Title makes it sound like a new method of generating energy was discovered, but really the article is about using geothermal in a new location.
> The development of medium-deep (>400 m) and deep geothermal reservoirs (> 1,500 m) could be a partial solution to provide renewable heat to single buildings, residential or commercial neighbourhoods, or districts of the city of Aachen via the existing district heating network.
Ta-daa. That happens. They found some new geothermal source in Munich as well after I moved into the place I'm in now. It turned out it was very viable.
Nowadays the heat in my apartment is mainly geothermal (The district heating network in my neighborhood has been converted to geothermal energy over the past 10 years.)
Tapping a geothermal aquifer system is much easier than to get useful quantities of heat from dry rock, because in most places the thermal conductivity of rock is very low.
"The enthusiasm in the research community is justified by the vast extent of the energy supply and the low environmental impact of the method, however significant breakthroughs will be required to make this a commercial energy resource."
I have always wondered about the origins of the anti nuclear opinion of Germans.
It has Cold War origins to be sure, but what kind?
I suspect American intelligence has been supporting the anti nuclear movement for some time, for non-proliferation reasons - and not just in Germany. I certainly would be, if I ran the State Department.
* If the cold war had turned into a hot war, almost all of Germany would have been nuked. The expectation was not to be able to stop the soviet invasion, but to nuke them in western Germany.
EDIT: The reaction of the state also caused an escalation. The constitutional court blocked governmental overreach: https://www-bpb-de.translate.goog/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-akt...
This also lead to the anti nuclear movement being about more than just nuclear plants, but rights for citizens.
The Soviets are a more likely culprit, as then just like now most of their revenues came from oil and gas exports. They secretly supported the Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader-Meinhof) terrorists via the Stasi, so funding the Greens to stymie intermediate range ballistic missile deployments in Germany, with securing hydrocarbon sales as a cherry on top, would not at all be out of character.
Back when I was in high school in France in the 1980s (before Chernobyl), I was already very aware of global warming and deeply resentful of the various Green parties sabotaging the one solution we had at the time.
I'm still very pro-nuclear, including Thorium and fast-neutron breeder reactors (but not small modular reactors, that are a boondoggle outside nuclear submarines), but I recognize solar or renewables combined with grid scale storage are more economical.
Investing enough into renewables combined with grid scale storage to cover a prolonged Dunkelflaute is very expensive, therefor German government is investing in new gas-fired power plants with capacity of 11 GW, with state subsidies.
And this is exactly why Germany is not serious about its obligations to fight Global Warming. Always choosing the easy or demagogic way out, whether it was running on cheap Russian gas, or mothballing nuclear and restarting lignite coal power plants.
Some good answers below already. I think the anti nuclear movement already started before Chernobyl. I believe it was one of the founding ideologies of the green parties (the danger of high CO2 emissions was not yet front of mind for a lot of people back then). So the opposition to nuclear energy kind of laid the foundation for the modern (European) green parties. But these were all young people back then (in the 70s) and a they have now become the dominant generation in politics. So just like in any other country the 50+ years old are in charge and that cohort in Germany happens to have fond memories of opposing nuclear energy.
And just a little side note because I've looked it up recently: EU produces about the same amount of nuclear energy as the US - and that's despite Germany shutting down all reactors. So it's not like the US or any other region has a much higher usage.
Once I had a discussion with a German that is a strong supporter of the green party and his argument against nuclear power was the nuclear waste and no proper was of disposing it and also building new nuclear power plants are expensive and take a long time.
Then I did a deep research and created a PDF and pointed out that there has been many advances of re-using spent-nuclear fuel and minimize the environmental impact since 1980s and also countries like China has been using a cleaver way of using a standardized model of building power plants to cut cost, etc. but he didn't want to accept it as if he was almost brainwashed.
I think most nuclear folks would rather divert the "big coal, and nat gas" plant building budgets to "build nuclear."
I understand the motivations for solar/wind, but there are real limiters that aren't addressed yet. Nuclear is the only option that is carbon neutral and lacks those limiters making it appealing. If I need steady state gigawatt scale power in a specific location, Nuclear is the only green option.
Yeah, nuclear is a known solution to all our energy problems which is why I advocate for it.
Solar and wind are great but there is still no existing setup to provide a stable and reliable nation level power grid. Nobody has the power storage solution.
Nuclear however has been proven to be capable of delivering any kind of power generation we need at any scale. Perhaps it isn't best solution, but there are no other completely solved solutions, just speculation that before long we will unlock far better battery or energy storage technologies before too long.
> If I need steady state gigawatt scale power in a specific location, Nuclear is the only green option.
I don't believe that is true: one way to produce electricity is a thermal engine driving a generator, but for a thermal engine you need both a cold heat bath and a hot heat bath.
Those 2 heat baths could be externally delivered (a stream of ice, and a stream of steam, say) or one of the 2 heat baths could be chosen as the local environmental temperature heat bath.
Historically the local environmental temperature heat bath was selected for the role of the cold heat bath, and the hot heat bath was heated by say burning fuel (fossil or nuclear; and I am ignoring the chemical and mechanical energy terms of internal combustion engines).
If you could source a cold heat bath, one could select the local environments as the hot side heat bath instead.
Above the tropopause the atmosphere has become a lot more transparent for thermal infrared radiation, and thats why it is a lot colder up there, its in better thermal radiation contact with the CMB (the temperature of dark space), very close to the absolute zero point for temperature.
It is not a scientific challenge but a "mere" engineering one, to create a robust, all-weather aerostat where the "cable" transports mass (presumably, but necessarily a refrigerant) symmetrically up and down (in a loop) heating the upper layers of the atmosphere (puncturing the CO2 blanket), while cooling ground level environment. That large temperature difference persists day and night, winter and summer. So it is a form of green baseload energy generation, which helps cool the planet, and runs 24/7 reducing dependence on oil countries or places like Russia for nuclear fuel.
Depending on north/south lattitude, the height of the tropopause differs a bit.
You wouldn't want to risk such a contraption (some lightweight ~12km vertical zeppelin housing the up and down paths) falling on populated areas, but luckily 90% of the world population lives close to a coastline, so just anchor it further away from the cost than it is tall, if it falls over, at least it can't reach populated areas on land. Another upshot of coastal chimneys is that the sea is a very heavy thermal mass, so you won't run out of thermal energy that fast, the cold mass flow that comes down can be used to freeze water, desalinating it. During a transition period where conventional fossil / nuclear power plants still exist such ice or ice slurry could be pipelined to the "cold" thermal baths of such power plants, greatly improving the electric yield for the same amount of fossil / nuclear fuel.
There is just embarrassingly little research in this direction, to solve such an engineering challenge.
It is an intriguing idea but that is still one hell of a coolant loop with a hell of a lot of mass continously lofted through the atmosphere and subject to weather patterns. A wire I could see doing it but lofting a pair of tubes to transfer a significant volume of fluids seems not far off space-elevator level material science to me.
Zeppelins flew above the tropopauze, zeppelins could fly both east and west, against and along windflow.
Now imagine ~500 zeppelins flying above each other, forming a "tower", seems perfectly feasible (no space-elevator tech needed), but bombastic. Now instead of flying a single vertical stack of zeppelins you could easily comprehend that we could also fly 6 such towers so that for each layer 6 zeppelins arranged in a hexagon could maintain position. So we could fly "toroidal zeppelins" and stack them, we might even space them vertically saving on the number of toroidal zeppelins needed. It doesn't seem impossible, it just seems understudied, it certainly doesn't have associated fundamental exponential scaling properties like a space elevator. Why do we feel so obliged to defend nuclear energy (and the dubious sources selling nuclear fuel, as well as the associated dual use issues) if humans could turn global warming into a democratic power plant? all inhabited regions have a much colder atmosphere above the local height of the tropopause.
Why shouldn't we at least pour more resources in investigating even a slight possibility that we can generate green energy 24/7, with net-negative global warming, cooling the globe and rewarding ourselves with energy?
I don't agree ground level to tropopause heat chimneys require unproven materials (like a space elevator needs).
> So we just have to build the first expensive 20 to get the experience and then we reap the rewards after 40 years when we need the knowledge again?
I think the knowledge doesn't has to start from zero. Germany can ask for foreign aid from China.
> If nuclear would be cheap in the western world I'd be all for it but we just can't do large projects in our ccurrent system.
I agree, given the fact that it took 15 years to build the BER airport and Stuttgart 21 is still on-going, i can totally imaging building a single new nuclear power plant in Germany would take 50 years minimum.
> Solar + wind + battery is much less of an headache.
