this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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The operators would not pay the money to maintain the plants after 40 years. Nuclear is mostly baseload. I know that is can be throtteled, but that does not decrease the cost of the plant at all and is only necessary for grid stability. So the most comparable electricity form is lignite. There is still a lot of it in the mix, but we are talking about some massive declines compared to last year already. This and the last quarter were or are among the worst ever for lignite. If this continues, lignite is basicly dead in five years. It could be dead today if nuclear would be allowed to operate however.
The big issue in this is Rosatom. Right now they enrich a lot of uranium especially for the US. If that stops for some reason, the Western price for nuclear fuel would skyrocket.
There is no need to throttle nuclear, it is already low carbon and does not need to be replaced by renewable energy quickly, unlike ALL fossil fuel energy sources. That is the main problem I have with German Greens and climate activists, they act like nuclear and renewables cannot work together in a grid for no reason. In a scenario where there actually is too much electricity in the grid, throttling coal, gas, oil, hell, even biomass would be preferable before throttling nuclear. If that cannot happen, you can still try to export the excess electricity, which usually should not pose a problem, because both existing nuclear and subsidized renewables have a margin cost of basically zero. And if that does not work, finding ways to use excess renewable electricity (power to heat, power to gas, batteries, whatever else you can think of) is STILL preferable to throttling nuclear.
TBH I do not have enough insight into the uranium market to comment much on that, but even if true: The same situation already happened to renewables and their inherent (no, we do not have storage or H2 plants yet) gas backup plants. The need to diversify your energy sources unfortunately seems to be a lesson that the EU needs to learn the hard way. And fuel costs are such a small part of nuclear costs that even skyrocketing uranium prices would not change a lot.
You're basically seeing my point here.
In any case, thank you for your constructive comments! We might not totally agree, but I enjoy debating and you made some good points. Since not much can be changed about the German nuclear exit anymore (maybe we can still save 6 plants, but highly unlikely), this is all the effort I will expend on this topic. I just hope German climate activists (and our government ffs) will stop to block nuclear on the EU level, because I really am of the opinion that it can contribute to climate change mitigation. In ADDITION to renewables, not instead of. We need all the low carbon energy sources we can get, we have to replace the energy system of the whole fucking globe!
The issue is we actually are sometime shutting down renewables plants, due to electricity overproduction. That is usually on weekends with great production capacity, so rarer on not much production is lost, but with nuclear we would be at that border on weekdays as well. So in five years, you propably end up shutting down something on a regular bases.
As for renewables on EU level that is France really needing a lot of low carbon electricity today, due to its aging fleet.
Do you really think France is in a worse position than Germany? Their electricity sector is almost carbon free, their CO2 emissions/capita are a lot lower than Germany's and they did not build a lot of renewables so far. So, even in the worst case of having to replace all nuclear plants, they have to replace almost carbon-free electricity, using the most suitable locations for renewables in their country, since those are all still available, using current pretty low prices for renewables.
Meanwhile Germany did not even get rid of coal yet, about 50% of its electricity is still provided by fossil fuels (and a significant share of fucking coal, still), put inefficient old renewable technology in the best available spots for outlandish prices in the 2000s/2010s and now has to wait until the end of the lifespan of those old installations to put modern, cheap, efficient renewables there. If even possible, repowering old wind installations is faced with a backlash often enough.
You can look at this any way you want, the way the German Energiewende was implemented was terrible. You could argue that it helped to kickstart solar and wind, which it definitely did, but I do not think it was necessary to the extent it happened. Prices for wind and solar were already on a downward trend even way before 2000.
I don't even put the blame fully on the Greens, who loved the goal of 100% renewables as quickly as possible and getting rid of nuclear so much they never stopped to ask about the price tag. Coal-loving SPD and conservative CDU messing up from 2005 to 2021 played a huge role as well. Really the only good thing the CDU ever did about climate policies in that timeframe was trying to extend nuclear, if you ask me. Unfortunately they botched even that.
France has to 48 npps hitting 40 years this decade or well they already have and has a single plant under construction with massive cost overruns and delays. At times half their npps were not producing power due to maintanence issues. So they had to ask other countries to turn on recently turned off coal power plants, to make up for their nuclear power plant issues. That might return this winter, as French electricity demand peaks in winter. I hope it does not happen, but France was very close to some massive blackouts last winter.
Also 40% fossil fuels and not 50% for Germany.
I am aware. There are no plans to shut all of them down anytime soon, though.
2022 was at 48.5% even with nuclear still running. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&source=total&interval=year&year=2022
2023 is at 46.2% so far, and I doubt it will get better during autumn and winter. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&source=total&interval=year&year=2023
Edit: Well, Lemmy is botching the links, so here are the graphs directly, I guess:
2022:
2023: