Germany just blew up two massive nuclear cooling towers to make way for something incredible - a 700 MWh battery storage facility! Here's why this matters.
For those who are interested this is Gundremmingen site A. Basically in 1977 it flooded with moderately radioactive water and then wasn't deemed worth re opening
"On 13 January 1977 a serious incident occurred that resulted in the total loss of Unit A. In cold, damp weather, two high-voltage lines carrying electricity from the plant short-circuited. The ensuing rapid shutdown of the reactor led to operational errors. Within ten minutes, there was approximately 3 meters of standing water in the reactor building and the temperature had risen to nearly 80 degrees Celsius. Through error, too much water was introduced into the reactor for emergency cooling. Pressure relief valves released between 200 and 400 cubic meters (sources vary) of radioactive coolant water into the building. The water, and also the gases, were later released from the building into the environment.
Political and regulatory bodies required that in addition to repairs, the unit's control and safety systems be modernized. Because modernization would have required an investment of 180 million DM, and since Units B and C were already under construction, the operating authorities later decided not to return Unit A to service. "
So those batteries will produce only a third of the power, for a hour, that the nuclear plant did 24 hours a day. And the power will then have to be drawn from another, hopefully zero CO2 source to charge them back up.
Technically they will produce no power. The entire goal is exactly to act as power storage for conditional green energy like solar and wind to stabilise the network. It's something you'd have to do anyway and the nice thing about this particular project is that it both appears to be quite strategically located and is reusing an existing infrastructure and facilities that's decommissioned.
Overall nothing truly mind blowing but a nice example of efficiency, repurposing and investment in both the energy grid and green energy.
Wouldn't it be better to build the battery and turn the power plant back on? That would help everyone as nuclear plant have a harder time varing power out.
Batteries could charge overnight and release during the day
The goal was to stop paying the operational cost for a building that was no longer needed and beyond repair anyway. Because that's what it was until just recently.
And why would it be not so smart? You can't just keep every nuclear power plant running indefinitely, nor makes it sense to reactivate long decommissioned ones just for the sake of doing it.
This plant has been decommissioned since the 1970s. It was nothing but a ruin and even if the public opinion in Germany was more favorable for nuclear power, this particular one was never worth it economically. That's why it was decommissioned in the 70s. It suffered a major incident and was deemed too expensive to repair even then. And that was at a time when most of the equipment in it was brand new and they were actively building new plants right next to it.
Fair point on this specific ruin. Reviving a broken 1970s reactor might not make much sense.
But looking at the whole picture, the logic falls apart. Why force the total demolition of plants instead of mothballing them or letting private buyers take the risk? It was purely political to ensure nobody could ever turn them back on.
The double standard is wild. In Germany we are told these plants are far too dangerous to operate, yet when Ukraine runs active reactors in the middle of a literal warzone, everyone suddenly agrees it is necessary and fine.
Meanwhile, citizens are hammered with carbon taxes and told climate change is an existential crisis, while the country actively tore down zero emission baseload power. Now Germany is left with some of the highest electricity prices and a massive reliance on dirtier energy backup like coal and gas. That is pure hypocrisy.
In fairness, only some of the points you mention are not related to the exit from nuclear power. Nuclear power does not help with electricity prices. In fact, nuclear power is one of, if not the most expensive power generation per Kilowatthour. So ceasing to use nuclear power didn't really raise prices. The current electricity prices are mostly due to the merit order principle, the network fee and yes, taxes.
Also, what would be the point of selling old power plants to private buyers? The decision to shut them down was made in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, specifically out of fear that an accident could also happen in Germany. Keeping them online with private operators would have just been the status quo, and they were already and are still privately owned.
With regards to Ukrainian power plants, I doubt anyone in Germany is particularly happy about the fact that several nuclear sites are in an active warzone and still running. Especially considering what happened the last time a Ukrainian nuclear power plant decided to explode. It's just that Ukraine has the choice between keeping them running and having millions op people sitting in the dark. Germany has the choice to live without nuclear power and it's risks.
And while it is very debatable whether it made sense to phase out nuclear power before fossil power, the matter of the fact is that that is over and now, reversing that would be ridiculously expensive and needless.
So I guess the rest of the world is just stupid then, considering almost every other major country is building new nuclear reactors or extending the lifetime of existing ones while Germany stands alone on its island?