I agree, it's a less headache, but at the same time you cannot support energy intensive industries like chemical, manufacturing etc. You would have to build battery farms which is not sustainable. That's why Germany is slowly on a path for de-industrialization
Gas/Hydrogen are Germany's answer to you last point.
You can store energy created by renewables this way easily and use it when needed. Right now we can't produce enough hydrogen though, so gas can be used in the meantime, but in the future the entire infrastructure, such as power plants, pipelines or port terminals can be switched to hydrogen: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/HydrogenCor... You could even produce the hydrogen needed cheaply in countries with better conditions for solar and then ship it the same way we currently do with gas. Hydrogen power plants also have the advantage to quickly change output volumes, which is needed when most energy is produced by solar/wind.
1. Deuterium - Tritium fueled fussion power plants will produce low-level radioactive waste, in form of neutron activated structural matterials. Tritium is radioactive gas with tendency to leak. Antinuclear activists are already concerned with tritium leaks in current nuclear plants. Future nuclear fussion plants will handle much larger tritium inventories then current fission plants.
2. There exist designs for nuclear fusion–fission hybrid plants. You can use hybrid plant to make nuclear bomb material - plutonium.
"One of the most detailed of these studies was published in 1980 by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). They noted that the hybrid would produce most of its energy indirectly, both through the fission events in the reactor, and much more by providing 239Pu to fuel other fission reactors. In this overall picture, the hybrid is filling a role that is essentially identical to the breeder reactor. Both require chemical processing to remove the bred 239Pu, both presented the same proliferation and safety risks as a result, and both produced about the same amount of fuel. Since the bred fuel is the primary source of energy in the overall cycle, the two systems were almost identical in the end."
So they would use the excessive power generated by wind+solar into producing H2 from water and then transport it? Theoretically it can work, but as you mentioned, can they produce enough hydrogen to match the demand via wind+solar?
Nuclear fusion would absolutely be a game changer. But they it could take 5, 10 or even 50 more years to achieve that and by that time I don't know if German economy would be able to keep on pumping billions into research.
> So they would use the excessive power generated by wind+solar into producing H2 from water and then transport it? Theoretically it can work, but as you mentioned, can they produce enough hydrogen to match the demand via wind+solar?
I think it can work, especially as you can easily import it using existing gas infrastructure and pipelines as a lot of that infrastructure is build to be converted in the future or currently upgraded for it.
> Nuclear fusion would absolutely be a game changer. But they it could take 5, 10 or even 50 more years to achieve that and by that time I don't know if German economy would be able to keep on pumping billions into research.
Building a nuclear reactor would probably might as well take just as long and we need quicker changes — especially when it comes down shutting down our coal power plants.
I believe that the money a nuclear reactor would cost to build is better invested in renewables (together with gas/hydrogen) and nuclear fusion. Is this strategy the right move? Only time will tell, but I'm optimistic.
The Flammable Range (also called Explosive Range), the concentration range of a gas or vapor that will burn (or explode) if an ignition source is introduced, for hydrogen is much larger then for methane.
Becuse of hydrogen embrittlement you have to be carefull with material selection for pipes, storage tanks holding hydrogen. This not a big problem, but it means old pipes used for natural gas can not be used for hydrogen.
This article is literally about geothermal and all people can talk about is nuclear, solar. Why aren't we building geothermal energy plants everywhere?
What? For the same reason we don't build hydro plants everywhere, they depend on local conditions and all best spots are already used. Iceland can access geothermal power in entire country so they did.
In most places, thermal conductivity of rock is very low.
"The conductive heat flux averages 0.1 MW/km2. These values are much higher near tectonic plate boundaries where the crust is thinner. They may be further augmented by combinations of fluid circulation, either through magma conduits, hot springs, hydrothermal circulation."
“All best spots are already used”, is not even close to true for the US. We have barely begun to explore and evaluate potential sites and I see this as a huge future growth industry
The "nuclear waste" argument is so weird to me. We take radioactive rocks from the ground. Make them less radioactive. Put them back in the ground. There is no output that wasn't dug up out of the ground originally. It would have been polluting the original location already.
The 1st reason is nuclear waste. Germany is more densely populated than the US so you can't store it far away from humans. The solution tried before was to just store it deep underground. Turns out that might even be worse than storing it on the surface as it turned out and it has been a total disaster (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine). There have been more cancer cases in this region compared to neighboring regions as well, which might be linked to it. It is now planed to retrieve the waste again and store it somewhere else. Where is currently not known afaik. The whole thing costs billions of Euros already and is going to cost even more and didn't even deliver on it's promises. So for that reason alone wanting to produce more nuclear waste when we can't even deal with what we already have is obviously unpopular.
The 2nd reason is cost. As shown above the storage of nuclear waste has been an expensive fail for Germany, but it doesn't end there. We don't have any nuclear reactors left, so we would need to either reactive existing ones (expensive as they haven't been maintained for continuance operations) or to build a new one. How well that works we can see in either Finland or the UK... both have huge cost overruns and aren't even on-time. I think we had enough of those projects (BER, Stuttgart21) that another one that would likely end up like this is nothing anyone wants. Building more renewables such as solar and wind together with energy storage and gas/hydrogen power plants as backup is just a lot cheaper as we don't need more base load power plants, but ones that are a lot more flexible and can be turned on/off quickly depending on solar/wind output. And any new gas power plant is planned to also work with hydrogen, which can be produced when we have too much solar/wind and then act as the storage medium. So basically a long term way to store energy that is more flexible than batteries (at least on this time and size scale).
In the past reasons were different, but those aren't really relevant now.
But I'm not against nuclear power. Even with the increasted cancer rates, solar and wind are much more deadly - many workers die by falling off the roof.
Transuranic radioactive waste from US nuclear weapon programs is stored in WIPP. The storage rooms at the WIPP are 2,150 feet (660 m) underground in a salt formation of the Delaware Basin.
Weren't the anti-nuke hippies already quite a force before that?
Pete Seeger wrote his anti-nuke spin-off of "Acres of Clams" in the 1970s I think.
Not specific to Germany but there's been a very vocal anti-nuke movement almost since the beginning. They were pretty successful in ending new nuclear generating plant construction in the USA also.
That's part of it, but if you lived through months of news about where milk is unsafe and how to wash your vegetables and how much iodine to take. You'd maybe think differently too.
All the "oh, but it's different now, it's really safe" implies that the scientist at the time of the Chernobyl disaster didn't give assurance that it's totally safe either.
I am in favor of nuclear power and think that closing the plants was a huge mistake, but it's not somehow fully irrational to opose nuclear power. Not everyone has the hubris of thinking they can evaluate the risks when being shown some data. Nor can they distinguish the difference between "the experts then said it's safe" and "the experts now say it's safe".
Sure, but meanwhile they've been using your lungs as a particulate filter for coal byproducts for decades, and these things will fuck you up even in the best case scenario.
Unlikely. If we are able to pull too much heat from crust it will make those geothermal plants inoperable (due to too low temperature), in that localized spot, long before we are able to impact wider area or deeper layers.
Why? Nuclear has extremely serious, but very rare accidents, while fracking has less serious (as in, fewer people affected) accidents more frequently. I would say if you even it out, they're comparable...
Please refrain from putting these 2 in the same bucket. Fracking does lots of localized and non-local pollution. Nuclear is contained and way safer for humans.
Sure? With the continual modern improvements and safety engineering and education, I'll live right at the nuke if you'd like.
Every plant doesn't operate in a silo (well, it does in a physical sense), the operating knowledge and expertise is shared far and wide to help keep another Three Mile Island or another Fukushima from happening. I enjoy watching the training in action from the control room simulators.[1]
Just let me hunker down in the FLEX shelter when the time comes.
Cumulative radioactivity emitted by German coal as a result of the ban on nuclear is likely higher than the amount of radioactivity spread by the Fukushima disaster. We can also add lung issues and other pollution of the environment caused by soot.
Just 6.5% of German electricity was generated through coal last year.
By contrast Poland was ~90% for years and only just slipped below 50%.
If I had to guess why Poland never got any criticism for that while Germany was routinely pilloried by certain flavors of propaganda I would hypothesize that it was because Poland weren't humiliating the nuclear industry by swapping them with solar panels and wind turbines at 1/5th the price.
Solar panels and wind turbines are useful, but don't provide the base power a network needs to be stable, and on-demand capacity to give some flexibility. Ironically, fossil fuel electricity plants have to be built as part of renewables projects to make them viable.
