I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Coal and nuclear are fairly interchangeable. Since nuclear was shut down and some coal remains, it’s fairly clear Germany chose coal over nuclear for the medium term.
I'm guessing because it's an impossible counterfactual to suggest that an advanced industrial country could fully replace/de-carbonize 70% of their electricity production in the time span under discussion. Suggesting impossible counterfactuals doesn't advance the discussion in any way.
And Germany did not "chose coal over nuclear". While they have reduced nuclear production by about 30 TWh in the last 7 years, they have slashed coal-based electricity production by far more - 140 TWh - in the same period.
And it's not like Germany is bucking some trend with respect to nuclear - nuclear has been in decline globally since its peak in the mid 1980s.
Both nuclear and coal are shrinking since ~ 2000 and both sources of energy have been replaced by renewables since then. Currently ~40% of power produced in Germany comes from renewables. Wind energy has become #1 source of power from 0 twenty years ago.
Germany mix is still very dirty compared to some neighbors[0], it’s a fact that they chose politics over CO2 reduction (choosing to close all nuclear power plants overnight as a reaction to fukushima when the renewable capacity was not there and rely on coal until 2038). Wether you are pro nuclear or not it’s an environmental catastrophe.
> it’s a fact that they chose politics over CO2 reduction
True but the timeline is:
2002 - Ban of construction of new nuclear reactors and limitations on the normal operating life of existing reactors to 32 years. Last shutdown ~ 2021.
2010 - Government wants to increase the limit of some newer reactors to ~2030-2035.
2011 - Fukushima. 77% of Germans are against a increase of the operating life of the remaining reactors, 48% want all turned off immediately. Government (in a election year) goes with the opinion of a vast majority of Germans.
So the current exit was planned since 1990-2000. Municipal power plants have planned for increase in demand and invested billions. The need for renewables increases spending & investment enormously (after our wise government killed of solar in the early aughts and handed technological leadership to China).
With this years election the Green party will probably be the second most powerful party in Germany. A party that was founded with the goal to end German reliance on nuclear power and bombs.
Ah Sweet, the old “exportweltmeister” scam never seems to get old.
Germany is exporting so much energy because (and only because) without the base load provided by conventional power plants it’s energy grid routinely is on the brink of collapse, whenever there are weather based shifts in renewable energy production.
This causes the electricity price to routinely go negative because our neighboring countries don’t want to have it either.
What a failure. And what a failure that people still fall for that exportweltmeister lie
Do you have a source for your claims? I mean its obvious that renewables are dependent on the weather, but that's no issue since a neighbour can always produce & Germany is building up power storage capacity. Including a fat line to Norway where Germany sends wind power and receives renewables power when there is a need.
Additional the German power grid is super stable, black- or brownouts simply don't happen.
> This causes the electricity price to routinely go negative because our neighboring countries don’t want to have it either.
This has and probably will always happen. For example Aluminum smelters are getting paid to burn electricity almost since the beginning of the industrialization, otherwise this industry wouldn't exist.
> What a failure. And what a failure that people still fall for that exportweltmeister lie
So building up massive renewable capacity while starting to sell more and more of it is a failure to you? Either your expectations are crazy high or very low...
And, while yes, the prices tend to spike into negativity for short periods, that's actually pretty normal to happen for countries which partake in the Synchronous grid of Continental Europe then and now.
The base issue, or at least a bigger part of that then wind/solar is, of that is actually coal. A coal plant needs tens of hours, up to days to shut-down; and then another few days to start up again - and such starts-stops are quite taxing on the plant; it can only survive a dozen of those before requiring major maintenance to happen.
Wind can actually be turned off quite dynamically (rotate the blade such that the angle of attack for the wind goes down to zero), not milliseconds, but a few seconds to minutes.
For the reverse you need storage, things like batteries or hydro (pumped storage) can and are used for that already.
Using terms like "Exportweltmeister" (export champion) in context of the European energy market is just rather non-sense, Germans energy politic is far from perfect, but it was never trimmed for export.
This is why you build continent-sized electric grids. It’s always sunny somewhere.
Making a nation-sized renewable-based electric grid is very hard to stabilize, because you’re not working at the right scale. It’s the same with other large infrastructure like freeways: they’re only worth the investment if you connect vast areas.
