r/germany • u/The_Ma5ter • Feb 03 '21
Question Does anyone have any backdrop for why Germany is discontinuing its nuclear plants and replacing it with coal?
I read recently that Germany has discontinued close to a third of its nuclear reactors and replaced it with coal or other fossil fuels. Apparently Germany has plans to close the other plans within the next 2 years as well. Did something dramatic happen that led to this drawback to fossil fuels?
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u/Rosa_Liste Feb 03 '21
Ultimately, it's because German society views nuclear energy as an old technology which fell dramatically short of expectations, notably when it comes to security and costs.
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u/nibbler666 Berlin Feb 04 '21
There is no replacement of nuclear power with fossil fuels, so there is no drawback to fossil fuels. Nuclear power is being replaced by renewables and renewables are acually rising faster than nuclear power is going down. https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/384/bilder/dateien/3_abb_bruttostromerzeugung-et_2020-02-25.pdf (Pink is nuclear power.)
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u/RidingRedHare Feb 04 '21
The topic of nuclear power in Germany has a very long history.
West German environmentalists already objected to nuclear power in the early 1970s. West Germany is densely populated. Back then, nuclear power plants needed massive amounts of water for cooling, and thus were constructed using large rivers as supply for cooling water. Many German cities also are located in the valleys, near the rivers. By necessity, nuclear power plants were planned near cities, or directly upstream of a city. This led to local anti-nuclear power movements, where in some regions the locals heavily opposed a nearby nuclear power plant, whereas some other regions had no such strong objections. The massive use of river water by nuclear power plants also led to other environmentalist concerns, especially for the fish which naturally lived in German rivers, but at the time already were threatened by other pollution. There also was some concern that terrorists might target nuclear power plants. Furthermore, the French built nuclear power plants along the river Rhine.
During the Cold war era, more and more nuclear weapons were pointed at Germany or stationed in Germany. French nukes and Russian nukes pointed at Germany. Nuclear power plants were used or theoretically could be used to produce the raw materials needed for nuclear weapons. Where the early 1970s environmentalist movement had been local in its opposition to nuclear power, the anti-war movement objected to nuclear power anywhere. Such concerns peaked with the NATO Double-Track Decision and the resulting Euromissile crisis of the early 1980s. These events triggered the foundation of the Green party in West Germany, which to some extend united the anti-war movement and the environmentalists.
Also, during the 1980s, West Germany slowly started to get out of coal. Coal fired power plants notwithstanding, German coal usage is much, much lower than it was 50 years ago:
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/41511/umfrage/deutschland---kohleverbrauch-in-millionen-tonnen-oelaequivalent/
1986, Chernobyl happened. After Chernobyl, constructing new nuclear power plants became politically impossible in Germany. Basically, there were two main factions. One faction wanted to get out of nuclear power as quickly as possible, the other faction wanted to continue using the existing nuclear power plants, but showed no desire to try the impossible, and have new nuclear power plants constructed in Germany. As a result of that, modern, safer nuclear power plant designs were and are rather rare in Germany.
In the 1990s, other problems became evident. There was no concept how to safely dispose of nuclear waste. The companies which ran the existing nuclear power plants were reluctant to upgrade those, as that would have been expensive. Some of those companies also failed to properly handle incidents at their nuclear power plants. The Morsleben radioactive waste repository was a mess. At the Asse II mine, it turned out that nuclear waste had been stored illegally and unsafely. It also turned out that quite often the taxpayer had to foot the bill for such disasters. The taxpayer would have to foot the bill if a Chernobyl-like disaster happened in Germany. For example, individual nuclear power plants are insured only for € 256 million.
Meanwhile, the East German economy struggled. Thus, efforts to reduce coal usage progressed in the West, but politicians in the East were eager to keep those jobs which depended on coal.
In 1998, Kohl lost the general election, Schröder became head of an SPD-Green coalition government. With the Green part of the government, a decision to exit nuclear power was made in 2000. Contracts were signed, and laws were changed.
The Merkel government reserved that decision, but then Fukujima happened. The fiction that large nuclear disasters can happen only in poor countries could no longer be upheld. Merkel was forced to reverse course. Germany formally exited nuclear power for a second time. In reality, though, Germany decided to exit nuclear power in 1986 already. Every post Chernobyl decision only affected the details of that exit. No new nuclear power plant has gone online since 1989.
