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Comment by phicoh | Hacker News Reader

The problem is simple. For decades, Russia was supplying natural gas reliably and for a reasonable price. Generating electricity with natural gas is trivial.

So shutting down old nuclear power and replacing it with wind/solar backed up by gas was not a crazy idea.

Was is a crazy idea is then letting 'the free market' take care of the gas supply.

Where is gets more complex, natural gas is not just used to generate electricity, but also to provide heat for lots of homes. Keep old nuclear power plants running doesn't do anything for keeping people warm.

In short, Europe has a natural gas problem, not so much a nuclear power problem.

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> Keep old nuclear power plants running doesn't do anything for keeping people warm.

"According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, about 43 nuclear reactors around the world—mostly in Eastern Europe and Russia—provide district heating in addition to generating electricity." (https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...)

You have to compare district heating to about 7 million households using natural gas for heating in The Netherlands alone.

So keeping a few nuclear power plants open has hardly any effect on the amount of natural gas that is used.

The big asterisk is that countries of the former Eastern bloc have the infrastructure in place. No one will keep old and expensive nuclear reactors around and build a district heating to millions of homes from scratch.

There are project that use waste heat from nuclear power plants for district heating:

https://keepwarmeurope.eu/news/?c=search&uid=Nsjnork8

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325110704_Construct...

It was an incredibly short-sighted idea. ...with many people blatantly pointing out dangers of it.

Russia now has a "war chest" of almost a trillion USD. Enough to pay off all of its debt and to run the country under complete sanctions for two full years.

This is 100% because the EU, led by Germany, decided to allow natural gas to be pumped in.

That's not how sanctions, or realpolitik/geopolitics work, yet of course you are right. Western politics is reduced to ~2 year cycles. At best there are overarching themes that continue for a decade, then the next crisis somehow erases everything, and some new thing captures the imagination, that we of course fail to carry on to fruition.

Despite cheap money (pension funds are chock full of cash due to aging retiring population and they buy government bonds) and slack in the economy (youth unemployment) every "developed" country is full of idiots (ahem, pensioners and soon to be pensioners) clutching pearls about how spending will ruin everything. Sure, they want to play it safe, but this has an enormous cost on the current and future generations.

I wonder what they'll do when NATO goes to war with Russia over the Ukraine? I wonder if natural gas will be available at good prices from Russia then... even without the war Russia is going to be using that as blackmail for the forseeable future.

And on other side coal power plants are hit with expensive CO2 quotas.

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