power output grew by 29% in 2018, solar by 13%, nuclear by 2.4%. Compared to a decade ago, non-hydro renewables generate over 1,900 TWh more power, exceeding coal and natural gas, while nuclear produces less.

> * Over the past decade, levelized cost estimates for utility-scale solar dropped by 88%, wind by 69%, while nuclear increased by 23%. Renewables now come in below the cost of coal and natural gas.

That's today.

If you want more research into Nuclear (which has research in the range of hundreds of billions since the 50s) then you need to say: where, what for and with what goal.

Currently it's clear that the investing even more money into nuclear won't bring any breakthrough with visible effects in the next 20 years.

[close04]

> it's clear that the investing even more money into nuclear won't bring any breakthrough with visible effects in the next 20 years

The world will never become carbon neutral with PV and wind turbines. Our needs grow much faster than this tech will, short of an unexpected breakthrough, much like the one nuclear is still looking for and might actually be closer. It's just a great stopgap solution.

Your assumption (mind you, not a fact) that it will never happen does not preclude the investment in nuclear tech. We invested in PV for decades before they became anything near economically feasible. And they're not great for places that don't have the land to spare and/or are far away from the places that do. Not great when you are at the mercy of (ever changing) weather and climate.

But as usual your quotes have nothing to do with my point - that renewables projects can be astonishingly expensive too (nuclear level expensive for some wind turbines) and underdeliver, or that the reason there's no nuclear research has nothing to do with lack of potential but with preconceptions that it must be dangerous. So it's a self inflicted wound where you oppose improving nuclear tech and then you blame it for being old and inefficient. You are part of the reason we don't have good nuclear.

And to highlight the dissonance of your point you insist that there should be no investment in new nuclear tech because old tech is expensive and doesn't scale compared to renewables. And then insist we should invest in new renewables even if they are more expensive and don't scale as well as fossil. How is that? You either invest in the tech that scales and is cheap, or you don't. Or perhaps you invest in the technology that shows promise. And scary-nuclear-label aside, nuclear tech always showed a lot of promise, if only people like you didn't shoot it in the foot and then whined that it's limping.

Just google for "breakthrough in nuclear power" and see what advancements have been made even with a strong opposition of the uneducated. Now imagine what could be achieved if it actually received some solid support. In the meantime we're burning coal.

[pthreadses]

The problem here is that you seem to be arguing a point I’m not making. I’m speaking only to the decisions regarding prioritizing decommissioning nuclear over coal. Let’s ignore the future and deal only with what has already happened, because it requires no suppositions. The German public and politicians have decided to prioritize the phase out of nuclear over coal, both before and after the accident in Japan. This is a fact, it’s not up for debate. It’s supported both by public policy positions, public sentiment, and by looking at the percentage of energy coming from each production method. This has negative consequences for climate change.

That’s all that I’m saying here. I’m an overall supporter of the Energiewende, I’d be happy for renewables to replace both coal and nuclear. The issue is as renewables become a bigger share you can shutter coal or you can shutter nuclear capacity that renewables are replacing. Germans chose to prioritize shuttering nuclear, and that’s the wrong choice.

[lispm]

> Germans chose to prioritize shuttering nuclear, and that’s the wrong choice.

Actually it was not. There was no choice.

The problem is that you neglect the context. There are a bunch of actual problems which made getting rid of nuclear faster than coal the only way.

1) there was no choice. No one asked what should we replace with renewable. The renewable energy movement developed out of the opposition to a full Atomstaat (a nuclear state) and the risk of nuclear accidents in a densely populated country/europe.

2) there was no way it could have been decided to replace coal first. Coal is the only large primary energy source in Germany. By far. Hard coal and lignite. The whole industrialization of Germany was based largely on coal. Thus whole regions were living from that. And some still are. There is much larger opposition to replace coal than nuclear because people earn(ed) their living from it and there was (and still is) a large political lobby for it. This lobby is not from the greens. it took decades to close hard-coal mines and it takes decades to close lignite mines. Basically when the workers retire. Not because renewable energy fans like that, but because the opposition from some political parties and the industry is strong. Remember when environmentalists were recently protesting against lignite mining in Germany? Political impact: not much. In the current federal government are conservatives and social-democrats - both with large coal lobby groups.

3) Technically fossil fuel plants are slightly more flexible than nuclear power plants and mix better with renewable energy.

4) since coal is the only large domestic primary energy source at that time (very little natural gas, very little oil, uranium mining was dirty and on the way out, not much hydro, very little renewable deployed, ...) it was seen helping with energy independence.

5) France went in into nuclear technology early because that was a side effect of the creation of nuclear technology for the military. Germany didn't have military nuclear infrastructure, was late to the nuclear build-up and does have no ambitions for its own production of nuclear weapons - though that was featured when conservative politicians and technology fans decided to build up nuclear technology. Thus nuclear power was also an easier target to break up the grip of the four big electricity companies on their monopolistic market (each exclusively owned distribution and production in a large area of Germany). If you look at France, they haven't build-up similar large amounts of non-hydro renewables.

So the claim that Germany did make the wrong choice is completely neglecting the actual history: there simply was no choice and we are lucky that we were able to start the replacement of at least one of the problematic technologies and that this gave us an idea of the path to further reduce coal. There are still areas where we have even less progress: traffic and heating.

[pthreadses]

1.) of course there was a choice. That’s what all of this was, a concrete plan, none of this was organic. A choice was made to be nuclear-free, and not coal free. This is what set the stage for larger reductions of nuclear than coal as renewables grew. This was absolutely a choice.

2.) this absolutely may be what’s underpinning the preference. I’ve never really made a claim about why the choice was made, only pointed out it was the wrong choice from an environmental perspective. But let’s not pretend this was some nefarious lobbyists, the German people were behind prioritization of closing nuclear as well.

3.) Sure, although we both know this doesn’t justify the decision as it’s not a big enough issue to really matter.

4.) Right but we aren’t talking about plans to build new nuclear plants, we are talking about what that already exists gets decommissioned, coal or nuclear. So this is irrelevant.

5.) Again, not relevant to which of existing power generation capabilities you phase out.

You really seem unwilling to engage on the point being made here.