This is why after having spent a trillion of euros in renewables, Germany still has the highest cost of electricity and still relies on French nuclear to stabilize their network. Same goes with Spain, that had a major blackout caused by a renewable shortfall.
Neither does nuclear power. This is why when half of the French nuclear power plants were down for unscheduled maintenance in 2022 they had to import German solar and wind energy and burn a ton of gas.
Gas, batteries, grid interconnects and pumped storage are the only things which can stabilise the grid to properly match supply with demand. There is far more money available for all of them if you don't have to spend 5x as much per kWh on nuclear power.
While the global warming denialist brigade did try to pin Spain's blackouts on too many solar panels it was actually caused by voltage control on the grid.
France had to reduce nuclear maintenance for a long time to pay for the EU rules that forces it to give discounted nuclear electricity to private producers, which led to the situation you mentioned. Besides, french nuclear is important in stabilizing the german grid by adding/removing up to 20% power with a short delay. This leads however to increased wear on the reactors and maintenance needs.
And interestingly, you mentioned gas: in 2022 the EU went through a major energy crisis as Germany was counting on Russian gas to produce electricity. Pumped storage is finite and already maximized in Europe, same as hydro. Batteries are still unproven economically at scale.
One can accept climate change but be sceptic about the solutions pushed by the various lobbies, which led to the downfall of German's industry.
Its an irony that in 2022 the most problematic were the newest N4 reactors, not the oldest one.
Another irony was that already in in 2015, the French National Assembly voted that by 2025 only 50% of France's energy will be produced by nuclear plants. So in a way the nuclear reactors themself helped to fullfill the 2015 promise.
To be serious. After event in 2011 Fukushima, French nuclear energy didn't get much support from French politicians and was seen only as a necessary evil, which will be sooner or later replaced with German style energie transition. Only after the 2022 Russian invasion and stopping of Russian gas started the French politicians to understand the value of electricity source not dependent on foreign gas imports.
Germany imports all of its gas and batteries, has no significant potential for pumped storage (in relation to the size of its electricity grid).
Solar panels were not the cause of
Spain's blackout, insufficient voltage control in solar invertors was a contributing factor. Like with many serious accidents, there was not a single cause of Spain's blackout, but many factors.
The Fukushima where there has been one death attributed to radiation exposure (lung cancer that happened years later)? And 20,000 people died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami?
In the mean time, we've sponsored the Russian war of aggression, flooding Europe with violence that led to the death of over a hundred thousand, disabled half a million, displaced 10 million, and destroyed houses and infrastructure worth hundreds of billions.
Note that I won't even write answers to all the other commenters telling me that nuclear power plants are great (they are not). I will answer you because my reply was about your comment on Russian propaganda:
1. Angela Merkel and her conservative/center coalition shut down the NPPs as a direct response to the Fukushima disaster. The NPPs in Germany were never really important (something like 10% of electricity IIRC).
2. No one in Germany even knew about fracking until we learned that communities in the US now had poisoned ground water because of it. The whole thing was instantly dead forever in Germany. Yes of course the same idiots who want NPPs back also say we should do fracking, but I don't think any of that will ever happen.
So I did not want to discuss whether these decisions were wrong or not, just wanted to point out that making Russian propaganda the reason for this is a far stretch.
Regarding your point about German/European money paying for Russian bombs: You are absolutely right and it is shameful. We should have pulled the plug on Russia 2014. Do note though that Germany had Russian fossils since like the 70`s as part of ensuring peace and transformation through trade, which yes - did not work out so well in the end.
So at least we can agree that Germany’s reliance on Russian gas has been far deadlier than all nuclear and fracking accidents combined.
Regarding your arguments:
ad 1: This happened only because public opinion had been shaped by the movements mentioned in my previous comment for the last 40 to 50 years. Otherwise, how would you explain the fact that Fukushima did not have the same effect on policy or public opinion in any of the roughly 30 other countries using nuclear power — not even in Japan? Are Germans that much more intelligent than the French, Japanese, or Finns?
ad 2: That is somewhat ironic, considering that fracking has been taking place in Germany since the 1960s.
You should stop relying on such low-resolution thinking when discussing a complex issue like German energy policy.
> You should stop relying on such low-resolution thinking when discussing a complex issue like German energy policy.
It is funny that you are criticizing my ability to reason when you are not even able to (in two comments now) even address the (as explicitly stated in my personal reply to you) single point I was making.
> This happened only because public opinion had been shaped by the movements mentioned in my previous comment for the last 40 to 50 years.
Are you implying that 1986 was a Russian propaganda plot? What/who do you mean with "movements"?
> Are you implying that 1986 was a Russian propaganda plot?
Two things can be true at the same time. Something can be objectively bad, but the magnitude of consequences can still depend on how bad actors exploit their opportunity. Ignoring that is what I refer to as "low-resolution thinking". You see Chernobyl or Fukushima and you have emotions about them and think that those emotions are shared by everyone around you, including policy makers, which must have ultimately caused the policies, because they align well with your emotions. But you completely ignore the Zeitgeist and who's been invested heavily into shaping it in their interest. (I think this is much more relevant with regard to Fukushima than Chernobyl - with the latter, Russian interests were much more focussed on deception and deflection, especially towards their satellites. Also, the ability to manipulate the West was strongly diminished by that time, especially compared with their influence on Schröder and Merkel in the 2000s/10s.)
> you are not even able to (...) even address the (...) single point I was making.
Your "single point" was actually two points, that's why you've used a numbered list... but jokes aside, I've addressed them very well:
1. the "the Fukushima disaster" was a huge wave killing >20.000, but contrary to the rest of the world, we've cared much more about the hand full of people killed by radiation (and ~2000 killed by the combination of tsunami and the incident at the NPP) - the greens even declared the 20.000 killed purely by the wave as killed by the NPP, and they do so every year on social media since. You cannot reasonably explain why Germany reacted so distinctively different than other nations without pointing to the history of the movements since the 1960s/70s, and to the interest that Russia traditionally holds in German energy policy.
2. I've also addressed your lie about fracking. Fracking is being used in Germany today and it has been in use since the 1960s. There are new regulations about which types of fracking can be performed where, using which kind of fracking agents, which are generally good regulations. Everything else is fear mongering by interested parties, such as the lobbyists for solar and wind (which I am a HUGE fan of - the technologies, not the lobbyists), and Russian assets.
I stand partly corrected, the last fracking was done 2011, and I cannot find any information if the site is still active today. There have been more than 300 active sites. New ones have not been opened, but NOT due to laws, or lack of economical or technical feasibility, but due to local NIMBYism, which furthers the point I made: fearmongering, supported in relevant parts by foreign assets, is the strongest force. I'm still positive that Ukrainian blood spills our drinking water a hundred times more than conventional fracking ever has and ever would.
The no brain solution is to electrify everything and switch legacy infrastructure to renewables, just like China does. Gas usage is down in the EU anyway.
Long-term, that's the smart and also necessary move. But it can't be done overnight, and the transition has its significant challenges. I hope they don't mess it up it and will address these problems rationally - but given how most EU leaders have acted over these past few years, I remain painfully unconvinced that they will.
I guess it is, but solar can only be part of the answer: You need a solid plan (and all the infrastructure that implementing this plan involves) for when the sun does not shine, because in the more northern parts of Europe especially, energy consumption is highest during seasons in which sunlight is (relatively) scarce.
Also, "the grid" cannot absorb any amount of solar energy - so if you choose to address (at least parts) of the above challenge with a photovoltaic build-out that results in massive excess capacity during summer, there needs to be a plan (and again, its implementation) to handle that.
Excess capacity (literally free power) is only a problem because we mandate that electricity generation can only be done as a business that has to earn profit margins.
Because of economics, this means it makes sense as a business to sell power that requires a purchased input commodity, and doesn't make as much sense as a business to build enough solar to sell power during darker months. This is absurd, backwards, and is hampering our ability to deploy clean and affordable power.
National Governments should be massively overbuilding solar and just handing out the resulting power. It's really difficult to mismanage a solar farm.
Maybe instead of a deregulated generation market, we should focus on a barely regulated power storage market.
Not to sound like an ass but that's your typical HNer hot take on a topic they don't know anything about (which is 99% of topics outside of tech).
I know that I don't know jack shit about the topic, but I can already tell you that if you do what you describe you'll quickly learn about why grids have frequencies, what generate these frequencies, and what happens when they drift.
No, that's not what an "inverter" does, not most inverters at least, you need grid forming inverters and batteries for that... which is my whole point, you don't just take them out of the crate and plug them in the grid, that only works if most of the grid is powered by legacy plants stabilising it.
