[hit8run]

Meanwhile Germany just decommissioned its last nuclear reactors. Given the challenges of baseload renewable generation, it's frustrating to watch working infrastructure being dismantled while we're still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

[littlecranky67]

Comparing those old conventional reactors to MSR is not suitable at all. And they were not fully functional past their expiry date.

[preisschild]

> And they were not fully functional past their expiry date.

Most of Germany's Nuclear Power Plant could have run for many additional decades. Especially the Konvoi-PWRs from the 80's

[Moldoteck]

Us is extending licenses to 80y, heck Switzerland extended benzau to 64y. The expiry date talk is pure nonsense. German nuclear had excellent CF and extremely advanced safety, incl double containment

[JumpCrisscross]

> Comparing those old conventional reactors to MSR is not suitable at all

It is given we're talking about perceptions. I see no evidence Germany's Greens are suddently rational when it comes to modern reactor designs, of which MSRs are one.

[Moldoteck]

It's not just greens. Decision is jointly made by most parties. Spd is antinuclear. Cdu doesnt care. Afd probably just uses populism

[BoredPositron]

By all the doomerism about German and nuclear there is at least Wendelstein 7-x doing frontier work. It's fine to get rid of legacy nuclear if there is a feasible bridge ahead.

[p2detar]

Not sure what the point of this comment is. China has its equivalent EAST, France has ITER. Countries can do both fission and fusion research. To me the problem isn't that Germany closed some legacy reactors, but that too little is done into looking into alternative designs.

[preisschild]

Also France. Rip Superphênix

[p2detar]

> Against a background of ongoing protest and low-level sabotage, on the night of January 18, 1982 an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade attack was launched against the unfinished plant. [0]

I'm beyond speechless.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack

[preisschild]

> On May 8, 2003, Chaïm Nissim, who in 1985 was elected to the Geneva cantonal legislature for the Swiss Green Party,[17] admitted carrying out the attack. He claimed that the weapons were obtained from Carlos the Jackal via the Belgian terrorist organisation Cellules Communistes Combattantes (Communist Combatant Cells).[18][19]

Most peaceful green party member ^^

[empiricus]

By the time stellarator designs become economical (tens of years in the most optimistic case), you can cover the entire Germany in PV panels. Or even grow an entire new generation of forrest. So far stellarators look just like interesting vaporware. I mean they are irrelevant to any current energy discussion.

[Moldoteck]

The bridge in case of germany is coal and gas

[ViewTrick1002]

Germany has a 500 GW interconnection queue for storage.

It will be interesting to see how long the ”baseload” talking point lasts.

[gpm]

The baseload talking point has never made sense but storage doesn't make it make less sense. Baseload here is definitionally power sources that can't economically follow the demand curve. They carry the exact same problem that intermittent power sources like solar do, in that you need dispatchable power sources to augment them so that they can actually meet demand, the only difference is that the cause of this is that generation stays constant while load varies instead of both generation and load varying.

Baseload is not, and has never been, a feature. It's just a drawback that can be handled so long as only some of your power comes from such sources.

Batteries augment base load power sources the exact same way they augment intermittent ones, they take power from them when there is excess and give power back when there isn't making them effectively dispatachable power.

[hunterpayne]

> The baseload talking point has never made sense

Um, yes it has. When you use solar or wind for baseload, it must be backed up by a spinning reserve. When you calculate the combined CO2 output of both the renewables and the spinning reserve, you learn it is more than just using gas by itself (and often it is more than just using oil or coal). There has never been a renewable power source used for baseload that has reduced CO2 emissions per watt. The math and laws of physics basically prevents it from happening. You want that to change, learn how to purify poly-silica more efficiently. And nobody (and I mean nobody) is even working on that. You don't pay for power, you pay for power you control with a switch. Power you don't control is called an explosion.

[Moldoteck]

Baseload is about supplying demand. It'll not go. And to supply it reliably you need firm power. The 500gw statement contains both overlapping bids and just intentions to "think" about deployment. Still, germany would need at bare minimum 3TWh of storage to ditch fossils firming per last winter and deploy even more renewables to charge it. It remains a question how govt will protect investors from cannibalized generation- offshore is already facing problems

[ViewTrick1002]

Baseload power plants are already dead in many grids. Or forced to become peakers.

