>The loss of cheap Russian natural gas needed to power factories “painfully damaged the business model of the German economy,” Kullmann told The Associated Press. “We’re in a situation where we’re being strongly affected — damaged — by external factors.”
I would argue that betting the farm on a single unreliable (at best) partner for cheap energy and future development is an internal factor and not an external one.
Unreliable, at best. Could you explain why you think so?
The historical record since the current contracts were signed (in the seventies): The Soviet Union delivered reliably throughout the eighties conflicts about short-range nuclear missiles, etc. Delivery continued reliably when the Soviet Union split up. Delivery was reliable when the transit country Poland had what amounts to a revolution. It continued reliably through Germany's reuinification. In the fifteen years following, Russia's economy half-died but delivery continued without change.
These were wrenching changes to every country involved and one fairly substantial conflict. If this record indicates unreliability, what would it take to indicate reliability?
And the same people who celebrated shutting down nuclear now put the blame on cars and block streets preventing working class people from getting to work. And as such, the far-right party polls at a record high right now.
I'm not sure what you intend to say. Nuclear supporters are far-right? Vote for a Nazi-like party because roads are blocked?
Shutting down nuclear makes sense, we have much safer ways nowadays to generate (transform) energy. Storing the nuclear waste is a unsolved issue that is passed on to our children.
Whether or not we should shut down nuclear down the line, shutting down existing nuclear makes the opposite of sense if you think climate change is a serious issue. As a consequence, it caused severe damage to the German economy. The best friend of extremist parties like AfD is economic disruption that delegitimizes the status quo. There is a direct line from Merkel's panicked reaction to Fukushima and the AfD polling at 20% today.
Stop perpetuating these ignorant myths about nuclear energy.
Radioactive waste is radioactive because it still has stuff in it that can be refined into usable fuel ore for further use.
The reason this was not done was because it was cheaper to mine new ore than refine older waste. This is quickly changing.
When uranium pellets are used up they become depleted uranium and have industrial uses as ballests, armor, or (controversially) as weapons. These are about as dangerous as lead. Don't eat them but can be safely held on your hand or buried with minimum danger.
Nuclear power is our path to a green future and people like you spreading ignorance are why countries like Germany are now dependent on despotic totalitarian regimes.
Nuclear power is still expensive because those power plants have to be absolutely safe. They have to meet stringent safety standards making them expensive to build. Otherwise you get another Chernobyl.
Another red herring. Chernobyl had several design flaws in its RMBK reactors and what caused the melt down was operating it in a way that it was not designed for so a commie could look good for his bosses.
Modern reactors are far more resilient and safe. The reason building new reactors is so expensive comes down to the permitting and license process. Building is easy, dealing with the $300/hr lawyers and regulatory overhead that makes bringing new reactors online is why it's so expensive.
You want to know who has the safest track record of nuclear reactor operation? The navy.
If Germany were to rely just on solar and wind, the low capacity factor would likely require massive grid storage. The only large scale grid storage we have at this point is pumped hydro and that isn't scalable. For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely only on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity.
If making more grid storage was cheap and easy, we would have built it decades ago. This is why Germany is still burning so much coal.
What happens when the sun does sign?
What happens when the wind doesnt blow?
What happens when power demand rises and drops throughout the day?
Solar and wind cannot support a base load period. Battery tech is great and believe me it's cool but lithium ion batteries have been in place since the 70s and the chemistry hasn't improved.
Instead of sitting on our hands with a thumb up the bum, waiting for breakthroughs that never come, we have solutions today that work and should be leveraged before those gains in chemical engineering and material science happen.
Generation isn't the real issue. It's storage for base load that presents the real obstacle to shifting to renewable power. There are a variety of proposals to do so but none have yet proven economical at scale. The manufacturing capacity for batteries isn't remotely sufficient, and won't be for many years to come regardless of government subsidies.
ok, let me clarify my comment.. storage should occur once the fuel has been reprocessed and re-used enough times to have been exhausted, and then stored.
The "use once and store" attitude that results in needing safe places for highly radioactive material for 100's of thousands of years is insane, when you can just use the stuff until it's "worn out" and the resulting lower level waste only needs caring for for some small handful of decades.
And we need more fast-breeder reactors, too, FWIW.
>...Shutting down nuclear makes sense, we have much safer ways nowadays to generate (transform) energy.
Unfortunately Germany took the approach of shutting down nuclear before they had eliminated all coal plants. An operating coal plant will kill many people just through its normal emissions.
>...The five EU countries whose coal power plants do the most harm abroad are Poland (causing 4,690 premature deaths abroad); Germany (2,490); Romania (1,660); Bulgaria (1,390) and the UK (1,350).
Besides killing people in neighboring countries, Germans are also prematurely dying due to their use of coal and being downwind of its neighbors:
>...The five EU countries most heavily impacted by coal pollution from neighbouring countries, in addition to that from their own plants are: Germany (3,630 premature deaths altogether), Italy (1,610); France (1,380); Greece (1,050) and Hungary (700).
While Germany has a long term goal of stopping the burning of coal, every year this is delayed is more people dying. Energy supply disruptions have actually caused them to increase their use of coal:
>...The ‘intensive use’ of German coal power plants lead to additional emissions of 15.8 million tonnes of CO2 in 2022, according to a report by consultancy Energy Brainpool commissioned by Green Planet Energy. Due to the energy crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, Germany temporarily reopened decommissioned and soon-to-be decommissioned coal power plants last year to avert gas shortages, which resulted in more CO2 being released. According to the authors, the emissions are ‘additional’ because they are not accounted for in the European Emissions Trading System (ETS). Germany's total emissions amounted to about 750 million tonnes last year
In the future there will be better solutions to deal with the rest of the waste. Newer reactor designs would also make it possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. Through many cycles, the IFR ultimately causes 99.9% of the uranium and transuranium elements to undergo fission and produce power; so its waste is just the fission products. These have much shorter half lives; so in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium ore."