Do you describe nuclear power plants as "just putting two rocks next to each other and plugging them in the grid"
You don't need a grid forming inverter to re-synchronize with the grid, you only need a grid forming inverter if you need a complete cold start or to support a grid island.
In the context of our discussion, adding more capacity, that's exactly what's needed here. We're not replacing 100% of energy sources with solar, we are replacing energy sources with _renewables_ which is hydro, solar, wind, arguably nuclear as well.
Even extending your argument to "well we need to only have solar" then you need a grid forming inverter with batteries. That's not a massive increase in complexity or time and supports the "just tie them to the grid" statement.
Trying to use the analogy of a nuclear power plant, which requires 10-15 years (including permitting), is ridiculous. A solar plant is 2-5 (including permitting) - by comparison.
China still uses a massive amount of coal, and has a lot of southern idle land. Germany has been doing what you say for the last 15 years, it didn't seem to work out so well.
Germany invested a lot money and still burns coal, imports a lot of natural gas for electricity production, has higher electricty prices then France and higher emmisions then France.
"The energy transition will require considerable added investment. Estimates of the total amount of annual investment vary from 15 to 40 billion euros, or 0.5 to 1.2 percent of Germany’s current gross domestic product (GDP) of around 3,200 billion euros."
No brain because there is lack of survival instincts in such phrase?
Russia openly declares willingness to destroy europe, your lifestyle, way of thinking etc. They claim they are better. Sure , sponsoring this country is no brainer lol.
Germany already financed biggest war in europe since WWII by flooding russia with oil money. Is that not enough?
Amount of money EU spent to tame the fire of war could easily cover building 20-30 nuclear plants across the europe to solve the heat/cooling problem once and forever.
The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought wars the First, Second, and Cold Wars has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united, they're the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn't happen. - This is a direct quote by George Friedman. This[1] is a good read to entertain the idea more.
That's fantasy. Germany tried very hard to civilize russia through trade over few past decades. Everybody tried. Turned out russia is just to stupid for any kind of advancement. Did not learn a thing. Everybody else did though.
>Russia openly declares willingness to destroy europe
There is not a scintilla of evidence for this.
They're trying to keep the same violent and aggressive American dominated military alliance that is currently and actively trying to destroy Iran far away from their most vulnerable border.
They also tried to pursue the diplomatic route multiple times before invading and after invading and were always rebuffed.
They started the largest war in Europe since 1945 and I fervently hope that Putin will pay for that in a way similar to Hitler.
That entire war is a massive, futile attempt to revive their glorious imperial days by annexing lands that they consider their alienated property. Fuck them and their bombs and their disgusting oscillations between paranoia and megalomania.
Contemporary Russia has fewer people than Pakistan and a smaller economy than Italy. It has no business playing a "mighty superpower" role anymore, but it ignored that reality (Putin is very much a person of the past, as is his inner circle of post-Soviet siloviks in their 60s and 70s) ... and it is learning the hard way.
The best possible outcome of this war from Kremlin's point of view is that they will become a de-facto resource colony for China, somewhat benevolently managed by actually competent people.
I'd encourage you to watch John Mearshimer's address to the European parliament because he addresses your narrative of imperial expansion and comprehensively refutes it, with clear, easy to understand evidence:
Ha, you speak about the war between Russia and the US and friends
You are correct. Perhaps deal with all these people in the same way ? It starts with Biden and ends with countless others, all of which are equally guilty, all of which are fuelling a war needlessly.
Biden? the war started in 2014, with inclusion of not so secretive anymore of regular russian military. continued in 2015, etc. How is that Biden at all?
The only person who fuel this war is Putin. I used to be a russian citizen, I speak russian, i know the society, etc. This war is extremely unpopular in russia, but the only reason why it is still ongoing is one man.
Putin self confirmed and bragging about "new territory". It's a classical Imperialistic war, old fart decided to restore their USSR greatness, and now they act. They did it in Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine. Sure, it's all NATO.
And yes, it did start like a proxy war by russia, to avoid severe sanctions. They funded and send troops to such called Donetsk republic etc.
It was such a great proxy war from the west that up until certain tine of the conflict they didn't dare to send even medical equipment, not to talk about any other weapons, to do not provoke russia.
It started with a group of terrorist snipers in the Hotel Ukraina who fired randomly into a crowd of civilians. None of them were ever prosecuted. The attempt to pin it on the Berkut failed miserably.
One of them was identified by a Ukrainian war hero as Andriy Parubiy, far right nut and future speaker of the rada. Several of them identified themselves as Georgian mercenaries who were hired by Andriy Parubiy.
The goal of the terror attack was clearly to overthrow a democratically elected president that was overwhelmingly popular in Crimea and the donbass and install a puppet who could be relied upon to do the bidding of the west.
This was successful, and is what kicked off the civil war.
Victoria Nuland's phone call where she "picked" the puppet on behalf of the US state department was leaked. You can listen to it.
That corruptionist was not "overwhelmingly popular". It was of the political party that is popular, not more not less.
It was all orchestrated by Russia. You can find tons of videos of russian hero's of that time, and they openly confirm now, that regular military was in Crimea, Donetsk , etc, since 2014. This is not some "leaked" phone. It's many interviews openly sitting on youtube and confirming with smiles their actions.
Title makes it sound like a new method of generating energy was discovered, but really the article is about using geothermal in a new location.
> The development of medium-deep (>400 m) and deep geothermal reservoirs (> 1,500 m) could be a partial solution to provide renewable heat to single buildings, residential or commercial neighbourhoods, or districts of the city of Aachen via the existing district heating network.
Ta-daa. That happens. They found some new geothermal source in Munich as well after I moved into the place I'm in now. It turned out it was very viable.
Nowadays the heat in my apartment is mainly geothermal (The district heating network in my neighborhood has been converted to geothermal energy over the past 10 years.)
Munich sits on a massive geothermal aquifer system (the Molasse Basin)
"Medium-deep geothermal resources in the Molasse Basin: A geological, techno-economic, and ecological study of large-scale heat pump integration"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812...
Tapping a geothermal aquifer system is much easier than to get useful quantities of heat from dry rock, because in most places the thermal conductivity of rock is very low.
"The enthusiasm in the research community is justified by the vast extent of the energy supply and the low environmental impact of the method, however significant breakthroughs will be required to make this a commercial energy resource."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dry_rock_geothermal_energy
They found some potential geothermal wells near where they were previously mining.
Yeah title is way off lol
Here a German podcast episode not about this publication, but in general about geothermal power in Germany: https://erdeumwelt.podigee.io/11-erdwarme
If you speak German it's very interesting. Sounds like we should build more geothermal power plants.
I have always wondered about the origins of the anti nuclear opinion of Germans.
It has Cold War origins to be sure, but what kind?
I suspect American intelligence has been supporting the anti nuclear movement for some time, for non-proliferation reasons - and not just in Germany. I certainly would be, if I ran the State Department.
* If the cold war had turned into a hot war, almost all of Germany would have been nuked. The expectation was not to be able to stop the soviet invasion, but to nuke them in western Germany.
* The nuclear industry in Germany was plagued by scandals and big parts plain criminal: https://www-deutschlandfunkkultur-de.translate.goog/hanau-de...
* And ineptitude was common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
EDIT: The reaction of the state also caused an escalation. The constitutional court blocked governmental overreach: https://www-bpb-de.translate.goog/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-akt... This also lead to the anti nuclear movement being about more than just nuclear plants, but rights for citizens.
The Soviets are a more likely culprit, as then just like now most of their revenues came from oil and gas exports. They secretly supported the Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader-Meinhof) terrorists via the Stasi, so funding the Greens to stymie intermediate range ballistic missile deployments in Germany, with securing hydrocarbon sales as a cherry on top, would not at all be out of character.
Back when I was in high school in France in the 1980s (before Chernobyl), I was already very aware of global warming and deeply resentful of the various Green parties sabotaging the one solution we had at the time.
I'm still very pro-nuclear, including Thorium and fast-neutron breeder reactors (but not small modular reactors, that are a boondoggle outside nuclear submarines), but I recognize solar or renewables combined with grid scale storage are more economical.
Investing enough into renewables combined with grid scale storage to cover a prolonged Dunkelflaute is very expensive, therefor German government is investing in new gas-fired power plants with capacity of 11 GW, with state subsidies.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-passes-law-subs...
Even a weak long Dunkelflaute can happen:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/prolonged-dunkelflaute-...
And this is exactly why Germany is not serious about its obligations to fight Global Warming. Always choosing the easy or demagogic way out, whether it was running on cheap Russian gas, or mothballing nuclear and restarting lignite coal power plants.