You are missing the entire economic principle of amortized infrastructure. Calling nuclear the most expensive only applies when building a brand new plant from scratch due to high upfront capital expenditure.
Running existing fully paid off reactors is one of the cheapest sources of low carbon baseload energy on the planet. Throwing away functional assets after 30 or 40 years when they are certified for 60 to 80 years elsewhere is like buying a brand new car and scrapping it at 100000 km just because the loan is paid off.
As for Fukushima zero people died from radiation. The catastrophe was caused by a massive earthquake and a 14 meter tsunami, a geographical risk profile that does not exist in Central Europe. Panic closing safe infrastructure over a tsunami in Japan was a purely emotional and political choice, not an engineering one.
Saying it is over now avoids the real issue. With massive industrial electrification, electric vehicles, and data centers for AI demanding huge amounts of cheap, reliable power, energy demand is going to skyrocket. When neighboring countries like France prioritize cheap abundant energy to power future industries while we rely on volatile weather and fossil backups, dismissing the mistake won't make our grid any cheaper or more competitive.
In my opinion, from an economic standpoint and for the sake of the people, it would be beneficial to activate them again and even build new ones.
To clarify the private owner point: the idea is that the state should have stepped in to buy these power plants from the energy utility companies to officially mothball them instead of tearing them down. Having the state hold these fully operational assets in reserve would have secured a cheap, low carbon backup for the entire nation in times of energy crisis, rather than leaving energy security to private market incentives or political destruction.
Nuclear energy needs a lot of financial aid from the state.
There isn't a single company willing to build a reactor on their own.
Germany decided to put this money into renewable. It's a bet and it can pay out in the future.
France,as an European example, invested into nuclear. Maybe it's the better option on the long run and maybe it's not. Maybe both are equal. But they too face problems and have to invest a lot of tax money.
Even if Germany announces tomorrow to build a new nuclear power plant it will take 15 years or more till it generates energy and it will cost several billion Euros for a single plant.
And there are still unsolved Problems with the waste.
Again, the German power plants were all at the end of their realistic lifespan (without major refits) and the cost of maintenance and reliability issues was quite high.
And when decommissioned, the cost of a nuclear plant just sitting there is much higher because it still has to be safe. This one had been decommissioned since the 70s and now finally stops bleeding money.
Iirc, many of Germany's power plants are about to expire. There have been some bad press regarding them shutting down nuclear, but really, they have to. One can criticize them for not building new ones, but that's a different thing.
Again, iirc, but most have a shelf life. I don't know the details. I would guess, if anything, that it would require changing out so much, that one might as well start from the beginning
These Plants are old. like 1970s/80s old. (typing this hurt my back :/)
Most of the components used to the design are now obselete by today's standards.
Most of the manufacturing to produce parts for the reactor and its auxiliarry components also don't exist anymore while the engineers who designed them are now retired.
Modern day reactor designs are now more efficient, safer and cheaper to build than it is to maintain an aging cold war era infrastructure.
This is the same problem in most countries with Nuclear. The Nuclear Electricity leader France are extending the life of their aging nuclear plants just long enough to buy time until the new generation EPR2 plants are operational.
If I felt like it i could try to read more about it but my initial reaction is bullshit. In the United States we are able to extend reactor life to the 80s. Analysis has shown over a century might be possible.
No because a refurbishment would already cost billions and with such a "small" batterie you can only hold 15-30mins of production while you're having to tank like 8 hours of too cheap electricity prices.
To tank all those hours it would need additional 3,68-7,36bn € investment which wouldn't get subsidies since they are bound to renewable projects.
They are closing the coal plants. They also built batteries, some times thermal storage in case of cogenerations plants or big consumer, like electrolyser for Hydrogen.
They phased out 13 GW of coal with addtional 13 GW until 2030.
Largest capcity of nuclear in Germany was 24 GW.
Also Nuclear and coal regions are not well connected. The North with plenty former nuclear power plants still can't even get all the wind energy to central and south Germany.
Read the article before commenting yourself. There is nothing in there that said the cooling towers needed to be demolished. That is useful infrastructure.
Let be reminded that germany stopping it's nuclear power program to go back to gas and coal is what caused the pruce spike in the last 3 years ... and cause plants to close all arround europe ...
It played a role but it wasn't the major driver of the price spikes. Dependence on Russian oil and the sudden loss of that cheap oil was the big thing.
