The five-year engineering feat Germany pulled off in months

I will grant you that Trump did get this right... but it was by no means a policy that he was an architect of, and the degree to which he was invested in this policy was questionable (US sanctions were driven largely by Congress, not the president).

Are there any plans on using waste heat from industry combined with district heating anywhere? Biofuels? Subsidized insulation retrofitting?

That it wasn't done doesn't make it less needed?

They decommissioned ~20GW of clean nuclear power over the past 20 years. Whatever way you cut it that’s a huge mistake for the climate (not to mention economy). That replaces most of the coal in that picture. Or replaces all of the gas and then some in that picture.

Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.

Why? At that point resistive heating could be cheaper than gas, and remove at least some of the demand.

Even so, not using any LNG for electricity and replacing coal is just if not more valuable.

And of course the reluctance to electrify heating for houses is linked to the bad overall energy policy.

Also, more importantly: if we can agree that nuclear shutdown was a bad decision, then we can work backwards from that and conclude that the people responsible for it shouldn't be trusted with anything more complex than digging ditches.

Believe me, I know. Having lived in Berlin the amount of anti-nuclear propaganda there is just mind blowing.

> but only due to heavy state intervention

And no state intervention was used in any of the other sectors of energy. Solar for example was just this totally market driving thing where no state intervention was needed.

To talk about the energy market in Europe and Asia as 'heavy state intervention' is ridiculous, its simply totally driven by states. Its states that decide what they want to build, its states that lay out their long term strategy.

> The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.

Nuclear declined because governments decided they didn't want nuclear, solar and wind were successful because governments bet all out on solar and wind even before they made financial sense. They had good arguments like, yes its more expensive now but prices will come down once we produce more and it will make our grid green. And this was correct, but its just as correct for nuclear. Its not difficult to understand.

Had Europe spend the last 20 years collectively embracing nuclear and deployed a few 100GW hours of nuclear building 100s of plants, investing 300 billion $ in it, with a well trained workforce for and the same few models over and over again it would also very also be very cheap.

To act like this has anything to do with markets is silly.

And this is without even mentioning all the 100s of nuclear research projects that were killed up, all the nuclear plants that were scheduled to build that were prevented by protestors. In France an insane Swiss politician from the Green party literally crossed the border to shot the nuclear reactor with an RPG. All the nuclear research and education that was removed from universities as well.

There is no reason, non what so ever that we could be deploying 10 new GenIV nuclear reactors every year in Europe, had this been our policy for the last 20 years.

So people over and over bring up this one year where France has some maintenance problem but somehow 40 years of brown coal in Germany is just considers unimportant, not to mention the still extensive use of coal now in Germany.

So how about instead of constantly shitting on France and Nuclear we look at the basic facts of what was actually good for humanity and what was a disaster.

Also, most nuclear plants should be back by then, some already, they are 'bracing' themselves in case of emergency and because anti-nuclear people have hyped this issue to a frenzy on social media.

And the French problems with nuclear now are 95% related to the last 20 years of anti-nuclear politics and specially the outright attack on nuclear by the Holland government where critical maintenance was ignored because they lived in a fantasy world where renwables were just gone do everything. This has been well documented.

Even before that France just stopped building new plants and started to use more and more LNG because of the opposition to nuclear and now they are eating the fruits of that.

Not to mention canceling amazing projects like the Superphénix reactor.

France is still living of the glory days of nuclear from the 70/80s. Its ridiculous, 20 years of sensible energy policy with 1960s tech is all that is required and yet most governments can't figure it out.

Also capacity is a dumb thing to look at. There can be week long streches where solar has like 5% utilization.

Of course Germany could have done what France did, there the graph looks quite different if you go back to the 1960 to now.

The Nordstream projects were conceived to allow Russia to exert force on Eastern European countries without endangering supply of gas to Germany.

Our energy policy has been incredibly short-sighted, focused on maximizing certain sector's economic interests at the expense of national security and EU security.

Literally Germany made the choice to replace nuclear rather then coal. That was literally their choice.

Do you know about all the bad effects of burning coal at large scale?

> And I don't believe for minute that Russia somehow would not have invaded if Germany had more nuclear.

That is not an argument I made.

France had clean energy for 40 years so how are they doing, fantastic compared to all the coal the Germans have been breathing.

They had a few maintenance issue because in the last 10 years anti-nuclear energy ministers deferred maintenance. Most of these issues however should be fixed before winter.

We are seriously comparing one year of a few maintenance issue with 50 years of clean energy production. How can anybody be critical of that?

> It really doesn't make much sense of speaking is superlatives

I think 40 years of breathing incredibly dirty coal smoke is kind of big deal.

