Batteries are deployed quickly, but high-capacity grid connections can take a decade in the planning phase alone. Everyone wants one, and NIMBYs are quick to oppose them. Locating at a decommissioned nuclear plant is a great solution avoiding this issue
Yup. Another good option is co-locating with renewables. In Scotland, there's several BESS projects that are being built on the north/renewable side of a big grid bottleneck between Scotland and England, because the grid upgrades take a long time.
(maps https://www.spenergynetworks.co.uk/pages/cross_border_projec... - it's an odd area, mostly beautiful in that stark empty way a lot of Scotland is, but there's really not a lot of human use already there apart from marginal sheep farming because the land is too steep to till.)
This installation is actually also co-located with renewables:
> It cooperates with a 53-hectare ground-mounted PV system operated by Solizer in direct proximity, which is supposed to deliver a peak output of 72 MW (MWp). Due to changes in tender conditions, large solar power projects and battery storage systems are increasingly being planned together.
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As obliquely referenced with the "changes in tender conditions", solar overproduction now causes negative midday electricity prices on a near daily basis in Germany from April through to October so long as it's not super cloudy.
Therefore, anyone with a solar installation that doesn't get a special constant feed-in rate for their electricity (no longer available for commercial entities) would actually pay money to feed their solar into the grid.
Therefore it's absolutely vital for new solar in Germany to have batteries on-site so they can sell later in the day, otherwise they're simply unprofitable.
We got so many disused industrially polluted sites too that would be great areas for putting battery packs. Ideally they will never pollute or anything, but if one does catch on fire it would be nice if the land it sat on was already polluted and not pristine ground.
Turning the nuclear plant back on would have been even better. And then putting a battery next to it would have been even better then that.
With batteries one could argue building them in a more distributed way might make more sense for overall resiliancy.
A fleet of like 70 nuclear plants at maybe 50 location could likely power all of Germany. For batteries you would likely go to 100 to 1000s of locations.
But that said, using the existing connections in some places does make sense.
No. the battery storage will deliver more power than the plant.
But, there are other issues: Atomic power keeps rising in cost. The plant was decomissioned and to turn it back on, you would basically have to rebuild it from the ground up - with people and knowledge that does not exist. Also, you would need the fuel from some place - as with oil and gas, you are depended on that place, since you can't easily switch uranium.
We would need about 55 power plants in Germany. At its height, Germany had 38 plants, all of that trash is still not solved. And we are not even thinking about the lawsuits that the reactivation or building of new plants would entail. People are suing against solar farms, what do you think a Nimby would be triggered by a nuclear plant?
In addition, none of these plants can be insured, all the risk is with the tax payer. As russia currently shows, you are also creating about 50 targets that to destroy a country. You don't even have to send a rocket, a few drones with grenades will make sure the plant has to shut down.
Personally, I do not want them. I remember Tchernobyl and the fallout afterwards. We have alternatives, like these battery storages, and can use water, wind, solar and hydrogen to not create potential nuclear issues, i am fine with that.
< For batteries you would likely go to 100 to 1000s of locations.
Yes, ideally de-centralized and build where power is generated. A battery park can be set up almost anywhere, a power plant not so much.
Nevertheless, I like the idea of using these old plant sites for storage, they have pretty good connections to the grid, so it makes a lot of sense. Can't use that space for anything else, really.
> No. the battery storage will deliver more power than the plant.
Which it can only do if it consumes more power than the plant was going to deliver. They don't supply power, they can only displace time of use against generation.
> Atomic power keeps rising in cost.
Why? And why won't those same factors increase all energy generation and delivery costs?
> You don't even have to send a rocket, a few drones with grenades will make sure the plant has to shut down.
Batteries are immune to grenades?
> A battery park can be set up almost anywhere
You know, the thing you want next to a battery, or any energy generation and storage system, is going to be a Fire Department.
Atomic power is in a bit of a sour spot as a technology. The large size of plants means we don’t build very many means we don’t get much cost reduction from learning curves. Wind and solar are getting much much better cost reductions over time. Batteries are in the same boat- small, modular, benefitting from learning curves.
A small number of large plants are much easier to target during war than distributed wind, solar, or batteries. It’s not that batteries are immune to grenades. It’s that you’d need to put grenades in orders of magnitude more places to get to all the batteries as compared to large nuclear plants.
