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Germany's oldest remaining nuclear reactor has been shut down, part of a move initiated four years ago to switch off all its nuclear plants by 2022.
Bavaria's environment ministry said Sunday that the Grafenrheinfeld reactor in the southern German state was taken offline as scheduled overnight, the news agency dpa reported. Grafenrheinfeld went into service in 1981. It's the first reactor to close since Germany switched off the oldest eight of its 17 nuclear reactors in 2011, just after Japan's Fukushima disaster. The next to close will be one of two reactors at the Gundremmingen plant in Bavaria, which is set to shut in late 2017. The rest will be closed by the end of 2022.
Germany aims to generate 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Monday June 29 2015, @07:23PM
Not that many. They power up all their nice all natural earth friendly coal power plants instead. How exactly that is better the nuclear I will never understand but I guess I'm not supposed to.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 29 2015, @08:18PM
Probably they just crank up the existing nuclear plants to 11.
They have indeed added coal plants since this announced shutdown. And they appear to only be shutting down the oldest nuke plants. Roughly half their nukes are still running, and they buy a lot of electricity and gas from across borders.
It will take just one nasty spat with Russia in a strong winter for them to realize renewable isn't going to carry the load.
They would need to build out solar a ten to twenty fold to approximate what they get from coal, gas, and nuclear. Germany seems to go to great lengths to propagandize their energy sources making the appearance of making great strides. But its only when you dig just a little bit [cleanenergywire.org] that you find layers upon layers [cleanenergywire.org] of bullshit.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rich on Monday June 29 2015, @09:43PM
Without further digging, the numbers in the diagrams seem to be for primary energy, which includes residential and other heating. The big bar for "petroleum" is for all the houses that have the tank truck come once a year for their oil heating. The remaining heating is done with natgas, which makes up the larger part of the "gas" bar. There's even trouble going on with gas-fired CCPPs (including a world-leading >60% efficiency one, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Irsching [wikipedia.org] ), because the grid doesn't call off enough power from there. It's indeed lignite (brown coal) that supplies most of the fossil based energy.
Germany is also not in need to import any electricity; quite the opposite. The Germans export over 30B kWh/a. http://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=27846 [www.iwr.de] This, for a good part, goes to the French with their dense NPP-population that has to be throttled in Summer when the rivers are too warm. Convenient, when German PV outputs near its peak (> 30 GW) on a sunny summer day.
The Russians have been perfectly reliable suppliers for the last 100 years, except for a short while that had something to do with a little invasion, supposedly (*) to secure Romanian oil sources, and maybe obtain some Kazhak ones, too. This is in contrast to the arabs which brought Germany a car-free-Sunday period in 1973.
So, really, the big piece of the cake is residential heating, which is why the Germans (**) are so obsessed with insulating houses (cf. my post in the bricklaying-robot article).
My NPP stock (which I didn't want to divest of, because of some tax regulation change) took a steep dive not only because they had to shut down a good number of NPPs, but also because it eventually came to be widely known that they had their "savings for dismantling" in the books, but not in the bank (hence the breakup of e.On; RWE might follow suit.).
On top of that comes the discovery that the low-activity waste dump at Asse is rotting away with the junk in mild-steel barrels and the price of fixing this alone will be probably in the dimension needed to kickstart a whole syngas economy. (Mind you, the German subsidies for PV got the current worldwide avalanche rolling). On the topic of this article, the dismantling is particularly interesting, btw, because it resembles the common large 1300 MW PWR widespread in the country in fully irradiated state. AFAIK all previous dismantlings were on less irradiated or smaller plants; they're taking apart a 600 MW PWR at Stade right now (and found out that primary circuit leaks caused the foundation to be contaminated).
(*) Depending on how revisionist someone is, of course :)
(**) except those who celebrate burning US-supplied petroleum just to show the stinkin' treehuggers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by angelosphere on Monday June 29 2015, @09:51PM
They have indeed added coal plants since this announced shutdown.
Wrong. Added implies the number went up. We built new coal plants, more efficient ones to replace old ones. Bottom line the number of coal plants is dropping.
And they appear to only be shutting down the oldest nuke plants. Indeed. Actually the article (did you read the summary?) sys so.
It will take just one nasty spat with Russia in a strong winter for them to realize renewable isn't going to carry the load. That is a pretty silly remark as the russian gas in winter is used for heating houses with gas furnaces. How exactly would the house be heated anyway? The amount of gas we use to produce electric power is very low.
They would need to build out solar a ten to twenty fold to approximate what they get from coal, gas, and nuclear.
You are bad in math ... if we increase solar (I assume you mean all renewables) by factor of ten we can power three countries ...
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 29 2015, @10:48PM
Go back and read the numbers.
You've cherry picked all the easy renewables, already, and you are still only up to 11% of your energy needs. The next best renewables are going to be a lot more costly, because you haven't addressed storage at all.
Like I said. It looks rosy till you start digging through the numbers in great detail. But if you limit your self to the public consumption nonsense you might never know this and will still run around regurgitating the same old nonsense. The figures are available. You just have to dig.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Touché) by angelosphere on Monday June 29 2015, @11:35PM
Renewables don't need storage.
That is an american made up myth.
BTW: all renewables together are the biggest power source in germany.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday June 30 2015, @02:26AM
Go look at the numbers and stop spouting nonsense.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @04:05PM
Fossil fuels are renewable too. It just takes a few million years to renew them. ;-)
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:05PM
And then non-renewable again as our sun dies out.
And then renewable again as the universe collapses and a new big bang occurs.
As you go up (or down) the time scale, renewable and non-renewable tend to alternate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @06:49PM
What makes you think the Universe will collapse? Currently the expansion is accelerating and it doesn't look like it will ever collapse, likely ending up in the heat-death of the Universe.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday June 29 2015, @08:26PM
And here I'll just trump out the stats from World Coal Association. I love them to prove points like yours,
http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/ [worldcoal.org]
Germany is by FAR the largest producer of brown coal - the shittiest coal around. But then it is what they have. In 2012, 44% of German electricity was coal sourced, more than US's 38%. Germany also imports another 1/3 of what it produces, probably from Poland. And Germany is world's 8th largest coal producer, a large importer and hence a major consumer.
Shuttering nuclear power, keeping in mind that there is plenty of nuclear power plants that surround Germany (France, Chech republic, etc), while keeping coal running, is a little anti-green. Keep in mind that Chernobyl area will be resettleable almost completely within current generation's lifetimes (Fukushima area within about 100 years), but carbon emitted by Germany (and others) will continue to warm the climate 1000 years from now. People 100 years from now will curse the shortsightedness of current decision makers - they are the ones that will have to move entire cities, and even nations, out of the way of rising oceans.
(Score: 1) by angelosphere on Monday June 29 2015, @09:55PM
brown coal - the shittiest coal around
That was perhaps, note the bold, 30 years ago. In a modern plant it is no difference whether you burn brown coal or black coal.
Shuttering nuclear power, [...] is a little anti-green. Perhaps you should simply dig out a graph how much power comes from nuclear plants ...
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:07PM
Shhh, quiet now! Nuclear is anti-green because dogma.
Don't question the dogma!