Yes, the so called base load isn’t the strength of intermittent renewables and yet Germany turned off clean, nuclear power in favor of gas and coal plants.
I wonder how that happened…
I wonder how that happened…
In case of Chernobyl, the worst case estimates are 4000 excess deaths. In comparison, about the same number of excess deaths is from coal burning in Germany each year.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373512769_Environme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Because coal burning is happening for decades and is not one time rare event it doesn't get the attention it deserves.
And also many organization demonizing nuclear energy do it, because they see a source of plutonium for nuclear weapons in each civilian nuclear reactor and each country running civilian nuclear reactors as a country on the brink of having nuclear weapons.
A study found that most of the contamination these days doesn't come from Chernobyl anymore but from nuclear weapon tests.
https://www.infranken.de/bayern/warum-wildschweine-in-bayern...
PS: hunters with contaminated boars have to pay for the disposal themselves but can get the money back from the state. So, like with everything around nuclear: in the end it's the taxpayer who has to pay for it.
https://www.bayern.landtag.de/www/ElanTextAblage_WP17/Drucks...
Renewables like solar have a per-MWh generation cost of zero. You literally have to make the electricity price negative before it makes sense for the operator to shut it down. Their profitability depends only on the average electricity price: the high market price during the winter makes up for the near-zero market price during the summer.
In a free electricity market there is absolutely zero demand for a power plant which generates a constant amount of power and acts as the "base supply". With dirt-cheap renewables its capacity simply isn't needed during the summer and its nonzero running costs makes it unable to compete. What is needed instead is a peaker plant which can supplement renewables, and which is profitable when it operates only during low-sun low-wind "dunkelflaute" winter weeks.
Nuclear is fundamentally incompatible with this. It is the most expensive form of electricity generation and its costs are dominated by the need to pay back a massive construction loan. In a free market a nuclear power plant would only be able to operate for a few weeks per year, which instantly kills its business case.
Want nuclear? Then you'll have to accept that it will require huge government subsidies, and that during high-supply moments you'll be turning off free renewables to make space for expensive nuclear.
If anything, one could say that renewables will be the new base load supply. The real question is: who will be doing the peaking?
Oh ffs. Nuclear power is not clean. Look what the GDR left us with the Wismut "heritage" - mining for uranium is incredibly toxic, and safely disposing of the spent fuel and all the other irradiated remains is incredibly expensive.
We just don't see it in our Western nations because we get our uranium from Russia, other -'stan countries and remote regions in Australia and Canada where barely anyone lives to care about the destruction.
As for the disposal, over half of the already measly budget for the Ministry of Environment goes to take care of the nuclear waste - 1.4 billion euros A YEAR [1]. In contrast, only 400 million euros are spent on environmental production. Nuclear power wasn't just never clean, it also was never cheap because the true costs were never accounted for.
Want to convince people that nuclear is a bad idea? Forget about the waste, the dangers, and the overseas environmental impact, and instead focus purely on the cost. The business case for nuclear in a renewable-heavy grid is extremely poor, and very few people like nuclear enough that they would willingly pay massive subsidies to choose it instead of any of the alternatives. For most people nuclear is a necessary evil and a magic-solve-everything solution to the climate crisis: they don't like it enough to stick to it when more attractive options exist.
There is a large somewhat unrealised issue of decommissioning large uranium nuclear plants when they reach end of life. [1] [2] Perhaps the newer smaller reactor plants proposed atm might not quite the same level of trouble decommissioning them.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Cs8I-6PkQ [video 27 mins] How a Nuclear Power Plant Is Actually Decommissioned — The Full $20B Process
- can take 30 to 60 years - average US nuclear plant decommission cost sits around 10 billion dollars.
Not as much material per single decommissioned site - but in total, simply to laws of scale, a lot more.
For the US this doesn't matter anyway, the US has ample amounts of geologically stable desert areas where they can just bury anything from UFOs to nuclear waste without anyone being bothered by it or it posing a danger to its surroundings, but Europe... outside of the Nordic countries with their granite rock formations, good luck finding a suitable site that doesn't risk contaminating the groundwater that is the source of drinking water for millions of people (see e.g. the Asse storage site and its issues).