| Its not obvious. And stop insulting my country. WE have a long history of nuclear power and the incident in Tschernobyl was a real big WTF moment for us. My parents were probably young parents and it was not clear at all what the real impact was. The news suggested to clean/wash all vegetables and still TODAY you need to check your hunt for too high radiactive values. It was NEVER obvious and Fukushima showed again HOW unreliable it can be and how little we know about this. Am i against Nuclear? No. But you would never have been able to push for nuclear 20 years ago because it took ages to even get climate change on the proper radar. I also believe, that at least in germany, we don't need it. It will be easier and cheaper and better to invest A LOT in PV, Wind, Battery and EVs. Economy of scale, independency, cheap, easy, win-win. Edit:
PV are just crystals, they should be even cheaper to build than now and with more flexible PVs you can do a lot of interesting and reasonable things. You can use them as fences (there was already a news article about it), you can put them on facades, around light posts, on your balcony, use them as sun shades etc. Wind became a lot better with no one really talking about it. And wind energy grows quadratically by radius. Big wind mills make A LOT more energy Batteries will be a game changer. We need them for EVs anway, we use them in laptops and smartphones. In germany we have a very good power grid but in 2th world countries like the USA you have a lot of Grid problems. Add batteries to it. And even in countries like canada you have the 'outback' with grid issues after bad weather. Alone the batteries for EVs will help a lot of providing necessary buffer capacity. We tend to forget how big and impactfull our oil consumption actually is. Its a lot easier to have batteries and 'thin' power lines than transporting oil from the ground to refineries to gas stations. The current situation is not better, its just paid off |
> WE have a long history of nuclear power and the incident in Tschernobyl was a real big WTF moment for us.
Sadly yes, but at least we didn't lose our brain as much as Germany.
The whole 'we are psychologically damaged and so can't evaluate properly' doesn't really work for me as an argument.
Yes, my parents are also psychologically damaged by this episode, if you show them scientific data they get angry. The last 50 years of fear mongering and propaganda have worked well. The whole 'any mushroom might kill you' is just nonsense.
> But you would never have been able to push for nuclear 20 years ago because it took ages to even get climate change on the proper radar.
Nuclear is a good idea climate change or not. Most nuclear reactors were build for practical reasons not climate.
And nuclear would have been commercially the best option by far, if back then we actually evaluate coal plants the same way as we do now in terms of fossil fuels and regulation.
We already have the right combination, water and nuclear. But instead of having our own policy we adopted the 'Germany will surely have cheap energy for us' strategy and that backfired.
> I also believe, that at least in germany, we don't need it. It will be easier and cheaper and better to invest A LOT in PV, Wind, Battery and EVs.
My math indicates something very different. Germany in 2000 had 20% nuclear, even with minimal learning effects, building nuclear would have been considerably cheaper then all the cost Germany had for their 'green' (coal energy) strategy. Not just the investment, Germany also had very high electricity prices during that whole time. And with the energy crises the amount of money they are using reduce the impact of the energy crisis is immense.
And with all that investment and cost, they aren't even close to fully replacing fossil fuel.
Battery are nonsense, so far can only be used for grid stabilization, not any serious outage. And if you take the cost large scale batteries (that have yet to be invented) into account, the whole solar/wind/battery plan looks even worse.
Go look at Li-Battery prices, they are not coming down in price anywhere as close to as people thought. And the grid scale battery startups are all taking much, much longer then claimed or are bankrupt.
> Economy of scale, independency, cheap, easy, win-win.
A single nuclear reactor is economics of scale. And if you build many of them, you get economics of scale in that too.
As I said, even if you consider the price paid by UAE for South Korean plants (literally built in a country with no nuclear regulator and no educated workforce), and you just take that cost. Germany would have saved money. If you take into account the cost reduction from building 40-50 plants, its not even close.
The simple fact is the fastest most efficent and cheapest de-fossilization ever done has been done with nuclear. We have literal prove that this is true. When all these countries were sitting around formulating the Kyoto protocol, France already had a green grid.
P.S: Fukushima killed less people then German coal plants do every year. German coal plants have been systematically murdering the population for centuries, not to mention causing all kinds of health issues, particularly in children. All this ridiculous panic about radioactive mushrooms, despite there not being a single reliable cause of death from that while everybody is having lung issues because of coal. Its just incredible how people who are usually smart and informed on a subject believe all the Greenpeace panic propaganda.
Turning of nuclear before coal is a gross criminal act, and the people responsible should be imprisoned.