[belorn]

The point of a graph is to illustrate a number that fluctuate and changes over time. Nuclear waste production does not.

We could graph how much money Germany is funding the Russian military by buying gas, coal and oil. We could also graph how much radioactive particels get released into the environment through fossil fuel combustion. However both would just correlate directly with how much fossil fuel they consume which would then follow the graph of CO2 emissions. One line is plenty enough to describe all those things without having to be too explicit about the trade offs being made in Germany compared to France.

[Archelaos]

> The point of a graph is to illustrate a number that fluctuate and changes over time. Nuclear waste production does not.

I would expect that more nuclear waste is produced when more nuclear energy is produced and less waste when less energy is produced. Isn't that a fluctuation?

[belorn]

Since nuclear plants generally operate at full capacity all the time you won't get changes in how much energy is produced. The linked graphs above are how much the market price is at specific locations, not how much energy get produced.

The European energy market price is determined by changes in supply (wind and solar being the main contributors for fluctuations, followed by water supplies), demand for energy, and prices for fossil fuel. If gas prices goes up, the price for energy on the market goes up. If cheap wind is flooding the market, prices goes down. As can be read by the graphs, since the European energy market is connected those changes occur simultanious in both Germany and France. However, there is an additional transport cost and thus prices can be a bit different. The negative energy prices also seems to effect those more closely to the plants with excess energy, rather than transporting the excess energy across the European continent.

The actually cost at any specific location is then determined by the energy market price (see above) and transport distance between the energy production point and energy consumption point.

A graph over nuclear waste would have no correlation with the market price. At most one would see a slightly more volatile market price when nuclear energy production is low, and a slightly more stable market price when the production is high, but one would need to have a pretty fancy graphical design in order to confer that knowledge in a graph.

[Archelaos]

> A graph over nuclear waste would have no correlation with the market price. At most one would see a slightly more volatile market price when nuclear energy production is low, and a slightly more stable market price when the production is high, but one would need to have a pretty fancy graphical design in order to confer that knowledge in a graph.

Does the market price correlate really better with CO2 emissions? Does the price drop between 21 Dec and 31 Dec from ~430/515 €/MWh to ~12/23 €/MWh mean that CO2 emissions of energy production dropped by 95% at the same time?

[natmaka]

Does nuclear relieves this pressure? Doubt so, as France buys a fair part of its uranium to Kazakhstan, which will very probably stop to supply if Putin says just a word.

The US buys 50% of its uranium to them: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-utiliti...

[liketochill]

Canada has lots of uranium if Kazakhstan stops supplying

[natmaka]

It may solve the problem for Canada. Maybe for the US, if there is enough supply.

Maybe even for France and Germany, but doubt so.

Moreover ore grade falls with extraction, and extraction-related emissions grow accordingly. Maybe up to 110g/ CO2-e/kWhel: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051332

[merb]

btw. gas imports for france and germany from russia are probably the same.

[belorn]

You are right to a degree. In reality gas and oil get put into reserves which acts as buffers for the actually consumption of the fossil fuels. During periods of good wind/solar weather, the buffers start to fill up, and when demand for fossil fuel energy rises the buffers get emptied.

There is however the ability to increase/decrease imports when needed by adding more transport trucks or reduce the flow in the pipe lines.

A graph over CO2 emissions is thus more useful in this context since they follow the actually consumption of gas/oil/coal, and has a direct connection with the market price for which the above graphs represent.

[merb]

well germany uses less gas for energy, but more for heating and overall way way more coal. of course france has less co2 emissions. coal is even worse than gas which favors france by a big margin.

in a best of case scenario we would not use either of coal,gas,nuclear oil or any other fossil technology, but we are far from it, but i'm pretty sure europe is closer than most other countries/states/etc.

[Archelaos]

To put some numbers on the table, in 2018 (I could not find more recent data) the values of CO2 emissions in metric tons per capita were as follows:[1]

  France 5.0 
  Germany 9.1  

For comparison:

  India 1.9
  EU 8.6
  China 8.0
  Japan 9.4
  Russia 12.1
  United States 16.1 
  Canada 16.1 
  Australia 16.8 
  

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

[natmaka]

Germany is richer (GDP) than France, 20% of its GDP comes from industry (10% in France), and its climate is colder.

[bigbizisverywyz]

Why is Australia so high? I doubt they need much heating, but is cooling so expensive?

[regpertom]

Having a squiz at the first page of results on that question, seems like it’s a per capita thing of being a large country with few people. Also, “including exports”, which means all the coal etc and thing they export to China etc is being counted. I don’t want to say it’s an accounting trick but it feels like an accounting trick. 7% of global fossil fuel exports counted against 0.3% of the worlds population (8bill vs 27mill). Is it also counted against the importing country when they use it? Because that feels like double counting.