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Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

? Sorry why?

The remaining nuclear power plants just had 4GW of output. Just this year alone 12 GW of renewables will come online.

That's a dishonest comparison as wind and solar are extremely volatile and can't replace a stable power source. You need something like coal for that.

You need peaking power plants such as Gas to cover volatility.

The comparison is a bit dishonest because it doesn't include the capacity factor of either technology:

Solar ~11%

Wind ~21%

Nucear ~90%

The nuclear power plants that were shut down would’ve needed extremely expensive maintenance to keep them running.

It’s a really complicated issue, with lots of misinformation floating around on both sides of the discussion. After all, nuclear power plants aren’t actually economically viable either without heavy subsidisation and socialising the trash management (at least the ones we’ve had in Germany).

While I can’t say wherever Germany should’ve built more nuclear power plants… I’m however certain that most online discussions about the topic are extremely misinformed. The biggest reason for this situation is probably corruption, some of which has been proven and reported on going back decades with Schroeder for example.

That kind of corruption goes bavk to the likes of Strauss. Otherwise, fully agree.

> The nuclear power plants that were shut down would’ve needed extremely expensive maintenance to keep them running.

That's false. The reason for the shot down was not economical but political. We pay an extremely high price for our nuclear delusions.

It’s both true. Their maintenance was delayed for years because of that political decision to shut them down, which worsened the situation.

And for the record: I never claimed that the decision to shut them down wasn’t politically motivated, I just pointed out multiple reasons why it wasn’t completely bonkers. The way you phrased your point also makes it pretty transparent why misinformation campaigns work so well. You once heard one part of the story and now believe to understand a very multilayered situation.

Calling the situation multilayered is just an excuse to partly justify this terrible mistake. There is no doubt that the cost of shutting them down far exceeds the cost of letting them run, so the remark about "extremely expensive" maintenance is just false.

Maintenance to keep them running would have been prohibitively expensive, because non was done in last years due the decision to shut them down. So yes, the cost of getting them back into running shape was prohibitive due to that maintenance backlog.

Different question so, instead of complaining about spoiled milk, what is your proposal for the future? A realistic one please takong into account project lead times for new power plants.

Unfortunately, I'm not so sure there's a quick fix for this.

Both nuclear, water and gas have the advantage that they're pretty massive and can store energy while they rotate. In the past, these systems were great for the grid because they kept on spinning and were hard to slow down. So, when there was a big load on the grid, like when an industrial plant fired up a huge device that sucked up lots of power, these giant machines took a while to slow down. That meant they could pump some extra power into the grid, at least for short periods.

The realistic option is probably to expand solar and wind power and also set up hydro pumps for storing energy. Alongside that, also invest in SMR reactors and supercapacitor to handle sudden spikes in grid demand.

> Maintenance to keep them running would have been prohibitively expensive

No. It would have been very cheap compared to the long term cost of a) an energy and economic crisis and b) with replacing nuclear with other power sources.

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