[sigh_again]

The Greens had partnered with the SPD from 1998 to 2005 (and then again recently since 2021 but that's no related to the subject). They directly contributed to creating the Energiewende program. Merkel & friends implemented it, but saying the greens just "indicated preference" is utter bullshit. It's also the greens today trying to exclude any nuclear project from benefiting from grants at the European level.

The Greens do not get to have their cake and eat it when they are, in fact, directly one of the sources of the current german problem. Those 232g CO2/kWH as I write (and over 700 last week) is exactly what they asked for when they pushed for a full renewable energy grid backed by hopes and dreams.

[ivan_gammel]

> Merkel & friends implemented it

Do you mean they are puppets of the Greens and as opposition to red-green government could not reverse policies they have considered harmful?

> directly one of the sources of the current german problem

From 2005 to 2021 it was Merkel & Co in the government making most of the energy-related decisions, yet you single out Greens as the primary culprits. Why? Did they sign Nord Stream agreements?

> It's also the greens today trying to exclude any nuclear project from benefiting from grants at the European level.

How not starting any nuclear project now is relevant to the current situation? It’s a strange claim given the time and costs needed to build a single nuclear power plant. It’s would not solve anything in the next 10 years at least, will be the most expensive energy on the market and add a dependency on a external supplier outside of EU (you cannot seriously suggest that we should get our uranium from Africa or Kazakhstan, so it‘s going to be an American one, same terms as LNG?)

[sigh_again]

>yet you single out Greens as the primary culprits. Why? Did they sign Nord Stream agreements?

You're incredibly defensive when all I have done is point out that saying "the greens aren't responsible for it" is a blatant lie. Especially when your purposefully ignore the next sentence, which still puts the blame on Merkel & Friends for continuing to implement it, in their case because it was lucrative to sign agreements with Russia for gas.(Especially this sack of shit Gerhard Schröder.)

>How not starting any nuclear project now is relevant to the current situation?

Aside from the fact that they have been on the offensive not just in 2024, but for close to a decade now (the Fessenheim closure has been demanded since 2016, green taxonomy started in 2020), because of this:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/24h

There has not been a _single_ day, a single month, a single year where the german electricity production has been under 200g eqCO2/kWh. Not a single one. The entire project has been slowly killing the planet, one day at a time, because technically illiterate and incompetent people have been leading your country.

>It’s a strange claim given the time and costs needed to build a single nuclear power plant.

While recent developments in Europe have been funny, to say the least (lol Flamanville/Hinkley Point C/Okilouto), half of these costs are caused by incredibly tight regulations, and another huge part has been caused by a gigantic loss of talent, which tends to happen when you demonize an entire industry for 30 years. There's also the fact that most of the recent constructions are new designs, which, yeah, require discovering flaws, unfortunately. China has 5-year construction speeds for nuclear plants using proven designs.

> It’s would not solve anything in the next 10 years at least

Considering renewables have not been solving anything in the past ten years alone, and will not solve anything in the net 10 years either, how about we start looking a little bit further than our noses and build _both_ ?

>will be the most expensive energy on the market

1/ lol lies 2/ lol renewables literally not working for a whole week in germany last week 3/ lol germany pushing for a common energy market where the price of the energy is based on the most expensive energy source available. Nuclear will never be the most expensive as long as we have gas burners for 400€/kWh.

>and add a dependency on a external supplier outside of EU (you cannot seriously suggest that we should get our uranium from Africa or Kazakhstan, so it‘s going to be an American one, same terms as LNG?)

Aside from the fact that I can _absolutely seriously suggest that_ and that I wouldn't take geopolitics lessons from Germany, thank you, we can also discover new sources of raw uranium (hell, even France is full of it, it's just cheaper to get it from Niger despite the instabilities), we can work forward on reusing and making nuclear "waste" useful (Breeder reactors have been an option, killing Superphénix was a mistake (but also the right choice from a financial perspective), keep it as a research reactor).

