Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by locallost 41 days ago
Germany replaced 2/3 of its coal use in 25 years while simultaneously inventing a whole new industry and a new way of thinking (some people still fail to understand it). This way of thinking has led to hundreds of gigawatts of new clean capacity per year in the last few years and continuously growing. This has already now been way more beneficial to mankind than nuclear has achieved in the last 60 years. The biggest problem in the world right now are people actively resisting this by wasting time and money. Poland could be on Germany's level right now for a fraction of the cost because Germany already did the heavy lifting for the whole world, but they refuse to do so on political and ideological grounds. This is a big problem, the biggest problem we have right now.

But anyway: Danke Deutschland

As for Finland and Onkalo, so my list is correct and there is no country in the world with a working permanent solution right now? Or have we invented time travel and are currently in later this summer period of the year?

Most of Sellafield's problem are related to faulty thinking that we'll figure it out no big deal, which is the exact attitude I was commenting on. But sometimes you don't figure it out later as they found out. Don't let it happen to you.

1 comments

No it didn't replace 2/3 of coal. Coal demand dropped as consumption dropped and Germany became net importer down from exporting 60+TWh/y

The claim of what Germany did for humanity was more beneficial is such a farce considering it's emissions

Your claim about repository somewhat implies that since there isn't a repository there will not he one which is bullshit. Humanity has tons of repositories for handling dangerous substances, herfa Neurode being a good example. Onkalo will soon get final permit. Fosmark is under construction. You are making this sound like some world ending problem

As said. Most of sellafield problems are from weapons testing era which both created waste of various kind ehich was not stored accordingly. This has nothing to do with commercial operation of commercial plants where final waste "type" is more or less the same, just like how it should be isolated.

Germany was a net importer of around 20TWh of electricity in 2025. If you want to tack that on be my guest, but coal use is still 2/3 down since 2000. It was in the 300TWh range then and it's now in the 90TWh range.

The only farce in the energy world I can see is that a positive example of emissions reduction like Germany is being singled out on ideological and political grounds, whereas the biggest offenders get a free pass. Examples are Poland which will accomplish nothing for 25 years despite the technology being cheap and available, and globally the US which reduced coal use by almost completely switching to gas instead of renewables like Germany, and additionally it uses almost twice per capital than Germany. Basically Germany could be 100% fossil fuels for electricity and be less bad than the US. Wild no?

My claim about the repository is that there isn't one since 60-70 years nuclear has been used worldwide as an energy source. Instead of wasting time interpreting what I mean, you should just ask me. My answer is: it might not be technologically infeasible (I don't know), but it's expensive and politically difficult since nobody wants to store it. That's just the reality of life -- technology is not deployed in a fantasy but in reality. In general, nuclear is a fantasy technology where large problems are handwaved away as if meaningless, but are difficult to tackle. For Sellafield I already said what I had to say. You either understand it or you don't.

All this maybe made sense 50 years ago, but we have better options now. And despite the occasional brouhaha the world is marching on without it. We'll soon have clean cheap energy and nobody will remember this failed attempt, nobody will remember coal, nobody will remember Trump trying to slow down the transition.

Made in Germany.