[jrflowers]

What do you call it when you turn off a nuclear power plant and then turn on a coal power plant? This isn’t rocket surgery.

If Germany eventually got more renewables, great. That does not retroactively mean that they didn’t replace nuclear with coal. That’s just replacing nuclear with coal and then doing something else afterward.

It’s like if someone left their first wife and got married to someone else, then did that a second time, you wouldn’t say that, based on who they’re married to today, they left their first wife for their third. That intermediate step happened.

[pfdietz]

> What do you call it when you turn off a nuclear power plant and then turn on a coal power plant? This isn’t rocket surgery.

Still waiting for examples of countries that did that.

Also, that's not replacing nuclear with coal. Plants age out and are replaced even if one is not replacing one kind with the other. We retire pickup trucks and build sports cars; that doesn't mean sports cars are replacing pickup trucks.

[Moldoteck]

IT IS REPLACING. If you had nuclear plants that worked fine (highest CF globally probably after US), some even not reaching 40y (when most are extended to 60-80y) and you retire them instead of retiring coal, it means coal replaced nuclear. This is not hard to comprehend. You as a country have a choice - retire coal/gas or retire nuclear. Germany made it's choice and paid heavily https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-025-01002-z And now Germany must build new gas plants to replace that leftover coal

Antinuclear movement in Denmark put a ban on construction and guess what happened later? DK became one of the biggest coal consumers on the planet with newly built coal plants.

France got a bit of antinuclear frenzy too by dismantling 2 Fassenheim units to allow connection of Flamanville. All this instead of retiring the leftover gas/coal capacity.

Spain retired several nuclear units before all coal and gas capacity too.

[pfdietz]

> IT IS REPLACING. If you had nuclear plants that worked fine (highest CF globally probably after US), some even not reaching 40y (when most are extended to 60-80y) and you retire them instead of retiring coal, it means coal replaced nuclear.

No it doesn't mean that at all. In particular, in Germany, the total coal generation went down, so it couldn't have replaced anything. What replaced nuclear in Germany was renewables and gas.

Consider your logic: if we had nuclear and retired it instead of shutting down renewables, does that (by your logic) mean renewables replaced nuclear? If not, why not? The structure of your argument seems to be privileging coal over other sources on the German grid.

[Moldoteck]

The fact coal generation went down is irrelevant. Coal got down because domestic consumption dropped and Germany switched from net exporting 60TWh/y to being either neutral or net importer in last year.

Since the goal of energy transition is first and foremost decarbonization, if you close a low carbon source while keeping higher carbon sources, you can say that the worst polluter replaced the closed source

The structure of my comment is privileging coal because it has the worst emissions in the context of the ultimate decarbonization goal (among other nasty enviromental impacts from it). That's why it's coal that replaced nuclear and not renewables nor gas.