this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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The ones that continued running after 2011 weren't that old and also quite safe. Keeping them running until we phased out coal wouldn't have been much of an issue and it would definitely have helped. Of course it wouldn't been a deciding factor, but given that the yearly death toll from German coal plants may very match the total of the Chernobyl disaster it clearly was the wrong priority.
Edit: The issues with building and transportation are linked to the cost of electricity. So nuclear might have helped there a bit as well. But for the most part the issue with pricing is about making the grid viable for renewables and running natural gas plants as to stabilize the grid. That would have been necessary either way.
Nuclear could actually help to alleviate the integration costs of renewables, though. For starters, you need less gas backup if your baseload (or at least some part of it) is covered by nuclear, and also less adaptations to the existing grid, because hey, it was designed, among others, for nuclear power plants.
It would be especially helpful in winter, because to get to a high share of renewables in winter (assuming we also use a high share of heat pumps) we will need long term storage from other seasons (or import hydrogen/ammonia), and I really doubt those options will become cheaper than nuclear, existing or even new, anytime soon. Green hydrogen is very expensive, and likely always will be in Central Europe, because transporting that stuff here from better suited locations is also expensive. So the less we need, the better.
Funnily enough, nuclear power plants could also provide district heating in addition to electricity, which I reckon would be massively helpful for the heating sector and getting through winter (and make the plants even more economical). The German Konvoi reactor (the design of the newest three plants we just shut down) is even designed to do that, but it was never put to use here (except in Greifswald, but that was an evil Soviet design Germany shut down in 1990).
If the plan were to rely on nuclear forever, sure. But that would necessitate new plants. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think it would have been a good idea to keep the plants from the 80s running until the 2050s. But the 2050s is when we could expect new plants to start operating if we started planning right now. If we wanted to build faster we'd to start doing what the CPC does with NIMBYs.
In other words: If we had decided to replace the nuclear plants in 2000 then we could continue to use nuclear. But right now nuclear is simply no time for that. Coal is supposed to be gone in less than fifteen years and all fossil's are supposed to be gone from the grid in about 20. With renewables and storage that is ambitious but doable. With new nuclear plants it's utterly unrealistic.
Yeah, Germany is mostly a lost cause for this topic, but some other countries in the EU still have considerable nuclear capacity (and also plans for new plants) and the German government is actively trying to derail that wherever it can, so I still think it's important to discuss this. Climate change mitigation does not stop in Germany and we are in the Europe community...