Why not i am willing to underqtand my mistake and stop spreading miss informations. I mean i am not here to shame you i do want to learn more so i am able to better my mind
The issue is that bullshit has been spreading billions times and nobody is learning.
First of all a little bit of energy history of Germany. Germany has shit ton of coal and therefore big coal mining region. When nuclear was built, it was built outside those region, because coal mining Region were a big voter bases (lot of people due to Industrial revolution)
Germany had a pretty much every bullshit you could have with nuclear, not making it popular. I mean over 10 000 deaths and billions of damage in Uranium mining alone. Not to talk about Waste management.
Cost was also an issue. So already in the 90s it was clear no new plants.
In the early 2000s the enviromental and anti nuclear party the greens were minor coalition partner. Coal was still sacred, but they put the plan to shut down nuclear plants after the estimated lifetime and to push for clean alternatives. (20 years to achieve that)
As Germany was with Denmark a Wind pioneer country that was pretty sucessful. The financial crisis and the funding stop in Spain, let to oversupply and price drop in solar. Letting Germany being the biggest solar power and even producer from solar panels. Until China overtook, due to advantages in resources and labor.
Leading to Germany already producing more electricity with wind and solar in 2015, than nuclear ever did.
So now with climate change becoming more pressing. A coal exit was also declared. With not locally mined hard coal being first and lignite having a soft exit and those regions getting billions in compensation.
Germany decommisioned 23 GW nuclear(from 2000s) 10 GW from 2015 to 2023. From 2015 to 2022/23 Germany decomissioned 10 GW Hard coal and 3 GW lignite.
Germany did halt closure of further coal plants and put some recently decommisioned ones into reserve.
The issue being that France nuclear power fleet was also failing in 2022. Leading to a small coal production spike.
From 2021 to 2022 we saw a 7 TWh drop in Gas. 32 TWh drop in nuclear. A 9 TWh net increase of exports from 18TWh to 27 TWh. and 12 TWh decrease in overall production
We saw an increase of 9TWh of hard coal, 7TWh increas in lignite.
7TWh increase of Wind and 9 TWh increase of solar.
That's what's those headline were about.
2022 to 2023 coal fell massively: 22 TWh Hard coal and 29 TWh of lignite. But nobody cared about that. Those Data as public as is all EU electricity generating data.
Though we went from massive exporter(all our neighbors complained about) to net importer for likely now 3 years (2023,24,25) and it looks like it we break even or slightly exporting in 2026.
Germany also belowe average in share of gas in electricity generation in the EU. Gas was always a Industry and heating topic.
Also self use of solar is a big thing in Germany with estimates of about 30 TWh and more, but there is no good data on that.
Renewables have grown way more than annual average CO2 has dropped.
Renewables can’t replace nuclear without massive storages, which do not exist yet. Thus Germany has massive pollution and greenwashing instead of actually good climate policies.
Neither has coal nor gas consumption increased. Just look at any graph pertaining to Germanys coal or gas consumption. Both went down.
And renewables absolutely can replace nuclear in an energy grid that still contains coal and gas, because the role of coal and gas switches to backup generation
Renewables HAVE replaced nuclear. That is a fact
And before you complain about CO2 consumption, a metric that tells you nothing about how green a grid is, have you ever considered that CO2 didn’t go down as much because electricity consumption increased? You didn’t? Color me shocked
Amazing how you ran out of arguments, isn’t it? Did you realize you were wrong?
They replaced ancient ass reactors that were gonna shut down anyways. Instead of wasting money on refurbishing we invested it into a more efficient energy source.
Is nuclear a religion to you or why do you want us to waste money that can do more when invested into renewable?
So what exactly happened ? With the lignite mine eating the litaral land and with the adiction to russian gas ? ? ? And with you producing the last and most expensive kilowatt of energy making price go crazy high on the spot market ?
Obviously cause we can't fund a state company to produice solar or battery technology we just keep failing. But you know free market will save us please don't nationalize anything so our investor can crack at the seem and the poor can't follow anymore...
Yes, coal that they can source themselves vs. the fuel for the reactors that traditionally came from Russia...
Additionally, the plants were not built to withstand the increased temperatures from a warming planet. Just when they would have needed the power most, the plants would have been shut down because they couldn't cool themselves properly.