Some good answers below already. I think the anti nuclear movement already started before Chernobyl. I believe it was one of the founding ideologies of the green parties (the danger of high CO2 emissions was not yet front of mind for a lot of people back then). So the opposition to nuclear energy kind of laid the foundation for the modern (European) green parties. But these were all young people back then (in the 70s) and a they have now become the dominant generation in politics. So just like in any other country the 50+ years old are in charge and that cohort in Germany happens to have fond memories of opposing nuclear energy.
And just a little side note because I've looked it up recently: EU produces about the same amount of nuclear energy as the US - and that's despite Germany shutting down all reactors. So it's not like the US or any other region has a much higher usage.
> EU produces about the same amount of nuclear energy as the US - and that's despite Germany shutting down all reactors
Noting that France has one of the highest shares of nuclear in the world, offsetting some of Germany's shutdown.
I'm sure Russians had something to do with it too. Makes sure Germany will not develop nukes and they'll keep buying oil and gas.
Once I had a discussion with a German that is a strong supporter of the green party and his argument against nuclear power was the nuclear waste and no proper was of disposing it and also building new nuclear power plants are expensive and take a long time.
Then I did a deep research and created a PDF and pointed out that there has been many advances of re-using spent-nuclear fuel and minimize the environmental impact since 1980s and also countries like China has been using a cleaver way of using a standardized model of building power plants to cut cost, etc. but he didn't want to accept it as if he was almost brainwashed.
So we just have to build the first expensive 20 to get the experience and then we reap the rewards after 40 years when we need the knowledge again?
If nuclear would be cheap in the western world I'd be all for it but we just can't do large projects in our ccurrent system.
Solar + wind + battery is much less of an headache.
I think most nuclear folks would rather divert the "big coal, and nat gas" plant building budgets to "build nuclear."
I understand the motivations for solar/wind, but there are real limiters that aren't addressed yet. Nuclear is the only option that is carbon neutral and lacks those limiters making it appealing. If I need steady state gigawatt scale power in a specific location, Nuclear is the only green option.
Yeah, nuclear is a known solution to all our energy problems which is why I advocate for it.
Solar and wind are great but there is still no existing setup to provide a stable and reliable nation level power grid. Nobody has the power storage solution.
Nuclear however has been proven to be capable of delivering any kind of power generation we need at any scale. Perhaps it isn't best solution, but there are no other completely solved solutions, just speculation that before long we will unlock far better battery or energy storage technologies before too long.
> If I need steady state gigawatt scale power in a specific location, Nuclear is the only green option.
I don't believe that is true: one way to produce electricity is a thermal engine driving a generator, but for a thermal engine you need both a cold heat bath and a hot heat bath.
Those 2 heat baths could be externally delivered (a stream of ice, and a stream of steam, say) or one of the 2 heat baths could be chosen as the local environmental temperature heat bath.
Historically the local environmental temperature heat bath was selected for the role of the cold heat bath, and the hot heat bath was heated by say burning fuel (fossil or nuclear; and I am ignoring the chemical and mechanical energy terms of internal combustion engines).
If you could source a cold heat bath, one could select the local environments as the hot side heat bath instead.
Above the tropopause the atmosphere has become a lot more transparent for thermal infrared radiation, and thats why it is a lot colder up there, its in better thermal radiation contact with the CMB (the temperature of dark space), very close to the absolute zero point for temperature.
It is not a scientific challenge but a "mere" engineering one, to create a robust, all-weather aerostat where the "cable" transports mass (presumably, but necessarily a refrigerant) symmetrically up and down (in a loop) heating the upper layers of the atmosphere (puncturing the CO2 blanket), while cooling ground level environment. That large temperature difference persists day and night, winter and summer. So it is a form of green baseload energy generation, which helps cool the planet, and runs 24/7 reducing dependence on oil countries or places like Russia for nuclear fuel.
Depending on north/south lattitude, the height of the tropopause differs a bit.
You wouldn't want to risk such a contraption (some lightweight ~12km vertical zeppelin housing the up and down paths) falling on populated areas, but luckily 90% of the world population lives close to a coastline, so just anchor it further away from the cost than it is tall, if it falls over, at least it can't reach populated areas on land. Another upshot of coastal chimneys is that the sea is a very heavy thermal mass, so you won't run out of thermal energy that fast, the cold mass flow that comes down can be used to freeze water, desalinating it. During a transition period where conventional fossil / nuclear power plants still exist such ice or ice slurry could be pipelined to the "cold" thermal baths of such power plants, greatly improving the electric yield for the same amount of fossil / nuclear fuel.
There is just embarrassingly little research in this direction, to solve such an engineering challenge.
It is an intriguing idea but that is still one hell of a coolant loop with a hell of a lot of mass continously lofted through the atmosphere and subject to weather patterns. A wire I could see doing it but lofting a pair of tubes to transfer a significant volume of fluids seems not far off space-elevator level material science to me.
Zeppelins flew above the tropopauze, zeppelins could fly both east and west, against and along windflow.
Now imagine ~500 zeppelins flying above each other, forming a "tower", seems perfectly feasible (no space-elevator tech needed), but bombastic. Now instead of flying a single vertical stack of zeppelins you could easily comprehend that we could also fly 6 such towers so that for each layer 6 zeppelins arranged in a hexagon could maintain position. So we could fly "toroidal zeppelins" and stack them, we might even space them vertically saving on the number of toroidal zeppelins needed. It doesn't seem impossible, it just seems understudied, it certainly doesn't have associated fundamental exponential scaling properties like a space elevator. Why do we feel so obliged to defend nuclear energy (and the dubious sources selling nuclear fuel, as well as the associated dual use issues) if humans could turn global warming into a democratic power plant? all inhabited regions have a much colder atmosphere above the local height of the tropopause.
Why shouldn't we at least pour more resources in investigating even a slight possibility that we can generate green energy 24/7, with net-negative global warming, cooling the globe and rewarding ourselves with energy?
I don't agree ground level to tropopause heat chimneys require unproven materials (like a space elevator needs).
> So we just have to build the first expensive 20 to get the experience and then we reap the rewards after 40 years when we need the knowledge again?
I think the knowledge doesn't has to start from zero. Germany can ask for foreign aid from China.
> If nuclear would be cheap in the western world I'd be all for it but we just can't do large projects in our ccurrent system.
I agree, given the fact that it took 15 years to build the BER airport and Stuttgart 21 is still on-going, i can totally imaging building a single new nuclear power plant in Germany would take 50 years minimum.
> Solar + wind + battery is much less of an headache.
I agree, it's a less headache, but at the same time you cannot support energy intensive industries like chemical, manufacturing etc. You would have to build battery farms which is not sustainable. That's why Germany is slowly on a path for de-industrialization
Gas/Hydrogen are Germany's answer to you last point.
You can store energy created by renewables this way easily and use it when needed. Right now we can't produce enough hydrogen though, so gas can be used in the meantime, but in the future the entire infrastructure, such as power plants, pipelines or port terminals can be switched to hydrogen: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/HydrogenCor... You could even produce the hydrogen needed cheaply in countries with better conditions for solar and then ship it the same way we currently do with gas. Hydrogen power plants also have the advantage to quickly change output volumes, which is needed when most energy is produced by solar/wind.
Ideally German's investment into nuclear fusion pays off though as it would change the whole game. https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-fusion-germany-bets-billions-o...
Germans public should be informed that:
1. Deuterium - Tritium fueled fussion power plants will produce low-level radioactive waste, in form of neutron activated structural matterials. Tritium is radioactive gas with tendency to leak. Antinuclear activists are already concerned with tritium leaks in current nuclear plants. Future nuclear fussion plants will handle much larger tritium inventories then current fission plants.
2. There exist designs for nuclear fusion–fission hybrid plants. You can use hybrid plant to make nuclear bomb material - plutonium.
"One of the most detailed of these studies was published in 1980 by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). They noted that the hybrid would produce most of its energy indirectly, both through the fission events in the reactor, and much more by providing 239Pu to fuel other fission reactors. In this overall picture, the hybrid is filling a role that is essentially identical to the breeder reactor. Both require chemical processing to remove the bred 239Pu, both presented the same proliferation and safety risks as a result, and both produced about the same amount of fuel. Since the bred fuel is the primary source of energy in the overall cycle, the two systems were almost identical in the end."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion%E2%80%93fission...
So they would use the excessive power generated by wind+solar into producing H2 from water and then transport it? Theoretically it can work, but as you mentioned, can they produce enough hydrogen to match the demand via wind+solar?