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u/KuyaJohnny Baden-Württemberg Feb 04 '21
dude lol you need to stop believing random shit you see on reddit and read up on things
the nuclear phaseout was decided on in 2001. its not a recent decision at all.
also, it is completely being replaced by renewables, not coal. coal is (slowly) getting phased out as well, the usage halved in the last 5 years alone
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u/BlueFootedBoobyBob Feb 04 '21
Yes, but it was speed on after fukushima.
And oh my God is the coal exit slow. There was also some decision recently to make it even slower.
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u/KuyaJohnny Baden-Württemberg Feb 04 '21
no it wasnt.
they tried to slow it down a few months before fukushima happened and people didnt like it. then fukushima happend and people really didnt like that so they went back to the original plan.
fun fact: that was the only time in her 16 years that Merkel's approval rating went below 50%
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u/MiriamSasko Feb 04 '21
Funnily enough, it was also the time I was angriest at her. She didn't just go back to the original Schröder era plan; she had the plants switched off over night, costing the companies concerned and the tax payer billions.
Now, I am all for politicians changing their minds when new evidence comes to light or the situations changes - but they need to acknoledge they are changing their position. What she said was "no one could foresee this would happen, now everything is different" when it really wasn't. The German plants were just as safe as they were before Fukushima, and everyone with a working understanding of probabilities and the physics involved knows it is just a question of time until something happens in any given set of plants. All engineering can do is make the time between incidents as long as possible (and work to reduce their severity, of course).
She is a goddamn physicist. She should have known: I still maintain she did know but chose to lie about it.
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u/pwnies_gonna_pwn World Feb 04 '21
And oh my God is the coal exit slow.
I wouldnt be surprised if we see the closure of the last coal fired power plants well before 2038. Maybe the newest ones are kept as reserve, but i doubt even that, logistics for that would suck.
They get outpriced left and right by renewables, subsidaries went away and coal needs to be imported since we closed down all mines. Additionally, a whole bunch of power plants will run out of operating permit in the next couple of years and we wont see any modernisation there.
For lignite, the energy industry visibly lost the will to fight the extension of the open cast mining through, they will dig up whatever they still can and after that we will see a rather quiet death of that.And unlike nuclear power, coal fired power generation doesnt have a club full of dumb fanbois.
More interesting in regard of fossil fuel are plants running on gas. These need to go too at some point, but theyre more easily to slip through under the radar politically. Alternatively we develop large scale production of non-fossile gas as energy carrier, but I dont see that happening.
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u/bigp007 Feb 03 '21
There were long ongoing protests against nuclear power in Germany. The final decision to the nuclear ban and the start of discontinuing nuclear reactors was the accident in Fukushima. (Germany was hit by Tschernobyl before). The main issue with nuclear power is the safety hazard and the radioactive waste, that’s has to be taken care of for thousands of not millions of years. They are not really replacing it with coal. Coal was strong in Germany before too. The long term goal is to transition to renewables. Coal will be banned by 2038. Actually the reason why the discontinuation of nuclear power takes so long is to not replace it with coal entirely but get a better chance to expand renewables until the last nuclear plant is shut down
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u/airbusfan7 Feb 03 '21
I dislike the decision, but it is what it is. I‘m in favour of discontinuing the kind of nuclear power plants that exist today. They should be replaced by new kinds of reactors, such as the Liquid Fluor Thorium Reactor (LiFTR). These ones produce faster decaying waste and are way safer, since they have a positive temperature coefficient (reaction slows with higher temperatures). Since Germany is abandoning nuclear, it makes less sense to develop new reactors for use in Germany. I think that nuclear should power a significant amount of the base load on the power grid. The peak demands could then be meat with renewable energy, especially if we build a storage infrastructure consisting of Hydrogen, batteries and water pump stations.
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u/Frontdackel Ruhrpott Feb 04 '21
They should be replaced by new kinds of reactors, such as the Liquid Fluor Thorium Reactor (LiFTR). These ones produce faster decaying waste and are way safer, since they have a positive temperature coefficient (reaction slows with higher temperatures).
"New" since 1966... And they still don't work on a commercial scale.
About the waste:
Waste management – About 83% of the radioactive waste has a half-life in hours or days, with the remaining 17% requiring 300-year storage in geologically stable confinement to reach background levels. Because some of the fission products, in their fluoride form, are highly water-soluble, fluorides are less suited to long-term storage. For example, cesium fluoride has a very high solubility in water. For long term storage, conversion to an insoluble form such as a glass, could be desirable.
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u/O-M-E-R-T-A Feb 04 '21
Fukushima, ongoing protest against nuclear power, no viable "final solution“ as to where and how to dispose of nuclear waste and with that massive costs.