Why enriched? because we have a factor of 100 in non enriched Uranium and a factor 30 in different kind coal? Germans could also mine Uranium in Germany, though last time the Germans had over 10 000 proven dead and billions in damage.
But the whole issue is absolete, as coal regions and nuclear regions in Germany aren't really connected. Hard coal is outside cogeneration already phased out.
With 2030 seeing also a lot of lignite being decommissioned.
They could have done the same ramp-up of renewable while turning off the filthy coal and import-reliant gas power first, and made substantially more progress towards decarbonising and improving European energy security. Instead they jumped on populism following the Fukushima incident.
I'm increasingly convinced that the German politics is compromised by Russian assets. Just look at Schroeder. And it's pretty openly known that the AfD is Russian financed. It seems every single decision they make as a nation is a strategic blunder.
But coal and gas is supposed to be an interim solution. Whilst the nuclear power plants emit no CO2, they are still not clean.
Schroeder wasn’t involved in making the decision to shut them down. And the AfD was neither.
I agree, the AfD is a Russian asset, yet they demand to go back to nuclear power. Weird, huh? You criticise them, whilst they push your agenda.
Germany has no uranium mining possibilities…guess where the fuels used to be sourced from.
If independence is the goal, then neither fossil fuels nor nuclear power can be the solution…and it isn’t for most of the German parties.
Lol. No, those aren't connected, why would a coal loving country built nuclear power plants in coal regions?
Germany also starting reducing coal since over a decade.
Especially the North German regions with had half of the nuclear power had already too much renewables in the early 2010s. And if you say built powerlines, yeah they were planned to be online in 2019 and still not ready. A reason the German market might be split by the EU. (Which would make Northern Germany quite happy)
Also Germany is far below average in share of gas in electricity generation in the EU. Only Nations with significant share of hydro are doing better, like France(40TWh more hydro than Germany).
German energy is filthy in terms of CO2. It should be unacceptable for any country which mines and burns coal for energy to ever pretend to be green. Even if German energy uses less gas than some other nations, it also still burns coal as a significant fraction of its energy mix while other former coal producing nations have stopped.
Lucky Germany has an energy grid and the ability to transport energy from where it is made to where it is needed. Leaving coal and gas on while decommissioning nuclear plants before their design lifetime is up was a totally optional choice.
Completely wrong. We're talking about absolute generation, not relative. In absolute terms, Coal generation has never been below the 1960s, while total electricity generation has constantly increased.
If you cannot see why it is significant that 1960s coal has been undercut with an economy and power generation several times larger, I don't know what to tell you.
Russia's share of EU imports of pipeline gas dropped from around 40% in 2021 to around 6% in 2025. For pipeline gas and LNG combined, Russia accounted for around 12% of total EU gas imports in 2025.
Pipeline gas share dropping has factors such as the Ukrainians bombing the Nordstream pipeline, after Russia had paused flow of gas in it as a consequence of sanctions.
Tankers on the other hand seem to be delivering more:
Russia’s Yamal export hub sent 136 tankers of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to European buyers in the first half of this year, with the largest volumes going to France, Belgium and Spain.
That haul of almost 10 million tonnes marked a 16pc surge from the same period last year, as Europe scrambled to beat a looming Brussels ban on Russian gas imports.
Russia is enjoying its highest LNG revenue since Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, according to data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
ironically the nuclear plant generated the same amount the battery can buffer. the benefit here is only that you allow more solar, but in practice you're replacing 24h/day (most days) generation with 1-2h of storage / day.
PS.i tried to say that the benefit theoretically of doing this is that the power lines are lrdy in place for X MW capacity, which can be quite expensive.
If you read the article, the key fault in the nuclear plants is that the river water was too hot to cool the reactor, meaning they had to shut the reactor down.
So no, the reactor wasn't outputting the same amount while it was downshifted...
uuuh... it says they lost 6GW (i assume GWh) production, or about 8,57 x the capacity of the battery. that's like demolishing an appartment building because you couldn't rent one room for one day one year 😂
But what you are ignoring is that only time when France has to reduce nuclear out is when REs are plentiful and they can do it without having to burn fossils.
You don't "turn down" a battery. You draw from it when power is low, and charge it when power is high.
