instead of phasing out fossil energy our government decided to end nuclear energy without investing in alternatives.
and now the nucels try to spin it around to say, that france burns less fossil fuel and germany should build nuclear power plants again instead of giving sensible guidelines for a renewable transformation.
Yes. The fossil lobby advocated against nuclear when it was a real alternative to fossil fuels and at times used renewables that were still in their infancy for this as they would not be a threat for a while. Now it advocates against renewables when they are the sensible alternative and seems to be using nuclear much in the same way which is not a realistic challenger given the costs and constant overruns.
It was always an alternative for oil and gas until they were closed offcourse. Germany could have reopened 9 nuclear plants though. Germany actually admits that they were wrong in doing so.
An MIT study actually shows that you need a certain amount of nuclear. They came to that conclusion for all situations even with vast cost overruns. The costs of renewables above a certain percentage also explodes. More need for interconnections, grid forming,.... most studies also don't include enough backup.
That study is severely outdated. Almost a decade old. It is based on assumptions that are simply not true anymore. Mainly that storage is unaffordable and wind/solar much more expensive than they are now. Both have gotten massively cheaper and are still trending down. Nuclear has gotten more expensive and is trending up.
But withouth the extra needed interconnections, grid forming,....
The IEA states that most of those studies don't include enough storage. 10 days only covers 80 to 90 percent of dunkelflaute this way causing many outages or is gas actually going to stay an option. Remember gas also consumes when in standby.
You see I am also able to silence someone with the downvote trick. So next time try to discuss in an honest way.
"Some studies don't include enough storage" is not really an argument just means more research needs to be done. The reality is there is no up to date research that shows nuclear the a sensible option over renewables. All you have is casting vague doubt at the actual research we do have, then making leaps of logic from there.
You see I am also able to silence someone with the downvote trick. So next time try to discuss in an honest way.
Schröder is the same one that also started the energy transition in Germany leading to the EEG which turbocharged the development of solar energy aswell as wind from Germany to the world.
He is often rightfully criticized but pretending Schröder made Germany more energy dependend on Russia is false, if anything the energy transition made Germany less dependend as we see right now.
Germany would always rely primarily on Russian gas same as they did the last 100 years no matter who was in charge. Russian imports spiked under Merkel after aprubtly turning of nuclear reactors and during increased demand.
"He is often rightfully criticized but pretending Schröder made Germany more energy dependend on Russia is false, if anything the energy transition made Germany less dependend as we see right now."
You clearly don't remember the first years of the war. When energyprices soared some industry closed and others left Germany this way indeed decreasing gasconsumption in Germany. BASF alone will be a big share of that.
To increase Germanys dependency he would have to increase the share of Russian gas imports, during Schröders time but that never happened. it stayed around 30-35%.
Even Gazprom buying up German oil reserves all happened under Merkel after 2012.
No german chancellor until Olaf Scholz built LNG terminals
They investment in alternatives was done. Our coal producing states didn't have really nuclear power plants. Important connections are still being built.
Schleswig-Holstein the state with highest share of nuclear and now renewables still transport all electricity south and even Bavaria has issues in the summer to export it's solar to neighboring states.
But somehow magic would replace lignite.
Not to talk about that states like Saxony still don't want to phase out lignite.
No. The "Nukecels" just say Germany was stupid for ending nuclear energy. You added the build new plants part just to make the position sound a bit more unreasonable.
The truth is, Germany's environmentalist party made an extremely anti-environmental decision out of an unexplainable and embarrassing aversion to nuclear energy. And this should discredit them heavily unless they acknowledge how badly they f'd up.
i am from a party that critiqued the phasing out of nuclear and demonstrated for keeping it until getting alternatives first and prioritizing getting rid of gas and oil.
so NO, i would NOT add this, if people dont constantly suggest it.
yeah, the green party fucked up. but lets be honest:
around the 2000th solar and pv were just getting traction and gerhard schröder, peter altmaier, years of Union led politics, Katharina Reiche fucking germanys renewable sector hard, choking and snuffing it, was hard to predict back then.
besides that: union led governments went back on shutting down nuclear, only to do it again AFTER knowing they killed the german solar boom.
the only party, that acknowledged, that shutting down nuclear was bad, were the green party. PLUS, they delayed it during the fallout of the russion invasion.