Batteries do pose a fire risk, but so do petrol cars. We pump flammable gas into our homes in large parts of the west and have designed ways of keeping ourselves safe. I see no reason why batteries won’t follow the same path.
Depends. People don't understand the idea of learning curves related to nuclear. If you don't fix your problems in second build you'll still make same mistakes. On the other hand if you do proper planning you can achieve instantly N of a kind costs, like first japanese ABWR.
Ren infra has own risks too. For example concentration in best weather areas. Most ren infra in Ukraine was in the south and was either captured or destroyed by Russia. There are similar risks in for north sea/offshore projects
No you dont rebuild it from ground. You do refurb which is relatively cheap. Canadian Darlington refurb costed about 3bn/unit with major components replaced fully. That's dirt cheap for ±1gw of firm power. Other refurbs costed less.
Sourcing uranium is not an issue. In fact per kwh nuclear requires least amount of materials and hence, imports https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...
Heck Germany can even extract it from seawater in worst case. Nowadays it's not that much more expensive vs land mining. But soon Sweden will be a player too, along Canada/Australia
Npp in germany were insured by law with insuring pools. On top, operators had full asset liability, again, per law. Closest catastrophe event would be TMI. Cleanup there is merely 1bn...
Russian war shows nuclear is great regardless. Ukraine's grid still has power even though most ren infra got destroyed/captured because most was deployed in south with better weather. Germany is in similar situation with northern offshore parks
You remember chernobyl which is expected to kill at most 4k ppl or much less per UNCSEAR but you are probably fine with german car industry which kills same amount of persons in merely 2y from impacts, right? You are fine with coal still operating which killed even more? You are fine with gas being used for firming? (habeck, reiche, fraunhofer)
Phaseout was a terrible decision https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-025-01002-z
France has decentralized grid with centralized multiunit locations. This reduces heavily grid investment needs. There's a reason Germany spends 10x vs France on transmission and curtailment
Batteries are not magic. Or new. Check emissions in producing them and cost of recycling them at end of life. Those cost multiply as you scale up to handle grid level load.
> No. the battery storage will deliver more power than the plant.
I mean it wont. it only stores power. The problem for germany is that they still have shitty coal plants. If they'd kept the nuclear and yeeted the coal, they'd have a much cleaner grid. they could have been able to turn off half thier gas and entirely oil free
How did UK and France solve it? Just ask them and do what they did?
> People are suing against solar farms, what do you think a Nimby would be triggered by a nuclear plant?
Simple. You make it against the law to sue a giant energy projects because energy is a national/existential issue like defense. There, problem solved.
Why do we act like there isn't a switch we can flip when needed to make our problems go away, and instead need to succumb to the whims of a few anti-intellectual nimbys who got brainwashed by anti nuclear propaganda, because "they can sue"?
>Personally, I do not want them. I remember Tchernobyl and the fallout afterwards
Do you also remember the other power plants in the world that didn't blow up?
Imagine if prehistoric humans stopped using fire because someone burned his house down once and "they remember the fire".
Remove the fuel elements, reprocess what's useful, and store the reprocessed materials and nuclear waste somewhere "temporarily" that isn't really suitable for long-term storage.
Remove intermediate and low level waste from site and also store it "temporarily".
Remove any non-contaminated plant and sell for scrap.
Punt the main part of the problem (scrapping the main reactors and reactor buildings) down the road for a hundred years or so until radiation levels are acceptable for demolition to proceed.
Re-use other parts of the site for projects that can use the existing HV connection, like another reactor, or battery storage.
That's essentially all you can do unless you want to risk a radiological accident.
Ah yes a "free country" is where some (at best) annoying person or (at worse) a fifth column annoyance can disrupt projects that would benefit most people
Why do you think it would be better or even possible to turn on an old nuclear power plant that is 4 years out of service and decommissioned (10 years left until the decommission is finished)?
Even if it is possible I have no confidence that Germany is able to come up with a solution to nuclear waste.
The federal states that are proponents of nuclear energy like Bavaria refuse to even examine whether a nuclear waste repository could be located in their territory.
Not that far away from the former nuclear plant in the article the "Schacht Asse" [1] is located where the problem of nuclear waste im Germany becomes painfully obvious.