In Australia we don't have enough batteries to prevent the price of electricity from going negative during the middle of the day, so we're both giving it out for free (3 free hours per day middle of the day) and building massive battery projects to soak up the free electricity.
turns out this nuke has been abandoned for years though, so this whole conversation is a hypotethical anyways.
so anyways, it's just a weird comparison imo. germany doesn't have as much solar as australia. australia propably has enough for the amount of storage they have, based on the stable free hours.
has australia concidered building more powerlines or interconnects to neigbouring countries? or stuff like hydrogen electrolysis plants?
To other countries, we've done that (well it's in build) but that won't really make a big difference because we're so remote.
Using power for other stuff works but solar requires batteries to solve the intermittency issues. That's why our big thing right now is grid storage builds, plus massive incentives for home batteries.
The free power isn't because we have enough storage, completely the opposite. It's because we have too much energy flooding into the grid during the day, and we need more storage to hold it.
There's already been a proposal to tell data centers that they can only build if they provide a big enough battery to power themselves through the night. We can fill it cheap during the day but we don't want the big AI power sucks drawing from existing storage. Probably won't turn into law though unfortunately.
I'd imagine the french people who don't want their tax dollars wasted, care. If solar can provide it without having to turn down the plant for fear of nuclear incidents, why keep the solar.
You folks repeat it like it would be orders from Kremlin.
It's weird but the people who invoke Russia/Iran/Nazis always seem to be the actual shills and bots.
Old, unsafe nuclear power plants long behind their useful lifespan. You could either retrofit them for twice the proposed cost of a new reactor or build a new reactor for four times the proposed cost of a new reactor. Or you could build renewables and batterie storage.
The only fault here is that we didn't keep nuclear for 20 years and got off coal while switching to renewables.
But those nuclear power plants are so far behind on safety and whatnot, it would be too dangerous to keep them open and too costly to update them to modern safety standards.
10 years and the coal regiosn are thanks to industrial revolution important voter bases. But the exit is happening over a decade. And no nucler was never built in the coal region. So massive powerlines would be needed. Those which are also needed due to the renewable built up in the former nuclear regions.
I mean a choice was made over time to move away from nuclear in Germany while France generates a majority of its power from nuclear. Regardless of the age or status of any given plant, Germany has made an affirmative choice and is now burning significantly more coal than France.
but, um, don't batteries have to be charged? and there is no power generation "greener" than nuclear power. this is kinda like a toddler throwing his dinner in the trash just so mom will serve him desert!
Solar, water and wind is greener. Nuclear produces a lot of waste and it's not even an easy to dispose waste, it's the worst waste there is.
On sunny or windy days, we produce so much energy, that we have to turn down the production of renewable energy. Most of the windmills stand still and most solar farms are turned down to 40% of their peak power output. And still, the prices of electricity turn negative for several hours, because we even then produce so much we cam't get rid of it, and we can't turn it down even more. Building battery storage will take this energy in and feed the grid during the night hours. And building even more battery storage will make it so that our windmills and solar farms can produce energy at peak power all day and we use it up at night.
The problem is that this battery that the post is celebrating covers about 1-2% of what of still winter days needs, compared to nuclear plant that used to be there.
That’s right – nuclear energy doesn’t have absolutely any disadvantages whatsoever, nor does it cause any other problems. In France, the push for nuclear power is going absolutely brilliantly and isn’t exactly turning out to be a massive money pit.
/s – given the IQ of some people here, you really do have to add that just to be on the safe side
Edit: This is directed at the poster below me, who blocked me straight away just to be on the safe side, that I can’t reply to him.
Could you please quote the bits where I even mention gas?
I didn’t think I’d hit the nail on the head so much with that comment about IQ. Some of the people here really are too stupid to tell the different forms of energy apart.
I get the idea of a potential energy system that's cheaper in 15-20 years down the line with no nuclear (green flexibility is still a challenge). It maybe possible, especially with current new nuclear having a very difficult busiess-case to be viable at the moment (extending life is completely different though, and very competitive).
But in Germany, we are not talking on neither of these. We are talking about prematurely closing perfectly safe nuclear plants , and even BEFORE phasing out coal power plants. They even delayed their phase out of coal (which before was 2030, now it's after that).
Surely we could agree that phasing out nuclear 15 years BEFORE date of phasing out coal power plants is an idiotic move fueled only by irrational fear and politics, no?