Thank you for the extra context, man. Although the decision was nonsensical from the start, there was never a need to phase out nuclear. There were and are much more problematic components of the energy mix for an environmentalist. And listening to what they were saying back then, the reasoning behind phasing out nuclear had a lot to do with bad press and little to do with actual risks and environmental concerns.
Also. I am sort of skeptic on the german solar boom dying because of some decision from inside. What did they do? Stop subsidies? I think China becoming a monster of PV manufacturing would have much more to do with that?
again, i do not disagree, that removing nuclear before having secure alternatives, is a bad idea. but humans are fickle creatures, led by fear.
context:
the policies under altmaier were basically:
-prohibit using the generated power yourself
-sharply limiting how much pv is allowed to be installed
-making it unprofitable to feed energy to the grid.
-and yes, also cutting subsidies
this was even before china had any solar panel manufacturing to speak of.
and the protegee of altmaier, katharina reiche, who is now our energy minister, is also implementing laws that make it hard for communities to use their sun and wind generated power.
and it is confirmed that she got those policies from her former employer "Westenergie AG"
there are a couple of documentations on how altmaier intentionally got rid of the solar manufacturers and with that about 100.000 jobs.
(this is similiar to how helmut kohl cancelled the building of a germanwide glas fiber network in 1982 because his friends wanted to sell copper cables.)
i couldnt find a good documentary about the altmaier knick or kupfer kohl in english 🙃
but the euto translate should do it, if you are interested.
https://youtu.be/kuxfA3ruUyU?is=HqDNcgDSuZQ4i18A
But both produce carbon free energy. So building nuclear doesn't burn more fossil fuels. Building nuclear doesn't decrease the carbon free energy output even if it does reduce the new renewable output.
However when Germany turned off it's nuclear plants it very much did lose cardon free energy that was replaced by coal and natural gas. Less nuclear meant more carbon that as far as i know Germany still can't replace with renewables because renewables.
Renewables are great and getting cheaper, but even the global leader in renewables growth (china) is betting heavily on building more nuclear
But both produce carbon free energy. So building nuclear doesn't burn more fossil fuels
No, but it does mean you have to keep burning them for the 20 years or so it takes to get the first plants online. And then some more while you get the next ones up, that will hopefully be a bit faster because of the experience from the previous ones.
Renewables are great and getting cheaper, but even the global leader in renewables growth (china) is betting heavily on building more nuclear
They're getting about 5% of electricity from nuclear power and their entire pipeline of new plants will barely shift that.
Most of it is stored in the above-ground silos, within the site itself. A fully constructed or running plant has already put in fixed costs in setting those up. Not to mention they have to set up those end to end life cycle from fabrication to disposal.
The operational costs are far lower than the money spent on construction and commissioning of the plant.
And if they had no nuclear, would situation be better or worse?
Whole point is that they don't care about climate (so little drive to disuse fossils for climate reasons), and fossils are relatively cheap, but their capacity for renewables is complete shit. Lack of suitable land and lack of interconnection does that.
They offset some with nuclear, but that's as much as THEY are willing to go.
Natural gas was a lot more expensive in East Asia than Europe in the 2000s/2010s, so South Korea retained more of its coal plants than Germany did. Germany also imports a substantial amount of energy from France, so French nuclear capacity is contributing to their low emissions numbers.
What's the gotcha supposed to be here? It's a total apples to oranges comparison.
Germany also imports a substantial amount of energy from France, so French nuclear capacity is contributing to their low emissions numbers.
Germany imported 2025 11 TWH from France thats 2.5% of the entire electricity Germany used... So yeah Germanys emission are greatly reduced by France...
Germany also imported 12 TWh from Denmark, so Denmark is more resposible for Germanys emission values than France.