Germany has had an absolutely blind and ignorant world view of energy production, making it an absolute catastrophe of an energy market that gets covered by other european countries. It's not renewables OR nuclear. It's never been, and that a dichotomy that's been pushed forwards by morons. It's both. I'll be perfectly happy to turn off every single nuclear reactor in the world the day we guarantee all of our needs are fully covered by renewables ,which is going to require a _lot_ of overcapacity, or a globalized electricity grid (I thought depending on Africa and Russia was a bad idea?).

Renewables aren't the solution. They're part of it, and as it stands, aren't enough. Turn off your fucking coal burners and build nuclear, now.

[ivan_gammel]

> You're incredibly defensive when all I have done is point out that saying "the greens aren't responsible for it" is a blatant lie

And I didn’t say that. Who is defensive?

> Aside from the fact that they have been on the offensive not just in 2024, but for close to a decade now (the Fessenheim closure has been demanded since 2016, green taxonomy started in 2020)

2016-2020 - Merkel government.

Overall most of what you say here can and should be attributed to conservative/socialist parties which were in charge and use green agenda opportunistically rather than strategically. Making greens as a root source of all problems is a lie, simply because they did not make most of those harmful decisions. Regulation is mostly not on them too. I am not big fan of German greens myself, but things should be made straight on this matter: German problem are not greens, German problem are boomers which do not care about change. Most of mainstream politics in Germany is captured by special interests groups, old dudes from some Verein, Kammer or other medieval guild, lobbying to preserve their moats and privileges. Nuclear power has lost the game to Fukushima fears and Chernobyl fallout, but it is a secondary matter. It could have been useful or not, that’s a matter of calculations deep in strategic documents. Last document I saw considered them unpractical. You are right, we do need energy strategy, but honestly I think Germany is incapable of producing it. EU should take it over, it has more momentum and political diversity to figure this out. And it makes sense anyway, not just to regulate the market, but to build.

Regarding the uranium production, yes, there are some expensive deposits in Europe. We have high population density so even if environmental concerns are addressed, they will cost a lot. Post-processing of the waste is going to cost a lot. It is by no means the same price as 20-40 years ago. Can it fully replace gas? I doubt so. Is it the only alternative? I doubt so. We are talking about 20-30 years, the horizon on which we may really see the effects of nuclear scale-up. The renewables will be much more advanced by then, grids more robust and efficient. We may not have the same problems as we have now to be solved by nuclear. So the question is really, does it make sense to commit to fossil fuel for another 50-70 years again?

[sigh_again]

> does it make sense to commit to fossil fuel for another 50-70 years again?

I now see that you have been arguing in bad faith since the beginning and should not have wasted time, down to repeating exact arguments from the greens that have, so far, proved to be wronged and dragged Germany into one of the worst emitters of Europe.

Good luck with your dreams, knowing you're dragging all of us down with you.

[ivan_gammel]

I understand that somehow Greens made you feel so angry that you cannot stand any argument with other opinion than yours, but this is HN, not therapy, we are not here to release your steam. Try to make it less emotional next time.

I‘m not acting in bad faith, I just don’t see how is your argumentation relevant to my original comment above. What I would expect to agree with you is the causal link making greens primarily responsible for current situation. As I pointed out, I do not see it simply because other parties were long enough in the government not only to undo things, but to build something on their own.

And I honestly, being relatively familiar with the topics, cannot see how nuclear power industry could save us if it were restarted couple years ago. The reports from German research teams show otherwise. If you have more data on viability of this approach, please feel free to share.

[dang]

You broke the site guidelines badly in this flamewar. I'm not going to ban your account right now the way I did the other one, which broke them quite a bit worse and has more of a history of doing so. But if you keep doing this, we're going to end up having to ban you, especially since this isn't the first time.

Please avoid tit-for-tat spats in the future, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, and please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post respectfully and thoughtfully in the future. If you had edited out the swipes from your comments, as the rules request, they would have been fine.

[sigh_again]

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