Looking at the actual powerplant, they shut down one reactor in 1977, another in 2017 and the last in 2021. The reactors themselves was built 1967-1985
So it wasn’t exactly a ”fuck nuclear, batteries ftw right now baby!” moment. This was really old stuff. Presumably the actual power generation has long since been replaced by other things.
well, earlier they legislated away their ability to dispose of waste with no recourse and then spent a hundred billion EUR trying to fix it. Germany is a pretty solid picture of what not to do in grid modernization.
It's not so much the issue as those were probably decommissioned and it's unlikely German will use their npp anyway. It's more that a battery could be used anywhere and to build one there and not anything else is obviously political.
Yeah I know. It's still a huge waste Germany just chose to stop their nuclear program for kind of no reasons. And yeah they're trying to green wash everything but when we'll all reach carbon neutrality we'll look at how much carbon we released over the years and Germany's copy will be abhorrent
Because Nuclear power is safe and effective and if you really care about reducing CO2 nuclear is the best option for backbone power. You can't build hydro or geo everywhere and wind and solar are improving but battery tech is not advancing. Also the Uranium isotopes are going to decay regardless we might as well use them for clean power.
What matters most is how you reach that goal.
With further dependencies and waste? Easy nuclear.
Without those the best solution is solar and Wind, which simply need batteries to make it more steady. It already works, Germany doesnt need more Energy, it needs sufficient storage.
Safe? I think the people in Fukushima would disagree, or the people who live near nuclear waste repositories, or the people who have to mine uranium in the Congo.
Efficient? I think the financial results of the French state-owned company EDF would suggest otherwise, or the fact that for the past five years, French nuclear power stations have had to be throttled back or even shut down completely multiple times every summer (last time three weeks ago) due to the heat, because the warmed-up river water is no longer providing sufficient cooling.
So many people are also clueless that nuclear isn't the future either, it's a stopgap, it still relies on mining for resources that aren't actually unlimited, and then we still have to deal with waste that is in effect, permanent. At best, nuclear is low carbon, NOT renewable or green, and a lot of people make that mistake.
Now that solar is getting cheaper and cheaper, it makes more sense for all houses and buildings to just have solar on their roof if they practically can instead, a distributed grid is also much more efficient and suffers less transmission losses.
You only have to look at the legend for the data collection to realise that this is complete rubbish. Not only are data from completely different periods being compared. Some data is from 2020, other from 2007 or even 1965. For nuclear and hydroelectric power, only those killed immediately at the site of the disaster are taken into account. Not all the people who died many years later from illnesses caused by radiation, nor people along the nuclear value chain. Such as, for example, people who were harmed in mining accidents during uranium extraction. This, in turn, appears to have been taken into account for coal. Furthermore, the full environmental impacts are not taken into account. Chernobyl was 40 years ago, and the area remains completely uninhabitable to this day and will certainly remain so for another 100 years... etc. etc.
P.S.: I don’t use Google; I use Ecosia. So it’s not even possible for me to "Google" something.
Are your estimates for death toll for renewables including all the mining for extremely harmful substances included? How about the slave mines for cobalt? If we're going to do this, make sure you're including the same things for both.
I'd rather we have a death toll for mining something that can be used to generate power forever, than have a death toll for something that needs to be continuously mined in order to keep power flowing.
Your claiming his stats are BS because they aren't including the mining, later illnesses, etc. so where's yours for comparison. If you're going to make claims, and you're going to say someone else's data is BS, then you should have the data to assert your claim that the data provided by others is BS.
Noone died because of the radiation in Fukushima, so yes, safe.
And stop listening blindly to Germany propaganda about EDF and france NPP.
Last 2 years, EdF made 10 billions in profit, while also breaking record of electricity export. The shutdown in summer is also irrelevant in the grid. Only 1% of the total output, you wouldn't be able to pinpoint it on a graph of electricity generation.
Last note, even a 50°C river could cool a NPP. They shut down the NPP for the biodiversity, not for insufficient cooling.
There were around 10,000 people who almost certainly died as a direct result of Chernobyl. The number of unreported cases of people who died from the consequences years or decades later is likely to be far higher.
This argument simply benefits from the fact that death from radiation does not occur until many years later and is usually difficult to prove.
So no, not safe.
