With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
Yes, countries like Germany are turning to coal as a direct result of nuclear-phobia.
The US, with all its green initiatives and solar/wind incentives, is pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia. The US has been the top oil producer on whole the planet for the last 5-6 years. The problem is getting worse.
Sorry, this is just false info. Germany is not turning to coal as a result of your called nuclear phobia.
I will repeat my comment from another thread:
If you are able to read German or use a translator I can recommend this interview where the expert explains everything and goes into the the details.
Don’t repeat the stories of the far right and nuclear lobby. Nuclear will always be more expensive than renewables and nobody has solved the waste problem until today. France as a leading nuclear nation had severe problems to cool their plants during the summer due to, guess what, climate change. Building new nuclear power plants takes enormous amounts of money and 10-20years at least. Time that we don’t have at the moment.
Renewables are great until the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing.
And that’s more likely than enriched Uranium becoming unavailable or locally unobtainable?
As people pointed out in another thread, nuclear energy is NOT the future and also a really bad short term solution,so countries like Germany are going back to coal short term to make the transitions to renewables in the meantime.
It’s not a great solution, but without Nordstream, there’s really not much else more sensible to do right now, just to make the transition.
what makes nuclear energy a bad option?
- It takes 20 years to build
- nobody knows how much nuclear fuel will cost in 20 years
- you have to take out a big loan and make interest payments on it for maybe 30 years before you start making a profit
- if you don’t have enough water for cooling because of climate change, the plant must shut down
- if your neighbor decides to start a war against you, your nuclear plants become a liability, see Ukraine.
I think smaller, decentralized renewable energy is cheaper in the short and long run and has a much lower risk in case of accidents, natural Desasters or attacks.
Out of necessity probably. In Germany for example they’re turning off nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal because nuclear is dangerous apparently. However you still need to produce the power somehow to run the country. Not even the most hardcore climate activists want to sit in a dark, cold apartment with no power.
Germany is not replacing nuclear plants with coal. They are replacing them with renewables and the plans to phase out nuclear are 10 years, respecitvely 20 years old, but thanks to nuclear lobby meddling they went back on phasing them out and then back on going back again because of Fukushima. So because of pro nuclear we got less renewables and more coal than if we just had sticked to the initial plan in the first place.
They’re burning coal to produce the energy they otherwise would have done using nuclear so I don’t think there’s anything wrong about what I said. If you turn off a nuclear power plant you’re going to need to produce that energy by some other means. They’re not building new coal plants to replace nuclear but they’re continuing to use/reopen coal plants that shouldn’t have to be used anymore. Germany is the world’s 4th biggest coal consumer.
“Replacing” implies that there is usage of coal plants, that before weren’t used. And that is not the case. In the first half of 2023 the share of both lignite and normal coal went down by 21 and 23%, while the share of renewables increased.
So renewables took up the slack, not coal. If you want to say, that the nuclear plants could be replacing coal plants, that is a different argument, but that does not imply the reverse relationship.
At least 20 coal-fired power plants nationwide are being resurrected or extended past their closing dates to ensure Germany has enough energy to get through the winter.
While this all isn’t necessarily directly linked to the phasing out of nuclear energy and is more related to the war in Ukraine it still shows that Germany is continuing to use coal plants it didn’t intend to anymore.
Germany is firing up old coal plants, sparking fears climate goals will go up in smoke
Germany to reactivate coal power plants as Russia curbs gas flow
Energy crisis fuels coal comeback in Germany
Germany Reopens Coal Plants Because Of Reduced Russian Energy
Yes. And as you see these articles are from 9 month before the nuclear plants were phased out. But since Germany didnt start the war in Ukraine i don’t think it can be considered a failure of the German energy policies in general. And incidently, if it wasn’t for the resurgence of nuclear in the 2009 government, the original plan to expand renewables that was formulated with the decision to phase out nuclear power by the 2002 government, would have made it much easier for Germany to react to the Ukraine war.
It is always painted as if the debate and political alignments would make it coal vs. nuclear. But the reality of German politics and economic interests in politics is that nuclear and coal are both on the same side and acting against renewables. It is the existing fossil lobbies and energy companies heavily invested in fossils that are against renewables. For them it doesnt matter, if they can run a nuclear plant or a coal plant longer, as either is an otherwise stranded asset form them. The argument, that we could reduce the amount of coal plants this way was only coming up, when the general debate started to acknowledge climate change as a serious danger and mitigation as necessary, so around 2015-2018. But it is not a sincere interest of the pro nuclear factions in German politics.
the problem with nuclear power is the waste. no ody wants it, nobody can agree on a place to put it. also the amount of power germany got from nuclear before shutting down the last plants was verry low.
People will do everything that givesthem an advantage in anykind of way. If coal is an affordable resource to fulfill a need it will be mined and put to use.
You may change the view on a thing for a few persons, but never of all of them.
It didn’t, at least not in the way you think. The headlines of the past few days show the aftermath of the last decades: industry contracts that were made in the last century and the political heritage of a generation of politicians who are no longer in power.
Coal is being phased out and that’s not changing. It cannot change substantially anyway; there is only so much coal in the gound. Recent political decisions moved to keep most of it there. For technological, political, economical and industry related reasons this won’t be a fast process unfortunately.
One of the roadblocks of our transition to a sustainable energy supply is how much money (and in our capitalisic society, therefore, power) the industry itself holds. Coal lobbies will work hard for you not to think about them too much. Nuclear lobbies will work hard for you to blame those pesky environmentalists. A game of distraction and blame shifting. This thread is a good example of how well it’s working.
Our resources are limited. This is true for good old planet earth as well as our societies. We only have so much money, time, and workforce to manage this transition. And as much as I’d love to wake up tomorrow to a world with PVC on every roof, a windmill on every field, and decentralised storage in every town center, this is just not realistic overnight. We’ll have to live with the fact of our limited resources and divert as much as possible of them towards such a future. (And btw, putting billions of dollars in money, time, and workforce towards a reactor that will start working in 10-30 years is not the way to do this, as much as the nuclear lobby would like you to think that.)
Tf you mean stopped
- a German