The plant was not broken and it could absolutly be turned back on. They would just need to catch up on some delayed maintance.
Nuclear 'waste' has plenty of solution and all these 'but the repositoy' is just what anti-nuclear people use to scare people that don't know any better. Nuclear 'waste' doesn't need a repository, its perfectly fine to just store it above ground for as long as needed.
The Asse mine is completely irrelevant to the discussion as this is not how anything is done anymore for a long time and many countries have proven capable of managing waste fine, including Germany since then. The fact is, basically nobody has died from waste managment.
Asse risk is overplayed, even if nothing was done, the likelyhood is that in the next few 100 years nobody would die because of it it. They are removing it because maybe in a few 100 years there could be a slight impact on ground water. Even the is if you make some worst case assumtions. Spend the billions it would cost to empty the mine on gold and put it into the ground. People in few 100 years can dig up and spend on what they think is their most important problem. In the incredibly unlikely case that its radiation, they can use their technology to do what they think is best.
Again: How can it be turned on, when it is actively decommissioned ("Rückbau") since 2024?
What are the costs (without omitting storing radiactive waste securely[1] above ground for some thousand years ? Are they less than batteries + solar + wind?
Terrorism and drone strikes are irrelevant. Casks can withstand train/rocket impacts.
It can be turned on by pursuing refurbs like Darlington in Canada which would be closest conceptually since a lot of stuff got replaced there. Refurbs would be cheap vs building anything new providing same TWh/year. Germany needs much more than just batteries. It needs gas firming on top (coming from Habeck, Fraunhofer and now Reiche)
yes, you can do refurbs which arent that expensive.
Nuclear waste storage is politically killed centrally. Look even at formulation in the law which demands "best" location. Germany could solve this problem in a second if it allowed storing waste in facilities where toxic chemicals are stored like Herfa Neurode.
Asse was an experimental facility that didnt have a plan of what to do if experiment goes sideways. It has nothing to do with final repositories like Onkalo. Still, it killed noone. Nor will it. Most of the waste there is from medical and research sectors and is LLW.
Why would it have been better to turn back on the nuclear plant? What would be the specific advantages of nuclear plant back in operation versus battery project realisation? Or would battery + reactivated plant be the best overall solution?
> And then putting a battery next to it would have been even better then that.
An NPP doesn't benefit that much from a battery. They're generally used to provide base load which fits their constant supply profile. Peaks and quick variations can be supplied by more flexible renewables together with a battery to buffer it.
If your NPP output is lower than the base load (I think this is almost always the case) then the NPP will always feed all its constant production to the grid to satisfy the constant base load. If you have a battery and what to put it somewhere with the most impact, it should go next to the variable power supply, where it makes sense to store and supply later. That's what batteries do, store what you can't use now to supply it when you can't produce.
Look at this picture [0] of the German grid. Same for France [1]. Why would you store any of the nuclear output when all of it is guaranteed to be absorbed by the grid real time, day or night? You can, but it doesn't make economic sense. Batteries shine where they can smoothen peaks, like solar and wind.
The big reason to put batteries next to NPPs is the existing grid infrastructure. You can't supply GW-level power from just anywhere. It's like building a large warehouse next to a major transportation route.
There are lots of times and places where renewable production is higher than demand. When that's the case "the NPP will always feed all its constant production to the grid to satisfy the constant base load." increases costs.
a npp benefits a lot from the batteries. Nuclear can be flexible and flexibility can be boosted with BESS buffers. Basically BESS would act similar to hydro in this case
You can scale battery installations basically arbitrarily to the size of the grid connection you have. Put the batteries at the end user if you can. Then they get power outage protection and the grid gets much of the same flexibility.
I have a solution: higher energy prices for those opposing NIMBYs and cheaper for YIMBYs .
So many issues in politics would be solved if the voters of certain policies were the only ones affected by them instead of writing cheques everyone else has to cash.
In Denmark, wind mills were initially quite popular, because locals owned them and benefited. The iconic wind farm Middelgrunden on the waters outside of Copenhagen is 50% owned by a co-op.
Not at all a wild bet. German electricity prices *routinely* swing by over 150€/MWh on a daily basis year round. That's a massive spread to make money off of.