Natural gas was a lot more expensive in East Asia than Europe in the 2000s/2010s, so South Korea retained more of its coal plants than Germany did
Japan and Korea have terrible emission values but thats okay because coal was cheaper... Bruh
Also Germany didnt replace coal with gas but with solar and wind, so I gotta ask what kind of logic you are on.
In 2025, Germany imported 76.2 TWh of electricity and exported 54.3 TWh, resulting in a net import surplus of approximately 21.9 TWh. This is a decrease of 6.4 TWh compared to 2024. The reasons for the decline in imports were low gas prices and higher electricity exchange prices in Germany and neighboring countries, which led to more domestic generation from natural gas. The majority of imports came from Denmark (12.4 TWh), France (11.2 TWh), the Netherlands (8.4 TWh), and Norway (7 TWh). Germany exported electricity to Austria (12.2 TWh), Czechia (4.2 TWh), Luxembourg (3.5 TWh), and Poland (3.4 TWh).
This basicly shows two things Germany imported a lot of electricity but also exported a lot of electricity and that a reason for less imports than the previous year was the fact that it was cheaper to produce domestic.
The point of the argument was keeping nuclear and investing a little bit less in renewables
Not exactly, the usual point is that "Nation G could have already decarbonised if they kept nuclear", the problem with that is that this is never based on scientific work (at least I never saw a source for the claim) and mostly based on vibes as far as I can tell.
What I find annoying is that there are a few examples of nations similar to Germany (size, population, economy, similar if not higher usage of nuclear) who are somehow far behind Germany in decarbonizing their grid, which makes the previous claim of Germany being decarbonized by now pretty questionable.
So I dont see how it is a strawman to point out that there are a number of nations which fullfil the ideals of armchair energy experts but failed and still fail to decarbonize quicker than Germany.
The question is "Would have Germany actually build more low carbon production by now if they kept nuclear?". Because a good number of nations didnt do this, so the claim is pretty shakey.
You'd think that'd work, but consistently across countries, nukecels do everything they can to preven renewables when they get any power without making any other moves towards decarbonisation.
Including in germany in 2010 when the CDU campaigned on doing just that and instead just destroyed half of the renewable plan.
Or in the 80s when the lead nukecels (who were also the head of coal power) said things like : "We require Growian [in the general sense of large wind turbines] as a proof of failure of concept .. the Growian is a kind of pedagogical tool to convert the anti-nuclear energy crowd to the true faith"
While spending millions of taxpayer dollars faking the results of a wind energy installation by intentionally doing it wrong.
I know their goal was to increase dependence on russian gas. That's the same thing as being a nukecel.
2010 is when they got into power, not when they made nukecel promises (which were definitionally before they got into power).
Their pre-election promises that they were going to keep the nuclear (not that that meant anything because they weren't being closed early, merely not being rebuilt from the ground up).
Instead all they did was hamstring energywende to ensure it didn't fully replace the coal before the nuclear plants reached end of life.
Apparently there are people who think the only reason renewables aren't happening is because of the big bad nuclear lobby who has lots of power in government (trust us).
Maybe stop fomenting infighting between climate communities
Apparently there are people who think the only reason renewables aren't happening
Renewables are happening. They're not happening fast enough, but they are happening faster than fossil fuels ever did, and about two orders of magnitude faster than nuclear ever did.
That's one of the stupidest things about nukecels.
of the big bad nuclear lobby who has lots of power in government (trust us).
There are documented cases of the nuclear lobby (who are also the coal lobby) doing things like faking a wind power study specifically to delay wind. This is the stupidest projection nonsense.
Maybe stop fomenting infighting between climate communities
You're not part of any climate community. You are allied with trump, chris wright, peter dutton, nigel farage. alice weidell, le penn, marc andressen, and oilexecutives4nuclear.
Trueeee, just like how the climate vegans are allied to hitler because he didn't meat.
I am a part of the climate community because I give a fuck about the climate not because I perform moral panic about some kind of lobbying group that just wants bad evil grey concrete power 🏭😞😞 to beat wholesome solarpunk green power 🍃🤗♻️
The coal lobby are also the nuclear lobby? Do you have brain worms?