Nuclear fusion would absolutely be a game changer. But they it could take 5, 10 or even 50 more years to achieve that and by that time I don't know if German economy would be able to keep on pumping billions into research.
> So they would use the excessive power generated by wind+solar into producing H2 from water and then transport it? Theoretically it can work, but as you mentioned, can they produce enough hydrogen to match the demand via wind+solar?
I think it can work, especially as you can easily import it using existing gas infrastructure and pipelines as a lot of that infrastructure is build to be converted in the future or currently upgraded for it.
> Nuclear fusion would absolutely be a game changer. But they it could take 5, 10 or even 50 more years to achieve that and by that time I don't know if German economy would be able to keep on pumping billions into research.
Building a nuclear reactor would probably might as well take just as long and we need quicker changes — especially when it comes down shutting down our coal power plants.
I believe that the money a nuclear reactor would cost to build is better invested in renewables (together with gas/hydrogen) and nuclear fusion. Is this strategy the right move? Only time will tell, but I'm optimistic.
Hydrogen is a bad idea because it is dangerous (highly explosive) and also leaky, due to the size of the atom
To transport hydrogen, you need complex infrastructure (real cold trunk or whatever) and you still leak, so the overall efficiency is bad
The Flammable Range (also called Explosive Range), the concentration range of a gas or vapor that will burn (or explode) if an ignition source is introduced, for hydrogen is much larger then for methane.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/explosive-concentration-l...
Becuse of hydrogen embrittlement you have to be carefull with material selection for pipes, storage tanks holding hydrogen. This not a big problem, but it means old pipes used for natural gas can not be used for hydrogen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/HydrogenCor...
Germany is planing a hydrogen pipeline network.
Help from an industrial country would be required
Sad to read that Germany, that was once an industrial power, is now an empty shell :(
This article is literally about geothermal and all people can talk about is nuclear, solar. Why aren't we building geothermal energy plants everywhere?
What? For the same reason we don't build hydro plants everywhere, they depend on local conditions and all best spots are already used. Iceland can access geothermal power in entire country so they did.
I take your point that they rely on local conditions, but those conditions are certainly not as restrictive as for hydro.
In most places, thermal conductivity of rock is very low.
"The conductive heat flux averages 0.1 MW/km2. These values are much higher near tectonic plate boundaries where the crust is thinner. They may be further augmented by combinations of fluid circulation, either through magma conduits, hot springs, hydrothermal circulation."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy
“All best spots are already used”, is not even close to true for the US. We have barely begun to explore and evaluate potential sites and I see this as a huge future growth industry
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The "nuclear waste" argument is so weird to me. We take radioactive rocks from the ground. Make them less radioactive. Put them back in the ground. There is no output that wasn't dug up out of the ground originally. It would have been polluting the original location already.
It's a matter of concentration
Nowadays it is mostly two things.
The 1st reason is nuclear waste. Germany is more densely populated than the US so you can't store it far away from humans. The solution tried before was to just store it deep underground. Turns out that might even be worse than storing it on the surface as it turned out and it has been a total disaster (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine). There have been more cancer cases in this region compared to neighboring regions as well, which might be linked to it. It is now planed to retrieve the waste again and store it somewhere else. Where is currently not known afaik. The whole thing costs billions of Euros already and is going to cost even more and didn't even deliver on it's promises. So for that reason alone wanting to produce more nuclear waste when we can't even deal with what we already have is obviously unpopular.
The 2nd reason is cost. As shown above the storage of nuclear waste has been an expensive fail for Germany, but it doesn't end there. We don't have any nuclear reactors left, so we would need to either reactive existing ones (expensive as they haven't been maintained for continuance operations) or to build a new one. How well that works we can see in either Finland or the UK... both have huge cost overruns and aren't even on-time. I think we had enough of those projects (BER, Stuttgart21) that another one that would likely end up like this is nothing anyone wants. Building more renewables such as solar and wind together with energy storage and gas/hydrogen power plants as backup is just a lot cheaper as we don't need more base load power plants, but ones that are a lot more flexible and can be turned on/off quickly depending on solar/wind output. And any new gas power plant is planned to also work with hydrogen, which can be produced when we have too much solar/wind and then act as the storage medium. So basically a long term way to store energy that is more flexible than batteries (at least on this time and size scale).
In the past reasons were different, but those aren't really relevant now.
Another relevant note here is that Germany is heavily investing in nuclear fusion, which is probably a better use of funds. https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-fusion-germany-bets-billions-o...
They stored nuclear waste in a salt mine? OMG!
But I'm not against nuclear power. Even with the increasted cancer rates, solar and wind are much more deadly - many workers die by falling off the roof.
Transuranic radioactive waste from US nuclear weapon programs is stored in WIPP. The storage rooms at the WIPP are 2,150 feet (660 m) underground in a salt formation of the Delaware Basin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
Electricity is so expensive in Germany that entire industries are leaving.
Nuclear fusion is very iffy while we know nuclear fission works very well.
It's mostly fear after Chernobyl, fueled by environmental groups and the Green party primarily.
Weren't the anti-nuke hippies already quite a force before that?
Pete Seeger wrote his anti-nuke spin-off of "Acres of Clams" in the 1970s I think.
Not specific to Germany but there's been a very vocal anti-nuke movement almost since the beginning. They were pretty successful in ending new nuclear generating plant construction in the USA also.
Yes, the free republic of wendland was established in 1980: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Republic_of_Wendland
The battle of brokdorf was also in the 80ies: https://www.helmut-schmidt.de/en/publications/detail/the-bat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Fossil_f...
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint#History
Just follow the gas pipelines...
That's part of it, but if you lived through months of news about where milk is unsafe and how to wash your vegetables and how much iodine to take. You'd maybe think differently too.
All the "oh, but it's different now, it's really safe" implies that the scientist at the time of the Chernobyl disaster didn't give assurance that it's totally safe either.
I am in favor of nuclear power and think that closing the plants was a huge mistake, but it's not somehow fully irrational to opose nuclear power. Not everyone has the hubris of thinking they can evaluate the risks when being shown some data. Nor can they distinguish the difference between "the experts then said it's safe" and "the experts now say it's safe".
Sure, but meanwhile they've been using your lungs as a particulate filter for coal byproducts for decades, and these things will fuck you up even in the best case scenario.
Coal plants also produce radioactive material btw: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
I thought they found vibranium. Shame…
Geothermal is great, but it's not new. Is this just a misleading headline?
They found it in the pockets of the taxpayers.
"Staufen darf nicht zerbrechen!"
curiousity question: does removing the heat from a geothermal well create unintendeed side effects?
Unlikely. If we are able to pull too much heat from crust it will make those geothermal plants inoperable (due to too low temperature), in that localized spot, long before we are able to impact wider area or deeper layers.
Hopefully Germany doesn't ban geothermal like they did with nuclear and fracking
Putting nuclear and fracking on the same level is wild.
Why? Nuclear has extremely serious, but very rare accidents, while fracking has less serious (as in, fewer people affected) accidents more frequently. I would say if you even it out, they're comparable...
Putting nuclear and fracking next to each other is also wild. Geographically.
Combining them is even more "fun", see also:
"Nuclear Fracking: Repeatedly Nuking Yourself for Commercial Reasons" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsu0lHkOIFg
Haha that's a good one, shaky foundation.
Please refrain from putting these 2 in the same bucket. Fracking does lots of localized and non-local pollution. Nuclear is contained and way safer for humans.
> Nuclear is contained and way safer for humans.
One could argue it is nominally safe.
> Nuclear is contained
Except when it de-contains itself.
I would put all the “nuke is safe” ppl in an island alongside the reactor and go back every 100 years to check if they went Atlantis or not yet…
I get that it’s a a form of clean energy and we kind of need that in the EU but a remote, “protected”, isolated location would be my first choice.
Sure? With the continual modern improvements and safety engineering and education, I'll live right at the nuke if you'd like.
Every plant doesn't operate in a silo (well, it does in a physical sense), the operating knowledge and expertise is shared far and wide to help keep another Three Mile Island or another Fukushima from happening. I enjoy watching the training in action from the control room simulators.[1]
Just let me hunker down in the FLEX shelter when the time comes.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuLuQvxJTpQ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXfuuWfyP6Y is nice and soothing.
Fracking is not like nuclear
But they were cancelled for similar reasons based on fears fueled by Russian propaganda.
So the Fukushima disaster and US polluted ground water are Russian propaganda for you?
Cumulative radioactivity emitted by German coal as a result of the ban on nuclear is likely higher than the amount of radioactivity spread by the Fukushima disaster. We can also add lung issues and other pollution of the environment caused by soot.