Flexible dispatchable power plants are having a field day though.

> Still, germany would need at bare minimum 3TWh of storage to ditch fossils firming per last winter

Source please. All these ”unimaginable amounts of storage” calculations are usually based on not over producing on a yearly basis.

We also should not let perfect stand in the way of good enough.

[Moldoteck]

The proof is looking at open generation data past winter. Sadly energy charts gives only gwh/day but you can still do some inference about how much fossils were used/how much imported

There's no such thing as baseload power plant. If solar were able to supply the demand with some bess you'd call it baseload. What matters is firm power. And yes, Germany plans to expand gas plants. It's sad they didn't opt out for BWRs that can modulate faster, at 1%/sec

[ViewTrick1002]

No data. Just hand waving. Typical.

Now you want a firming nuclear plant? First it needs to be reliable, we can't have a system collapse when 45% is offline like happened in Sweden in October and May this year.

Then it needs to be dispatchable.

Nuclear power when it runs at 100% 24/7 all year around except a tiny maintenance window costs ~18 cents/kWh.

Are we looking at a 50% capacity factor? And not collapsing when 50% are having outages?

So ~60 cents/kWh?

I love how new built nuclear power becomes completely farcial when put into real world constraints.

[Moldoteck]

Ah yes, presenting some out of ordinary situations like an everyday thing, typical for a nuclear hater...

German npp had a cf of 90%, providing for 4-5ct/kwh like https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...

For generation data, go to https://www.energy-charts.info/index.html?l=en&c=DE , pick any 4 day interval in each month from dec to feb last year. Look how much twh was generated from fossils and imported. That's what you need to replace

[hunterpayne]

Germany has the most expensive and dirtiest grid in the developed world. They get the majority of their baseload power from other countries, often generated by nuclear or gas. Also, that you think they have 500 GW of anything that generates power is pretty funny. The only thing your comment says is that you don't understand anything about how power is generated or how an electrical grid works. People like you are why we still use so much FFs. You can't solve AGW with accounting tricks.

PS Maybe ask Spain how that renewable baseload generated power is doing for them.

[dalyons]

Germany sourced 57% of all power from renewables in the first 9mo of 2025 [1]. They seem to be doing just fine, might be time to update your talking points

1. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/energy-industry-relieve...

[Moldoteck]

And it's still one of the dirtiest grids in europe, while having massive household prices per eurostat, highest in eu, despite of heavy eeg subsidies.

[ViewTrick1002]

Quickly becoming greener. Are you saying that Germany should stop their renewable buildout and keep their current emissions until the 2040s while waiting for new built nuclear power to ”save the day”?

That literally makes no sense at all.

Looking at wholesale prices all of continental Europe is quite similar.

Some countries, like Germany, taxes electricity a lot to promote efficiency.

Not sure what alternative you suggest?

The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power. So that’s not an option either.

Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program. The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

[Moldoteck]

It didn't make sense to shut down nuclear before coal/gas for Germany. It should deploy both ren and nuclear, even restarts unless it wants to use gas firming.

Germany's low carbon twh is unchanged since 2015. What changed is it became net importer and demand dropped, hence a lot of coal closed.

Wholesale is irrelevant. Taxes are needed to fund infrastructure. In case of Germany a big chunk is transmission which will be subsidized from 2026 just like eeg already is. Example of why- sudlink, but that's just for redispatching, ren require by default more transmission due to distributed deployment

France is open to subsidize epr2 project. The challenge is, edf must first show a bill by EOY and, EC must approve state funding, unlike ren subsidies. Epr2 is expected to cost about 60-80bn, half being offered by the state as 'nice loans'. 40bn is about what Germany pours into EEG alone in merely 2y.

Germany can reuse own konvoi designs or try to make a deal with khnp and Westinghouse

French debt and electricity/edf are not connected. Most of the debt is from pension system because well, work hours, pension age and vacation days vs neighbors. Edf debt is peanuts in comparison. In fact it's debt to ebitda ratio is in normal range.

[AngryData]

To be fair, a lot of nuclear reactors around the world should be shut down just due to age and outdated designs. However they should also be being replaced with modern reactors, which few people have, which makes shutting them down while we are still largely utilizing fossil fuel power and chemical plants really dumb.