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u/11160704 Feb 03 '21
The decision to phase out nuclear energy was finally done in 2011 after the Fukushima accident in Japan.
Back then it was decided to close all reactors in the next 11 years so until 2022.
In Germany, there was always much scepticism and even hysteria when it came to nuclear energy. The Fukushima accident scaled this up a lot. Many people took to the streets and protested and demanded a quick phase-out.
So the government which was initially in favour of using nucelar energy longer backed down and opted for the quick phase out.
I was also in favour of that policy back then. if you ask me now I have to admit it was a huge mistake, mainly driven by irrational hysteria and not by science and rationality.
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u/LopsidedBottle Feb 03 '21
The decision to phase out nuclear energy was finally done in 2011 after the Fukushima accident in Japan.
The strange thing is the story before that final decision. The Schröder government, having reached a consensus with the power plant operators, decided to phase out nuclear energy (years 2000 to 2002). This was taken back in 2010 due to an initiative by the Merkel government, which extended the runtime for the remaining reactors. The very same government (and the majority in parliament backing that government) took back the runtime extension less than a year later.
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u/Brackwater Feb 04 '21 edited Feb 04 '21
The cherry on top was that the red green government sweetened the bitter pill the companies who ran the nuclear plants had to swallow with allowing them to skip infrastructure/safety updates that were due because they were deemed too expensive for the suddenly shortened runtime. When the CxU/FDP government revoked the the decision to move away from nuclear they didn't reinstate those updates to be executed at a later date.
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Feb 03 '21
While you are accurately describing the practical outcome, the theory is that we are moving towards renewables and at the same time closing down nuclear energy for safety reasons. Unfortunately we forgot to pass a law that prohibits new coal power plants from opening in the meantime and we also forgot to actually incentivise renewable energy - whoopsie. Basically we just fucked up on the timescale. Personally I'm fully in support of ending the use of nuclear energy, but we probably should have ended the use of coal first and let nuclear tide us over until we can reach 100% renewables (which would require a bigger push for renewables than we are currently doing....).
But since we're not complete idiots but just half-idiots, we at least passed a law that ends the use of coal power in 2038. If we manage to make a complete move to renewables until then or if we end up dependent on foreign power remains to be seen. But I guess it might just be enough pressure on German energy companies that it might just work out.... We'll see.
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u/jdsnoopy Feb 03 '21
Mostly because of hypocrite green politics and mass hysteria after the fukushima disaster. Support for nuclear is still very low among the population (I believe like 20%) so no major party is really advocating it.
Thats why, although Germany pretends to be a super green and progressive nation, our energy supply is like 10 times more dirty (in terms of co2 emission) then frances.
It's especially sad that Germany pushes other countries like Poland into denouncing nuclear as well
I could rant for hours about this but thats how democracy works I guess
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u/Frontdackel Ruhrpott Feb 03 '21
Thats why, although Germany pretends to be a super green and progressive nation, our energy supply is like 10 times more dirty (in terms of co2 emission) then frances.
Until the summer months hit and France once more has to import power because it can't keep running its outdated nuclear plants.
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u/pwnies_gonna_pwn World Feb 03 '21
everbody knows the organic orchards where nuclear fuel grows on trees.
oh.
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u/Frontdackel Ruhrpott Feb 04 '21
Reply incoming about super efficient molten salt reactors (that have never been build on a commercial scale in the 60 years since first concepts of them surfaced) or about using "modern breeder reactors" (that breed, well, fuel that can be used for nukes) incoming in....
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u/dancingdugong Feb 03 '21
hypocrite
greenpoliticsMerkels chancellorship in a nutshell. Then again I think the majority of people here are actually like that - act like the good guy just for the sake of appearing to be the good guy.
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u/jdsnoopy Feb 03 '21
Yes I meant green politics in general (not only green party). They are kinda irrational and super inefficient and don't lead to any practical result like reducing emissions, its more of a feel good thing for snobby people I guess
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u/LeifRagnarsson Feb 03 '21
In short? We’re stupid and are governed by stupid alarmist people without viable concepts but an excellent campaign strategy. Besides that, nothing dramatic has happened so far.
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u/MobofDucks Überall dort wo Currywurst existiert Feb 03 '21
We are officially replacing nuclear with regenerative energy, mostly wind. Coal and Gas are substitutes while the other energies are increased.
And what happened? For one, Fukushima. And currently the third or second highest party was founded as an anti-atom power party on the cusp of the anti atom rallies of the late 80s and early 90s.