Yes, that's what I meant. You can be either green or neo-Nazi, no middle ground.
People have different problems and priorities than you, and if you decide to annoy them on top of the hardships they've already been burdened with, this might be the straw that will cause them to eventually radicalize. Just look at the AfD banners of the day, and you will see that they use every opportunity like this to grab voters. I've seen posters that said "Klima-Kleber ins Knast", so this is a factor that may bend people down.
What I don't like about Germany is that left-leaning people love to shout out their virtue with demos, banners, stickers, banter and whatnot, but when they are confronted with an actual working-class crowd, they just brush them off as "Nazis", and we don't talk to "Nazis".
I agree with your assessment. I see the extreme polarisation growing elsewhere too. Is there any basis to suggest that it is linked to a growing urban-rural divide? Or something else maybe in the media?
It might be, but I think formal education plays a role here too. German universities are very left-leaning, so people with a degree are more likely to hold left-wing positions. This is in comparison to my home country Poland, where there is an ideological divide in higher education - arts and humanities colleges are more left-leaning, while everything else is apolitical or leans right. I have a degree from an engineering college, and most people there (me included up until some point) had right-libertarian towards nationalist right wing positions. The technical colleges there are voter strongholds for the furthest-right fringe party, which initially incentivizes votes with promises of low taxation and resulting riches, and then sucks people in as a whole with conspiracy theories.
True about the political atmosphere in German vs Polish universities. I happen to have had a taste of both. There seemed to be more intellectual freedom in the Polish unis that I visited -- one technical, the other economics. (Just don't try to discuss delicate subjects like the Germans or the Russians.)
There is no Nazi-like party in Germany. The AfD's platform of reducing immigration (not even eliminating it or repatriating!) is a far cry from the Third Reich's atrocities and trying to draw a comparison is obviously cheap and nasty rhetoric.
From my point of view, the biggest problem with the AfD is that there is a lot of variability in the political currents that it contains. Most of them are pretty normal and reasonable. Some of them make me a bit uncomfortable. All based on my personal views of course. However I'm also sceptical of taking random comments as proof that a guy has a shrine to the Führer in his finished basement.
No. Not based on that article at least. Maybe you know more about him. A 3 word quote does not proof make.
The German authorities are doing in their trousers because of the AfD's meteoric rise. They will do anything so that the average voter thinks that utter incompetent clowns like Scholz, Bärbock and Habeck are indeed good political choices. Any and all elements (like 3 word quotes) are going to be used to ban the real opposition.
The sad fact is that a stuffed animal could do better for Germany than the current coalition. The AfD is in the right place at the right time.
I don't find such views as yours very pragmatic. I am not an ideologue. But I'm also not German so I'll leave the choices to you lot. Whilst mentioning that my only horse in the game is the fact that a healthy and prosperous Germany is beneficial to me, whereas the opposite is absolutely not. Best of luck.
I...do not understand this mentality in the West. Until we have a clean reliable alternative, Nuclear is the best we have.
Do I think it's amazing or perfect? Not at all. But I much prefer it to burning non-renewable and cancerous petrochemicals/carbons. So, it's the best we have until we have for now.
Natural gas isn't just a source of heat and power. It was also an essential feed stock for much of the German chemicals industry. That industry is now rapidly downsizing and migrating to other countries with cheaper gas.
It wasn't unreliable, and what alternative did they have? Do you know of one where they can get the same amount of energy at the same cost? Because Germany would love to know, quick.
Cheap Russian energy was the drug that Germany got hooked on. Every viewer of after-school specials knows you shouldn't get hooked on the drug dealer's freebies.
The whole world buys oil from Saudi Arabia and goods from China, singling out Russia as some particular evil that it would be a mistake to do business with is nonsensical. Trump wants Germany to drop Russian energy inputs because it benefits the US geopolitically and economically, it's not so clear that it's a benefit to Germany.
Yes, but also the rationale of the Anglo-Saxons in general. Idea born in England that is a truly understated root cause of the present conflict. People will stuff their fingers in their ears and swear it isn't true.
Correct. From Wikipedia [1] "On 2 September 2022, the company announced that natural gas supplies via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline would remain shut off indefinitely until [...] compressor station [...] was fixed [...]. Gazprom justified this by claiming that European Union sanctions against Russia had resulted in technical problems".
From CNN Business [2] "On Friday [September 2 2022], shortly after the G7 announcement [of the oil price cap], Russian state energy giant Gazprom said it would not resume deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline on Saturday as planned."
On 26 September 2022, NS1 and NS2 pipelines were damaged ending any possibility of Russia using them for political pressure or profit.
My understanding is a bit different. Gazprom and or the Nord Stream operator insisted on fulfilling its contractual obligations for delivery but the situation became overly complicated for the reception of payment and some foreign to be repaired turbines were stuck in Canada or Germany because of sanctions against Russia. Then boom.
Let's also not forget that blowing up those pipelines caused a sevear ecological disaster releasing an enormous amount of gas into the atmosphere. The pipes are keep under pressure even when no gas is moving.
Who ever did it committed an act of terrorism and a crime against nature.
I would argue that betting the farm on a single unreliable (at best) partner for cheap energy and future development is an internal factor and not an external one.