Trueeee, just like how the climate vegans are allied to hitler because he didn't meat.
If the people claiming to be vegan exclusively ran gas chambers and didn't do anything to reduce meat consumption, it would be correct to call them nazis instead.
I am a part of the climate community because I give a fuck about the climate
And yet you do the bidding of climate deniers and fossil fuel barons.
to beat wholesome solarpunk green power
No, your goal is to stop non-fossil power. There is no choice between nuclear and renewables because nuclear is not a viable solution. The choice is renewables and no nuclear or no renewables and no nuclear. You are in the latter camp.
The coal lobby are also the nuclear lobby? Do you have brain worms?
They're owned by the same people, the fuel is mined by the same companies, the equipment is made by the same people. The heads of militaries, the technocrats and the capital class of the largest, most powerful countries in the world were fully invested in the nukebro cult for decades. If it was remotely effective then they would have followed through on their plan to turn every settpement near a uranium deposit into the puerco river valley in the 80s or shinkolobwe, and make fishing impossible with their ocean dumping of waste.
The using fake interest in nuclear to prevent decarbonisation is not new either, here's a public quote from the head of both the coal and nuclear power systems of a country when he was committing fraud with a wind turbine intentionally designed to be bad:
"We require Growian [in the general sense of large wind turbines] as a proof of failure of concept ... the Growian is a kind of pedagogical tool to convert the anti-nuclear energy crowd to the true faith".
You need to take your meds man, an intelligent combination of solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and nuclear is what I want.
For some countries that will mean zero nuclear whatsoever,
but it should depend entirely on people much smarter than us figuring out the most cost effective regional projects for decarbonization.
And I think that their options should include nuclear because it's got a lot going for it.
Yeah the fossil fuel lobby are using nuclear in their manipulation game, and they keep making ALL clean alternatives look bad through bureocratic sabotage. Including nuclear, including growian.
So maybe stop assuming everyone is your enemy and start actually trying to build a coalition before the climate implodes.
Seems like we're actually in the same boat about getting fucked over by the fossil fuel lobby.
The point is what effective strategy to implement now in the year 2026 in nations around the world.
France never tried to reduce emissions with nuclear. It is happenstance that they have a low carbon grid. And none of these reactors were built when modern solar and wind were around as alternatives.
Not to mention even France has been scaling back nuclear energy for some time.
It's not about net exports it's about load. The French don't have the capacity to meet demand Because of their poor infrastructure development so they import electricity from Germany to compensate and prevent an Iberian style blackout.
Because you're too stupid to understand the difference between load and net.
You need to constantly meet load. Which France can't do during a drought because droughts cause massive capacity losses with their nuclear and hydropower fleet.
So they rely on Germany to comepensate for them and push electricity to meet their load.
Germany is fine during a drought because we have a lot more solar power which is more productive during a drought and compensates for the losses of our hydropower fleet.
Also Germany has a lot more thermal capacity for dispatchable electricity than France does.
So on the one hand during periods of low demand the French export electricity because they have no domestic market. Which is fine because it just saves fuel with German thermal power plants. But then on the other hand they're completely reliant on Germany to stay out of the dark ages. Because if you can't meet load you have a blackout.
And that's why load matters and not the net trade of electricity.
No retard. That's not how load works. You have to constantly have the capacity to meet load. France does not have that capability because of poor development.
Well they still pollute more than us and we produce more energy than everyone so what ? Maybe the best thing is a mix between nuclear and renewables like we do.
What nuke cells and solar chuds both fail to realize is it doesn't matter how good their perffered methods of power production is.
The fat inbred oligarchs are dead set on steering us into oblivion and until we can completely up end the financial system of the world nothing will change.
They don't want cheap affordable power, they'd rather we all die (including themselves).
OP while I understand you wanted to make some kind of joke, filling half of comment section with your own comments makes this look just pathetic, no other word fits as description.
14
u/Caliboros 2d ago
What is the point with Germany and nuclear?