> Problem is, you have to rely on someone

You can source uranium from Australia or a number of other countries. Or mine it in Europe if you want to. You can actually have a number of suppliers, so there really isn't a problem.

In fact, a really clever policy for Europe would have been to invest in nuclear for electricity. Then go a step further and invest in high-temperature reactors for the next generation and also use them to produce methanol and mix that into fuel supply and eventually mostly replacing it.

This is likely no longer necessary because we are switching to electric cars now, but still, would have been a good policy back then.

That was the logical next step for the DeGaul policy in France but they gave up on it and sadly by the time the EU happened France had largely turned its back on nuclear.

Simple put with the right policy, the German 'Grünewende' could be mostly done by now and very little LNG would be required.

You can use them for 50-70 years

Except that is simply a lie that anti-nuclear people spread.

Nuclear plants can reach 80 or 100 years and we honestly don't even know the max lifespan. Almost the German plants could have continued to run. 30 year is nothing for a nuclear plant.

Yes, it requires maintenance and partial replacement of subsystems, but that's just the reality. We are talking about replacing fucking coal, I just don't understand why people don't care about that.

You mean the nation that in 15 years decaronized most of the grid? Yeah how horrible to have 40 years of clean power.

The reason France has problems and has to import, is because since the early 1990s France has stopped building new nuclear reactors.

Even worse, since then leftist governments, specially after 2014 when they basically wanted to copy Germany and get ride of all nuclear. They essentially stopped with vital maintenance.

Unfortunately, they built so many plants in the same period, and those are getting in to their mid years and need maintenance. Because they have largely stopped building new plants, some of the knowlage is now lacking.

Overall, the issue in France is not enough nuclear, not nuclear itself.

France even had really awesome advanced nuclear projects, that were all killed off often by Green/Left governments.

Don't you think its kind of funny to point at the only large industrial nation with a green grid and say 'look at the issues those people have'. If I was German I wish we had those kinds of problems.

> And no, building new powerplants is not the solution. None of these plants were constructed on time or within the budget. They need room, they need to be connected, they need trained workers, they need massive oversight (because the owners will do just enough around security to fulfill the letters of the law, never the spirit of the law).

Actually new plants is the solution. Yes, they need time, that's why building shouldn't have been stopped.

Nuclear plants don't need that much room, and there are already train lines most places, adding a branch line isn't that hard.

Yes, training workers for those jobs is actually good.

Energy is mostly government driven anyway, and so it is in France.

> Nuclear reactors are also not fit for the coming climate change, especially not the ones now being turned off. Almost all of them needed to be shut down in the last summers, because the water intake from rivers was either to warm or there was simply not enough water available.

Saying all of them need to shut down because of water is just wrong. Most nuclear reactors continued to operate in most places in Europe.

The hardest energy problems are in winter, all you need to make sure is that you build new plants in places where you can cool them even under worst case assumptions for future climate and it will be fine.

> In addition, nuclear is only viable, because it gets supported by tax money. Nobody will ensure these things against accidents, the companies are not responsible for transport/storage of the waste and get price guarantees. '

In the European context saying only because tax money is nonsense. The 'markets' are so strongly regulated and often lots of it is state owned. Wind and Solar were only made viable by tax money. Massive government projects to push these drove the economics of scale.

The same could have been done for nuclear for the same price. Had Europe built 100 new nuclear reactors in the last 30 years, the economics of nuclear would be way better. Had Europe not invested massively in wind and solar, the economics there wouldn't be as good.

Even going back to 1970, Jimmy Carter killed nuclear project and focused research on solar. And many of the same trends were happening in Europe. If you prioritize one group of technologies and demonize another you can't then act supersized decades later with the results you get.

And even those project just use the grid as balance, if base load and intermittency were correctly priced, a lot of those economics aren't as good. But governments didn't want to do that, because they wanted more solar/wind even at the cost of later dealing with intermittency.

> And despite all of that, the price for nuclear power rises - while the prices for all others forms of energy drop. From a market standpoint, it makes no sense to invest billions (face it, it will be billions, even if companies responsible tell you it will "only be millions") into a technology that is more expensive than others, harder to control, and not flexible enough. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...) Investing these billions into decentralization of the power grid and renewable energies (Wind, Solar, Hydro, Storage capacities) will yield a way better return with less complications and more stability.

The economics are not nearly as clear as you make it out to be.

If you build large nuclear project with many of the same reactors multiple times it look pretty good. It also requires far less investment in terms of updating the grid, because usually you can just locate reactors where coal plants were before.

Nuclear build cost are dominated by learning cost, if you build many then they get massively cheaper and you can built them far faster. Look at France in the 70/80s as a good example.

