For a country that people shat on a lot for closing their nuclear plants Germany is on the right track reducing their C02.
The good news is that the current government has systems in place, which should bring something like 79% of emissions to zero by 2050. What is really lacking is agriculture and trucks. There are plans to increase taxes on trucks to include a carbon price of 200€/t, which should help. Some of the EU agricultural legislation would also help with agricultural emissions, but those will propably never go to zero anyway.
The bad part is most of it is way to slow.
I remembered vividly when some people predicting soaring high coal electricity generation would occur in Germany for 2023 back in April. Of course, those who had been studying the actual Energiewende for a while knew that would never be the case.
Interestingly, most of Germany import in 2023 was also from renewables. One could say that German coal has been beatened by growing renewables both at home and abroad.
Now think about how much lower it could have been with nuclear power.
Not much, since it covered only about 4% of the demand to begin with. Plus billions in compensations for nuclear companies if the plans had been changed again. Plus Billions to transport the waste through the country again and again because there is no storage safe enough on the long term. All of that money is by far better invested in renewables.
They have been searching for more than 30 years to hide the last nuclear waste somewhere and still haven’t found a suitable place. That’s why they don’t want nuclear power.
Here is were we in scandinavia can step up, we have a stable bedrock and modern technology to drill into the ground.
Let us build a few permanent storage sites with secure handling facilities and sell space to other countries needing it.
Ontario, Canada this year is supposed to be choosing which of 2 proposed storage sites will be chosen for development. Nuclear power is a major part of the grid there, representing something like 35% of capacity and 55% of output. The generation facilities are geographically well situated, with one station being <100km away from a proposed storage site and two others within 250km.
I wonder what kind of risks there are with accidents during long distance transportation. Ships sink, trains derail, and trucks have accidents.
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I think Germany should have kept open their nuclear power plants as long as they could. But I don’t think opening new ones was the right idea.
Hopefully they keep making the gains they have.
I don’t know about that some of the new gen 4 reactors that are starting to come out effectively tackle a lot of the downsides like cost or the need to store waste.
I don’t think a 100% nuclear solution is a good idea but it sounds like it’ll have its place in a future national energy portfolio for a lot of countries.
Thank you Germany, that’s impressive
For real now? I thought they were going back to coal?
That’s what the propaganda keeps saying. I wonder why…
Germany based.
