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
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:
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.
The article you linked isn’t very convincing in my opinion. “We could shut down our nuclear reactors because France has plenty of nuclear reactors” doesn’t explain why the switch to coal would be an advantage. The article also admits that in the winter the carbon intensive coal plants would need to switch on to supply power (but that happened not to be necessary last time).
Nuclear is expensive but not inherently more so than coal. Plants have become more expensive because of the nuclear scare in the 80s and 90s, but they’re still cost effective today.
The anti nuclear propaganda from the left is as strong as the anti solar propaganda from the right. I think everyone sensible agrees that solar and wind energy are the future, but grid storage is ineffective to this day and electricity demand will only go up. The fact Germany is
constructing newreactivating decommissioned coal plants proves that.The best moment to start building a new nuclear power plant was ten years ago. The next best moment is right now. I don’t see why we should accept the carbon footprint and toxic, radioactive exhaust of coal plants, especially for how little electricity were getting out of them in exchange.
Germany has not build any new coal plants. At least not in the last five years.
Edit: Why are people down voting a factual statement? Go ahead and provide better info if you got it.
If hasn’t constructed any new ones, but it has reactivated plants that were previously shut down. I suppose that means you’re right, but it also means the coal plants that have been activated are using older environmental norms, so I’m not sure if that’s an improvement.
Hmm I think what you mean is that some coal plants have been put into active maintenance. IIRC this was rather a countermeasure in case of absence of gas supplies. They are not part of the regular energy market.
Anyway, I think there is not only one way forward. Countries like France choose to use a big portion of nuclear, Germany does not. And every way has its own challenges. What is important is that energy supply should be independent of oppressor states and moving into a direction of carbon neutrality.
There is no “nuclear lobby” stop making shit up. Nuclear isn’t profitable, that is why we don’t have it. If it’s not profitable, there will be no industry lobby pushing for it. The fact that it isn’t profitable shouldn’t matter. I care about the environment and if Capitalism can’t extract profit without destroying the environment (it can’t) then we need to stop evaluating infrastructure through a Capitalist lens.
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?
If you haven’t noticed, the sun stops shining for several hours every day and how much the wind blows changes pseudo-randomly on a hourly basis. Are problems with uranium supply more common than that? Not to mention that uranium can be recycled.