| The whole argument hinges on the claim that 35% of electricity in Germany is generated by gas. This seems very high and I couldn‘t find a source for this claim in the article. According to [1], it‘s 14% (for consumers). This includes a large number of CHP (combined heat and power plants), which produce district heat and cannot be replaced with nuclear power. Then there‘s 36% of industry usage , of which 1/5 [1] is used for power generation in industry power plants. I‘d assume that quite a few of these on-site power plants do other things too, like CHP, and cannot be replaced with nuclear power.
Ignoring this, it’d be 14% + 36%*21% = 21,56% of total Gas used for power, in reality, much less would be replaceable with nuclear. The EU economic think tank Bruegel claimed [2]: A technically and politically difficult decision to delay the closure of German nuclear power plants in operation until the end of 2021 could free up another 120 TWh of gas Germany used 945,3 Twh in 2020[3], of which 94,8% was imported[4] That’s 816,14 Twh. In 2020 55,2% of the imported gas came from Russia [5], so 494,7 Twh.
So, according to Bruegel, a respected European think tank, Germany could replace 24,3% of the Russian gas it imported in 2020, if it managed to re-open its power plants closed in 2021. (the ones put out of use years earlier are being demolished[6] [1] https://www.springerprofessional.de/erdgas/produktion---prod...
[2] https://www.bruegel.org/2022/01/can-europe-survive-painlessl...
[3]https://www.weltenergierat.de/publikationen/energie-fuer-deu...
[4] https://www.bveg.de/die-branche/erdgas-und-erdoel-in-deutsch... [5] https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/unternehmen-verbraucher/id_... [6] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernreaktoren_in_D... edit: corrected an error |