Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out Has Been a Disaster | Hacker News Reader

Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out Has Been a Disaster

nationalinterest.org

26 pointsmpweiher13 comments

The article is factually incorrect on many fronts. There were only 3 reactors running at last. Nuclear was never profitable, the country shouldered most of its costs (esp for radioactive waste storage)

The renewable energy transition was blocked and delayed by the same Merkel govt. Germany was once leading in wind and PV energy and all those industries were destroyed and almost 100k jobs lost. 60bn subsidies per year go to fossil fuel companies including coal mining and burning. Often under the disguise of job retention. All through industrial lobbying and strong unions in the fossil fuel industries.

Ha, I didn't read your post until after I said the links are always propaganda...see my previous comment. Have an upvote)

Germany's renewable industry also was never profitable, if you look at the whole country. It was always propped up by huge subsidies, and when those subsidies where scaled back (as planned and announced beforehand), the whole rent-seeking industry folded and business went to China.

It is hard to argue about energy cost in Germany, because all energy sources are a mixture of privately financed and public/state-subsidized, but always in different, complicated and frankly weird ways. Things are easier to see in countries where either practically everything is done by the state (e.g. France) or everything is more free-market (e.g. the US).

You aren't considering the phase-out costs, particularly mortality and environmental costs from the fossil fuels that Germany has now doubled down on.

Green Party activists often demonize nuclear while calling for renewables and their inevitable companion of gas peaking plants. Activists pretend "renewables + gas" is green and clean using insane cognitive dissonance, while claiming that renewables can power 100% of a country's energy needs -- a farcical claim not supported in any country.

How much CO2 german fossil fuel energy production is putting the air compared to the others?

Maybe Germany could go energy martial law, that to build and deploy wind/hydro/solar/etc production plants to shut down their fossil fuel energy production plants. In the meantime, if France is ramping up on nuclear energy, Germany will get some from the EU electric grid.

> In the meantime, if France is ramping up on nuclear energy, Germany will get some from the EU electric grid.

It’s mostly the opposite, though. France is heavily importing German electricity.

I said not right now, in the future as it was just announced last year.

Whatever, who knows how it will end up.

Huh, maybe I missed something, my understanding was, that they have no new plants ready to go anytime soon as they just left their old ones, which now have the issues they have. Do you have a link?

It would be more profitable than burning coal, were externalities priced in to fossil fuel energy generation as they are with nuclear energy.

With nuclear, every kWh generated incorporates the cost of decommissioning, storage, truly baroque safety compliance, and all the rest.

With coal, every kWh incorporates the cost of… coal. What’s the plan for the radioactive ash? Dump it. Somewhere. Wherever. What’s the plan for the atmosphere? Screw it. What’s the plan for decommissioning? File for bankruptcy and let the state deal with it.

I like to check the source info on partisan posts, and something from the About Us page was just...off.

For over almost three decades, The National Interest, founded in 1985...

With that and also the dated nature of the isses they mention on the page, it hasn't been updated since 2015 or before.

(I rarely bother with the link itself, it's always propaganda. Dang, the only entertainment I can find in these things is in the metadata.)

It's interesting how Dimitri Simes is now completely missing from their Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Interest

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_National_Inte... (Dec 2021 version)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitri_Simes

Favorite part: "Simes resides in Washington, DC, but remotely serves as a moderator of the Moscow-based political program Big Game on Channel One Russia, together with Vyacheslav Nikonov."

No single group has done more to increase CO2 emissions over the last 40 years than the environmental movement, with groups like Greenpeace, and parties like Germany's Green Party, playing the central role in blocking the expansion of nuclear power in the advanced economies.

> Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist and author of the book “The Power of Capitalism”

These people are really destroying the credibility and respect people have for Capitalism with their climate change denial.

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