For a good chunk of the year (April through to October), the prices even go negative at mid-day most days of the week. This will pay itself off very quickly
Why wild bet? It seems to be a safe bet that intermittent solar and wind availability will continue to create huge price swings, which storage can exploit and reduce to almost everyone's everyone's benefit. The investment just takes a while to break even, that's all. And with LFP or other long life battery technology, it will pay off for quite a while after break-even.
BESS asset life isn't great so a longer paypack period runs up against product life. Without running the actual model (volume, frequence and price differential) its tough to tell how quick it happens though I am sure I could build that relatively quickly if I wanted to (assuming granularity of public data).
My main point is that its a very large asset so you can't external forces come and mess up the financials (such as policy, regulatory changes, or large infra jump in that area) to make good on that bet. Certainly some public dollars being put to work to de-risk the bet.
Recently had a battery storage facility nixed near where I live because the loudest local residents were panicked about possibilities of leaks of heavy chemicals into the groundwater (which is somewhat fair) and a bunch of less reasonable nonsense. Still, assuming the legit risks can be handled, facilities like these are crucial to future growth in electricity demand.
We have been pumping oil out of the ground for lifetimes and still have little concern for all the leaky dead wells across the country but these solar panels, that’s the real problem.
We have also been breathing fine coal, diesel, brake-pad and tire dust for almost 100 years with no riots from gen-pop, but clean nuclear and batteries will kill us.
About 15 years ago there was some interest in putting in some wind towers in the township I lived in. People were talking about stray electricity killing their livestock. Never mind the several dozen towers already installed 3 miles away.
>People were talking about stray electricity killing their livestock.
That's why I think voting shouldn't be a universal right to everyone, but a privilege you gain after clearing certain bars, one of them being basic education and an IQ test.
Giving every dumbass the same voting power as an academic, to grind national development to a halt and make life shit for everyone else just because they don't understand 5th grade physics, is a recipe for disaster and we're living proof of it.
If you ever worked in public rations and interacted with the gen-pop off the street on a regular basis, you'd see my point eye-to-eye. The masses are too stupid to be entrusted with national decisions, and the only reason they are allowed to, is because they are easily manipulated into voting the way the elites want them to, because they're stupid.
It's exactly why Plato opposed democracy arguing the same faults.
>Plato argued that democracy gives power to the masses (the demos), who are often ignorant, emotional, and easily manipulated by skilled speakers (rhetoricians and demagogues).
Indisputable fact.
>Plato believed that ruling is a skill that requires deep knowledge, wisdom, and training in philosophy — not something that should be decided by majority vote or popularity.
Indisputable fact.
>He famously compared democracy to a ship where the sailors (citizens) vote on navigation, instead of letting the trained captain (philosopher) steer. The result, according to him, is chaos.
I agree with the complaint but have yet to see a mechanism that is free of abuse and disenfranchisement.
People are stupid and vote with their emotions or what the pastor told them to.
It would be lovely to ensure that votes came from well informed voters.
It’s like communism or anarchocapitlism, it works on paper but hard in practice. Preventing voting is a nice idea but really hard to get right because humans are messy animals.
The world is messy and one of the reasons I am such a believer in markets on average is because they help align outcomes in the world we live in.
It’s a weird time. You would think folks would be excited about technology but we have this weird even in America where everything is scary. Facebook brainrot is no issue but F those EVs.
The argument is only fair if they provide some valid information to back up their claims. There's a project to put in a BESS near my rural hometown and every anti argument is based on non-LiFEpo cells and self-inflicted confused overlap with the data center water use arguments. This is while completely supporting "beautiful farmlands" that leech pesticides and phosphates into the water table
I do think there should be localized referendums where we offer people the choice of taking energy infrastructure out of local approval altogether in exchange for 10% off their bills. It would save so much time and effort. I suspect the silent majority would happily take it leaving a few people yelling at pylons.
A nuclear power plant cannot free all of its energy at once as the fuel enrichment is too low for an exponential excursion of power, i.e. an explosion.
Batteries tend to burn instead of explode. Same energy, but released over much more time. And while an uncontained battery fire is a huge issue in a private home or in a car park because of how difficult they are to control, in a dedicated battery storage plant you can just let it burn down
It's not without risk, but as far as power plants go it's pretty low risk