You also solve the intermittency issue because nuclear don't have that. So had we just invested in nuclear, rather then wind and solar, we wouldn't have to do all those investments into intermittency mitigation a problem that still remains unsolved.

Even worse, because intermittency was not price correctly, the base load had to suffer and that made their economics worse. Often nuclear also didn't receive the same subsidies as solar and wind. There are many examples of that.

And this is before we even talk about GenIV reactors. Because all research and development was stopped and often made borderline impossible, we have not progressed. Newer reactor designs have massive amount of potential to be cheaper. They can also solve problem such as heat production for industrial heat. But over the last 30 years there was comically little investment in that.

So what you see as 'economics' and 'market' I see as governments 30 years ago deciding that solar/wind were the future and simply going with it. Had the EU fixed on a single reactor design, even Gen3 design, and had said we will de-carbonize by nuclear it would have been far cheaper and we would be further along by now.

In fact, such a standard nuclear plant would have been an amazing thing to export to other nations as well.

And then have a GenIV reactor in the pipeline after that.

Nuclear isn't the future because 'we' didn't want it to be the future. But it could have been, and it would have been far better future then what we have now.

P.S: Let me give you an example. France had the GenIV Superphénix. They had finally worked out all the issues (including somebody shooting an RPG at it) and could have started to seriously think about building then in larger numbers but by that point they had little interest in building new reactors and the left/green govenrment wanted to kill as soon as possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix

Had France simply started building 5-10 of a next generation of these in the 2000s they would now be a net energy exporter with reactor that had super low fuel cost (because of breeder) and the per plant cost would likely be a fraction of the PWR designs they are currently planning.

You can see how small this reactor is compared to PWRs. So the overall cost when in production at scale would be amazing.

There have been an abundance of coverage on it, even from state media... but nothing ever changes. Heck, the current head of the government was/is involved in the biggest financially scandal of Germany's history and got away with it by "forgetting" everything.

This is a non-sequitur; the transfer of power was extra-constitutional, so it can't be ruled out by this fact alone.

> Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia.

This is a circular argument. It was illegal insofar as it violated Ukrainian law, sure, but whether Ukrainian law should apply in Crimea in the first place is literally the whole point of contention!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/09/25/trump-accuse...

Think of the difference between 91 octane gas at a pump vs slightly filtered crude oil.

Not sure I'd use it as a success story.

What if it isn't something like windmills that clearly are a net improvement for society over coal, and the objections aren't merely 'not a nice view'? For example, suppose some big corp wants to frack the environment to pieces for big bucks, leaving a poisoned, nearly unlivable habitat for the nearby village.

How can we safeguard against this, in a way that the village inhabitants can protest against such threats with real teeth, without grinding everything to a halt that is a mere nuisance but offers real benefits to society?

While we may think we are dealing with 'reality' we are mainly dealing with the artifacts of the governance system - and it believes itself to be the determinant of reality itself!

It only pays lip service to the idea that it is there to facilitate and improve people's lives - the idea of governance/social contract/etc is an just an expedient idea that aseerts itself to be the master not the servant. It is the enemy of the individual.

You can disguise cell phone towers[0]. It hurts cell phone company profits though, so they'll only do that if the cost of the cheap ugly tower is more due to objections.

[0] https://twistedsifter.com/2012/08/examples-of-cell-phone-tow...

This time is usually necessary to improve the quality of the projects. It is for a reason that this procedures exist. In the past and still today, we are destroying the environment, endangering people's health and reducing their quality of life through hasty decisions. Therefore citizens have decided to enact planning laws to improve the situation. Of course, the duration of planning periods are a cost factor, but one needs to find a sweet spot between them and the (not only financial) cost of projects going awry.

And remember that it were the Greens under Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck which were primarily in charge for the fast implementation of the LNG terminal.

> "Ruin my view".

You understand these aren't the same people, yes? The latter are wealthy entrenched (mostly conservative) NIMBYs who have no care for the environment, and have a deeply personal agenda. They may have appropriated the language of environmentalists when they talk about the impact of projects on their lives, but dismissing environmental concerns because some are using them in bad faith is not reasonable.

Bad faith actors always do this.

Yes the germans created rocketry and the first jet engines, which they created as weapons against the communists. In cooperation with Europe, the United States of America annexed hitler's scientists and technologies, and used them to help defend ourselves from the communist plague. We also quite successfully commercialized these technologies.

Fear of being a communist slave by a country which has no problems working or starving its captives to death in the name of the state ideoloy, well, it's a hell of a motivator. I remember my great grandmothers' stories about the russian pogroms very well.