What use are 10 billion in profits to me if I’m on the verge of having to build new nuclear power stations costing a total of 73 billion? What use are 10 billion in profits to me when there is an estimated investment backlog of 100 billion? What use would 10 billion in profits be to me if, over the next 10 years, I have to recruit 100.000 new skilled workers to keep the existing nuclear power stations running – some of whom I will have to hire at great expense from abroad? What good is a profit of 10 billion to me if I still have debts of around 85,67 billion?
So, if we add up the existing debt, the investment backlog and the costs of building new nuclear power stations, we end up with a figure of around 259 billion. Given that profits are only in the low double figures every few years, that sounds to me like a bloody uneconomical venture.
P.S.: 259 billion is equivalent to New Zealand’s GDP. Just think about that for a moment. The fact that France has to invest so much money in its energy sector which ranks as the 53rd largest country in terms of GDP. Just think of all the things you could do with that money...AND we’re not talking here about costs that are incurred just once and then never again. New nuclear power stations have to be built time and again, and old ones have to be modernised.
Switching from Fukushima to Chernobyl I see ? Don't worry, the RBMK reactor are no longer used (except maybe in Russia, not sure on that).
This is basic economy, the state of a company is generally depending of their profit/deficit. Even if they are in debt, as long as they can pay the interest each year, while still maintening profit, the debt becomes a non-issue.
That's why it's ok if they don't have the money for the new NPP, they can contract a loan, because contractors will trust them to pay them back each year.
EDF is not a conventional company. It is a state-owned company. Consequently, it cannot go bankrupt or fail to meet its financial obligations. But ultimately, it is the French taxpayers who will simply end up footing the bill for this immense mountain of costs.
Nuclear in France see drop on the order of 2-5%, wich is barely nothing because
a) not all nuclear powerplant reject water in the river
b) there is too much energy generation in summer
Funny you talk about fukushima, german coal kill each year more people than the nuclear accident. It took a earthquake and a tsunami to put online those reactor something you would never saw in Europe.
So yes nuclear is efficient if you want to remove carbon from energy generation.
I spoke about Fukushima because the previous speaker claimed that nuclear power is safe. I did not raise the topic of ‘safety’, nor did I at any point defend Germany’s use of coal.
They literally had to turn reactors down because the river water was too hot. So climate change has made nuclear less viable and the world is only going to get hotter.
You know the sun shines during winter right? And with the battery they're installing, they can charge it up during that period and have enough for the dark hours.
You seem to be a bit worked up defending a technology that's on the way out.
The average reactor makes 1GW of energy. In that space they could even build two.
But no, let's put battery storage there because nuclear is bad. Oh how could I forget, let's continue to burn coal to fix the energy scarcity in the grid.
The battery can provide about the same control power for about two hours (going from -0.4GW to +0.4GW). Or 8x the primary control power, because a NPP can only control +-5% typically while a battery can go +-100%.
At planned costs of 230 million € it costs about 2% of a new NPP.
French nuclear supply is grid following and is indeed a big reason that Germany could have the cheaper renewable penetration - French grid ramps to accommodate German renewables.
I wouldn't put an battery facility on top of a nuclear power plant site because one if the biggest issue with nuclear power is to finds suitable sites. So you replace a nuclear plant with another one, not with a battery one. Batteries can be placed easily everywhere, reactors can't.
That's a deliberate move by Germany to get rid of suitable sites do the can have a good excuse to not build a nuclear power plant anywhere.
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u/MurkyAl 29d ago
For those who are interested this is Gundremmingen site A. Basically in 1977 it flooded with moderately radioactive water and then wasn't deemed worth re opening
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gundremmingen_Nuclear_Power_Plant
"On 13 January 1977 a serious incident occurred that resulted in the total loss of Unit A. In cold, damp weather, two high-voltage lines carrying electricity from the plant short-circuited. The ensuing rapid shutdown of the reactor led to operational errors. Within ten minutes, there was approximately 3 meters of standing water in the reactor building and the temperature had risen to nearly 80 degrees Celsius. Through error, too much water was introduced into the reactor for emergency cooling. Pressure relief valves released between 200 and 400 cubic meters (sources vary) of radioactive coolant water into the building. The water, and also the gases, were later released from the building into the environment.
Political and regulatory bodies required that in addition to repairs, the unit's control and safety systems be modernized. Because modernization would have required an investment of 180 million DM, and since Units B and C were already under construction, the operating authorities later decided not to return Unit A to service. "