Just 6.5% of German electricity was generated through coal last year.
By contrast Poland was ~90% for years and only just slipped below 50%.
If I had to guess why Poland never got any criticism for that while Germany was routinely pilloried by certain flavors of propaganda I would hypothesize that it was because Poland weren't humiliating the nuclear industry by swapping them with solar panels and wind turbines at 1/5th the price.
You forgot 14.8% electricity was made by brown coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite
That number is clearly wrong. The german term "Kohle" includes the english "coal" (Steinkohle) and "lignite" (Braunkohle). The real number is >20%.
German: https://strom-report.com/strommix/
English: https://strom-report.com/electricity-mix-germany/
Solar panels and wind turbines are useful, but don't provide the base power a network needs to be stable, and on-demand capacity to give some flexibility. Ironically, fossil fuel electricity plants have to be built as part of renewables projects to make them viable.
This is why after having spent a trillion of euros in renewables, Germany still has the highest cost of electricity and still relies on French nuclear to stabilize their network. Same goes with Spain, that had a major blackout caused by a renewable shortfall.
Neither does nuclear power. This is why when half of the French nuclear power plants were down for unscheduled maintenance in 2022 they had to import German solar and wind energy and burn a ton of gas.
Gas, batteries, grid interconnects and pumped storage are the only things which can stabilise the grid to properly match supply with demand. There is far more money available for all of them if you don't have to spend 5x as much per kWh on nuclear power.
While the global warming denialist brigade did try to pin Spain's blackouts on too many solar panels it was actually caused by voltage control on the grid.
France had to reduce nuclear maintenance for a long time to pay for the EU rules that forces it to give discounted nuclear electricity to private producers, which led to the situation you mentioned. Besides, french nuclear is important in stabilizing the german grid by adding/removing up to 20% power with a short delay. This leads however to increased wear on the reactors and maintenance needs.
And interestingly, you mentioned gas: in 2022 the EU went through a major energy crisis as Germany was counting on Russian gas to produce electricity. Pumped storage is finite and already maximized in Europe, same as hydro. Batteries are still unproven economically at scale.
One can accept climate change but be sceptic about the solutions pushed by the various lobbies, which led to the downfall of German's industry.
Its an irony that in 2022 the most problematic were the newest N4 reactors, not the oldest one.
Another irony was that already in in 2015, the French National Assembly voted that by 2025 only 50% of France's energy will be produced by nuclear plants. So in a way the nuclear reactors themself helped to fullfill the 2015 promise.
To be serious. After event in 2011 Fukushima, French nuclear energy didn't get much support from French politicians and was seen only as a necessary evil, which will be sooner or later replaced with German style energie transition. Only after the 2022 Russian invasion and stopping of Russian gas started the French politicians to understand the value of electricity source not dependent on foreign gas imports.
Germany imports all of its gas and batteries, has no significant potential for pumped storage (in relation to the size of its electricity grid).
Solar panels were not the cause of Spain's blackout, insufficient voltage control in solar invertors was a contributing factor. Like with many serious accidents, there was not a single cause of Spain's blackout, but many factors.
The Fukushima where there has been one death attributed to radiation exposure (lung cancer that happened years later)? And 20,000 people died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami?
> the Fukushima disaster
Germany doesn't experience magnitude 7+ earthquakes on the regular... or at all for that matter. It 100% is manufactured fears
In the mean time, we've sponsored the Russian war of aggression, flooding Europe with violence that led to the death of over a hundred thousand, disabled half a million, displaced 10 million, and destroyed houses and infrastructure worth hundreds of billions.
The inherrent dangers of nuclear energy stem from flawed actors admimistrating something which carries manageable and often avoidable risks.
Fracking as a process carries inherrent unavoidable risk.
What about the >100.000 Ukrainians killed with bombs and bullets paid for by German energy policy?
Note that I won't even write answers to all the other commenters telling me that nuclear power plants are great (they are not). I will answer you because my reply was about your comment on Russian propaganda:
1. Angela Merkel and her conservative/center coalition shut down the NPPs as a direct response to the Fukushima disaster. The NPPs in Germany were never really important (something like 10% of electricity IIRC).
2. No one in Germany even knew about fracking until we learned that communities in the US now had poisoned ground water because of it. The whole thing was instantly dead forever in Germany. Yes of course the same idiots who want NPPs back also say we should do fracking, but I don't think any of that will ever happen.
So I did not want to discuss whether these decisions were wrong or not, just wanted to point out that making Russian propaganda the reason for this is a far stretch.
Regarding your point about German/European money paying for Russian bombs: You are absolutely right and it is shameful. We should have pulled the plug on Russia 2014. Do note though that Germany had Russian fossils since like the 70`s as part of ensuring peace and transformation through trade, which yes - did not work out so well in the end.
So at least we can agree that Germany’s reliance on Russian gas has been far deadlier than all nuclear and fracking accidents combined.
Regarding your arguments:
ad 1: This happened only because public opinion had been shaped by the movements mentioned in my previous comment for the last 40 to 50 years. Otherwise, how would you explain the fact that Fukushima did not have the same effect on policy or public opinion in any of the roughly 30 other countries using nuclear power — not even in Japan? Are Germans that much more intelligent than the French, Japanese, or Finns?
ad 2: That is somewhat ironic, considering that fracking has been taking place in Germany since the 1960s.
You should stop relying on such low-resolution thinking when discussing a complex issue like German energy policy.
> You should stop relying on such low-resolution thinking when discussing a complex issue like German energy policy.
It is funny that you are criticizing my ability to reason when you are not even able to (in two comments now) even address the (as explicitly stated in my personal reply to you) single point I was making.
> This happened only because public opinion had been shaped by the movements mentioned in my previous comment for the last 40 to 50 years.
Are you implying that 1986 was a Russian propaganda plot? What/who do you mean with "movements"?
> What/who do you mean with "movements"?
Peace movement, environmental movement, anti-nuclear movement.
> Are you implying that 1986 was a Russian propaganda plot?
Two things can be true at the same time. Something can be objectively bad, but the magnitude of consequences can still depend on how bad actors exploit their opportunity. Ignoring that is what I refer to as "low-resolution thinking". You see Chernobyl or Fukushima and you have emotions about them and think that those emotions are shared by everyone around you, including policy makers, which must have ultimately caused the policies, because they align well with your emotions. But you completely ignore the Zeitgeist and who's been invested heavily into shaping it in their interest. (I think this is much more relevant with regard to Fukushima than Chernobyl - with the latter, Russian interests were much more focussed on deception and deflection, especially towards their satellites. Also, the ability to manipulate the West was strongly diminished by that time, especially compared with their influence on Schröder and Merkel in the 2000s/10s.)
> you are not even able to (...) even address the (...) single point I was making.
Your "single point" was actually two points, that's why you've used a numbered list... but jokes aside, I've addressed them very well:
1. the "the Fukushima disaster" was a huge wave killing >20.000, but contrary to the rest of the world, we've cared much more about the hand full of people killed by radiation (and ~2000 killed by the combination of tsunami and the incident at the NPP) - the greens even declared the 20.000 killed purely by the wave as killed by the NPP, and they do so every year on social media since. You cannot reasonably explain why Germany reacted so distinctively different than other nations without pointing to the history of the movements since the 1960s/70s, and to the interest that Russia traditionally holds in German energy policy.
2. I've also addressed your lie about fracking. Fracking is being used in Germany today and it has been in use since the 1960s. There are new regulations about which types of fracking can be performed where, using which kind of fracking agents, which are generally good regulations. Everything else is fear mongering by interested parties, such as the lobbyists for solar and wind (which I am a HUGE fan of - the technologies, not the lobbyists), and Russian assets.
Where is fracking being done in Germany today?
I stand partly corrected, the last fracking was done 2011, and I cannot find any information if the site is still active today. There have been more than 300 active sites. New ones have not been opened, but NOT due to laws, or lack of economical or technical feasibility, but due to local NIMBYism, which furthers the point I made: fearmongering, supported in relevant parts by foreign assets, is the strongest force. I'm still positive that Ukrainian blood spills our drinking water a hundred times more than conventional fracking ever has and ever would.
That still doesn't make them comparable
technically speaking, geothermal is in a way also a form of nuclear energy.
Opening survival north stream single pipe for Russian gas is no brain solution. Europe break records importing relabeled Russian gas last month anyway
The no brain solution is to electrify everything and switch legacy infrastructure to renewables, just like China does. Gas usage is down in the EU anyway.
