German Chancellor Scholz speaks out against new nuclear power
Growth in german wind capacity is slowing. Soo… then the plan is to keep on with lignite and gas? Am I missing something? Installed Wind Capacty - Germany German Wind Capacity [https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/08ff4e67-7e8c-414e-80e1-08d3fb9bffb4.png]
Don’t import Reddit’s extremely ignorant takes on nuclear power here, please. Nuclear power is a huge waste of money.
If you’re about to angrily downvote me (or you already did), or write an angry reply, please read the rest of my comment before you do. This is not my individual opinion, this is the scientific consensus on the issue.
When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.
If you’re about to lecture about “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, save your keystrokes - the majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable. Again, this isn’t my opinion, you can look it up and find a dozen sources to back up what I am writing here.
This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream of thorium fusion breeding or whatever other potential future tech someone will probably comment about without reading this paragraph.
Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. It is 100% worth researching for future breakthroughs. But at present it is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.
Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on nuclear power should be spent on renewables instead.
For centralisation - large areas of the grid are dependent on a few locations, so if there is an issue with one or two areas, the entire network can fail. Say for example if there is an earthquake which disables two nuclear power plants, that could cause massive issues with the grid.
If you have many small power sources distributed across a larger area, it significantly mitigates the issue - the loss of even dozens or hundreds of wind turbines would be able to be handled much more responsively.
Nuclear is uniquely disadvantaged at having very bad responsiveness to demand. Renewables are extremely good at that, coincidentally.
For security, I’m sure you can imagine many scenarios, but nuclear waste is a potential target for creating dirty bombs for example.
Unfortunately simply using renewables alone is t enough to decentralize them. Lately Texas has been having near energy shortages and part of the problem is a few unexpected central outages at fossil fuel plants, but another is the vast majority of wind turbines are built in one sunset of the state, so if wind is low there it can (and has) cause massive decreased in available energy, far larger than a couple traditional large scale nuclear plants when other parts of the state are under fire warnings because of high wind and dry conditions. Of course this isn't an issue with the technology itself, but rather a problem with implementation. The issue isn't with what was built, but the lack of building more across the state (or joining one of the two larger grids to further decentralize power production over a broader area)
Anyways, another issue with security is centralized power production make a good target for disruption. And if you have the side effect of causing a meltdown...
Ironically, I seen the claim that the original reason was because the US grid was outdated and Texas wanted to do better. Probably back when people who called themselves "conservatives" actually cared at little bit about conserving the environment (at least in some self-interested ways). Of course it didn't work out that way.
No clue why the rest of the US is divided into two grids.
lntl