There's always something. Did you know that nuclear-power producing France comes close to crashing the grid basically every other winter? See eg https://www.cre.fr/Actualites/RTE-fait-appel-aux-industriels... for the announcement from 2019, but I remember reading articles about this at least as early as 2012.
This is because a lot of French households use electrical heating (because it was encouraged by the government to use the huge sovereign electrical capacity), so cold put a huge stress on the grid. This is not related to nuclear power per se.
It's not entirely unrelated: Nuclear plants make bad peakers, and I suspect the older plants probably also aren't too good at load-following. The French also not only get into trouble when demand is high in winter, but also when it's too hot ín the summer because they don't want to boil their rivers...
No. Literally Germany's coal is specifically because its their own coal, a natural resource within their own borders they control. For national security, they maintain a coal capacity. Germany's coal burning is national security, nothing to do with environmentalists.
Arguments about Germany's energy independence would be far more compelling if they were not, for example, currently building giant pipelines to import Russian natural gas.
That's mostly for heating, though. Heat pumps are being increasingly used in new homes but nearly all homes older than 10 years are using gas or oil furnaces. Electricity prices are also very high, amongst the highest in the world, so heat pumps aren't as cheap to run as in other countries. It's definitely a problem that needs to be fixed, potentially within the next 30 years because that's the timeframe where the law requires old furnaces to be replaced.
They literally break down cute little towns and pay them pennies to relocate to increase the coal mining holes. Germany really is somewhat strange in this
What kind of sovereignty do you have if a powerful neighbour can put your people to freeze in the winter by cutting your energy supplies, forcing you to accept their conditions? National security is more than weapons.
Nuclear reactors are very much hardened against such attacks, and of course, those were both very different situations. No need to spread FUD about the safest form of electricity in the entire world in terms of deaths per TWh. [1] It's also roughly zero carbon.
You know the worst nuclear accident, Chernobyl, killed 4000 people in the full course of time - and we've learned a ton since then. Fukushima killed 1 person.
On the other hand the worst hydro accident, Banqiao Dam, killed 200,000 people instantly. [2] Such an outlier it's frequently excluded from all analyses on hydro safety. No such luck for the Soviets though.
Chernobyl shortened the life of a few thousand people, maybe - the estimate keeps dropping - over a 35 year time period. A few dozen were killed quickly. The rest are estimates of deaths based on increased cancer occurrences.
The reason for making the distinction here, is that while some certainly can be reasonably said to have been killed by Chernobyl, and the 4k number may well be reasonable, that number is an estimate based on possible effects on cancer rates over 35 years that have kept being adjusted down as the early high predicted cancer deaths didn't happen. E.g. there was a spike in childhood leukemia, but the death rate was extremely low. Not all of those projected deaths have even happened yet, and then represent often tiny reduction in the total life expectancy for people exposed 35 years ago and counting.
Notably, given the discussion here, coal does exactly the same thing - it keeps persistently, slowly affecting the life expectancy of everyone, only new particulates released keep being released year after year. And incidentally also includes uranium dust. Yet it's a lot easier to ignore those deaths because there's no single specific event for people to link them to.
Yep, agreed - and in particular, my understanding from the USCEAR report [1] is the majority of the cancers expected were thyroid cancer. That's the one, if you have to get cancer, you hope to get since it's over 99% curable. I went with 4000 (per UNSCEAR) because it's an up-hill battle to get folks to even hear you out if you suggest even that.
It's worth emphasizing the point that coal plants produce large quantities of radioactive waste dispersed over a wide area. Nuclear reactors simply do not do this. Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste [2].
Who do you imagine would like to attack Germany with bunker piercing missiles but don't have their own radioactive material?
Even just a dirty bomb would have far greater damage potential than slightly increasing cancer rates for the next several decades by replicating something like Chernobyl.
Modern reactors simply can’t fail catastrophically. The concrete hull can easily withstand two airplanes falling on them, and if one were to cut totally throw the inner loop circulating water, the reaction would just stop instantly (because the highly pressurized water would escape, and it is the moderator)
(Yes, I know it's a different source of coal. But energy, in the age of oil tankers and thousand-mile pipelines, is fungible.)