Long-term, that's the smart and also necessary move. But it can't be done overnight, and the transition has its significant challenges. I hope they don't mess it up it and will address these problems rationally - but given how most EU leaders have acted over these past few years, I remain painfully unconvinced that they will.
Isn't solar the fastest energy source to spin up? Just take them out of the crate, put them on racks, tie them to the grid.
I guess it is, but solar can only be part of the answer: You need a solid plan (and all the infrastructure that implementing this plan involves) for when the sun does not shine, because in the more northern parts of Europe especially, energy consumption is highest during seasons in which sunlight is (relatively) scarce.
Also, "the grid" cannot absorb any amount of solar energy - so if you choose to address (at least parts) of the above challenge with a photovoltaic build-out that results in massive excess capacity during summer, there needs to be a plan (and again, its implementation) to handle that.
Excess capacity (literally free power) is only a problem because we mandate that electricity generation can only be done as a business that has to earn profit margins.
Because of economics, this means it makes sense as a business to sell power that requires a purchased input commodity, and doesn't make as much sense as a business to build enough solar to sell power during darker months. This is absurd, backwards, and is hampering our ability to deploy clean and affordable power.
National Governments should be massively overbuilding solar and just handing out the resulting power. It's really difficult to mismanage a solar farm.
Maybe instead of a deregulated generation market, we should focus on a barely regulated power storage market.
Iron air batteries.
Not to sound like an ass but that's your typical HNer hot take on a topic they don't know anything about (which is 99% of topics outside of tech).
I know that I don't know jack shit about the topic, but I can already tell you that if you do what you describe you'll quickly learn about why grids have frequencies, what generate these frequencies, and what happens when they drift.
Yeah that's what an inverter does, the "tie them to the grid" part. Every solar system has them, and they can islanding or not.
> Yeah that's what an inverter does
No, that's not what an "inverter" does, not most inverters at least, you need grid forming inverters and batteries for that... which is my whole point, you don't just take them out of the crate and plug them in the grid, that only works if most of the grid is powered by legacy plants stabilising it.
Do you describe nuclear power plants as "just putting two rocks next to each other and plugging them in the grid"
You don't need a grid forming inverter to re-synchronize with the grid, you only need a grid forming inverter if you need a complete cold start or to support a grid island.
In the context of our discussion, adding more capacity, that's exactly what's needed here. We're not replacing 100% of energy sources with solar, we are replacing energy sources with _renewables_ which is hydro, solar, wind, arguably nuclear as well.
Even extending your argument to "well we need to only have solar" then you need a grid forming inverter with batteries. That's not a massive increase in complexity or time and supports the "just tie them to the grid" statement.
Trying to use the analogy of a nuclear power plant, which requires 10-15 years (including permitting), is ridiculous. A solar plant is 2-5 (including permitting) - by comparison.
China still uses a massive amount of coal, and has a lot of southern idle land. Germany has been doing what you say for the last 15 years, it didn't seem to work out so well.
What makes you think Germany didn't do well with renewables? This almost looks like a hockey stick graph: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/climate-energy/rene...
Germany invested a lot money and still burns coal, imports a lot of natural gas for electricity production, has higher electricty prices then France and higher emmisions then France.
"The energy transition will require considerable added investment. Estimates of the total amount of annual investment vary from 15 to 40 billion euros, or 0.5 to 1.2 percent of Germany’s current gross domestic product (GDP) of around 3,200 billion euros."
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/how-much-does-ger...
China's really big. Australia is advancing faster per capita due to having less capita. Can we be Australia?
No brain because there is lack of survival instincts in such phrase?
Russia openly declares willingness to destroy europe, your lifestyle, way of thinking etc. They claim they are better. Sure , sponsoring this country is no brainer lol.
Germany already financed biggest war in europe since WWII by flooding russia with oil money. Is that not enough?
Amount of money EU spent to tame the fire of war could easily cover building 20-30 nuclear plants across the europe to solve the heat/cooling problem once and forever.
The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought wars the First, Second, and Cold Wars has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united, they're the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn't happen. - This is a direct quote by George Friedman. This[1] is a good read to entertain the idea more.
[1] https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/the-crisis-in-ukraine-is-not-ab...
That's fantasy. Germany tried very hard to civilize russia through trade over few past decades. Everybody tried. Turned out russia is just to stupid for any kind of advancement. Did not learn a thing. Everybody else did though.
>Russia openly declares willingness to destroy europe
There is not a scintilla of evidence for this.
They're trying to keep the same violent and aggressive American dominated military alliance that is currently and actively trying to destroy Iran far away from their most vulnerable border.
They also tried to pursue the diplomatic route multiple times before invading and after invading and were always rebuffed.
They started the largest war in Europe since 1945 and I fervently hope that Putin will pay for that in a way similar to Hitler.
That entire war is a massive, futile attempt to revive their glorious imperial days by annexing lands that they consider their alienated property. Fuck them and their bombs and their disgusting oscillations between paranoia and megalomania.
Contemporary Russia has fewer people than Pakistan and a smaller economy than Italy. It has no business playing a "mighty superpower" role anymore, but it ignored that reality (Putin is very much a person of the past, as is his inner circle of post-Soviet siloviks in their 60s and 70s) ... and it is learning the hard way.
The best possible outcome of this war from Kremlin's point of view is that they will become a de-facto resource colony for China, somewhat benevolently managed by actually competent people.
I'd encourage you to watch John Mearshimer's address to the European parliament because he addresses your narrative of imperial expansion and comprehensively refutes it, with clear, easy to understand evidence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1U3HDNQ24o
Unfortunately Europe seems to have lost its mind over this conflict. It will end very badly for them if they don't behave rationally towards Russia.
What largest war in Europe since 1945 ?
Ha, you speak about the war between Russia and the US and friends
You are correct. Perhaps deal with all these people in the same way ? It starts with Biden and ends with countless others, all of which are equally guilty, all of which are fuelling a war needlessly.
Biden? the war started in 2014, with inclusion of not so secretive anymore of regular russian military. continued in 2015, etc. How is that Biden at all?
The only person who fuel this war is Putin. I used to be a russian citizen, I speak russian, i know the society, etc. This war is extremely unpopular in russia, but the only reason why it is still ongoing is one man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1U3HDNQ24o
He says that nato provoked the war and make sure no peace was found
Is that conflict a proxy war ? That would be the first time the US did that .. :)
Do you even believe in this nonsense ?
Putin self confirmed and bragging about "new territory". It's a classical Imperialistic war, old fart decided to restore their USSR greatness, and now they act. They did it in Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine. Sure, it's all NATO.
And yes, it did start like a proxy war by russia, to avoid severe sanctions. They funded and send troops to such called Donetsk republic etc.
It was such a great proxy war from the west that up until certain tine of the conflict they didn't dare to send even medical equipment, not to talk about any other weapons, to do not provoke russia.
It started with a group of terrorist snipers in the Hotel Ukraina who fired randomly into a crowd of civilians. None of them were ever prosecuted. The attempt to pin it on the Berkut failed miserably.
One of them was identified by a Ukrainian war hero as Andriy Parubiy, far right nut and future speaker of the rada. Several of them identified themselves as Georgian mercenaries who were hired by Andriy Parubiy.
The goal of the terror attack was clearly to overthrow a democratically elected president that was overwhelmingly popular in Crimea and the donbass and install a puppet who could be relied upon to do the bidding of the west.
This was successful, and is what kicked off the civil war.
Victoria Nuland's phone call where she "picked" the puppet on behalf of the US state department was leaked. You can listen to it.
Sources, sick imagination.
That corruptionist was not "overwhelmingly popular". It was of the political party that is popular, not more not less.
It was all orchestrated by Russia. You can find tons of videos of russian hero's of that time, and they openly confirm now, that regular military was in Crimea, Donetsk , etc, since 2014. This is not some "leaked" phone. It's many interviews openly sitting on youtube and confirming with smiles their actions.
>Sources, sick imagination.
All of that evidence can be verified with a quick google.
>That corruptionist was not "overwhelmingly popular".
In Crimea and the Donbass he undeniably was. Election figures confirm this. Again, a quick google would confirm this.
>It was all orchestrated by Russia.
The source for this definitely IS imagination.
>You can find tons of videos of russian hero's of that time, and they openly confirm now, that regular military was in Crimea, Donetsk , etc,
Of course. Just as many "patriotic western" soldiers ended up fighting for Ukraine, many "patriotic Russians" ended up fighting in the donbass.
It's way better to buy re-labelled, because russia earns less from that when intermediaries take their cut, because it's buyers market.
no brain in the truest sense of it.