My main point was that you ignored the opportunity costs of keeping those reactors running. If you spend resources on X you don't have those resources to spend on Y, where Y may be a much better way of achieving what you want to do. To me it looks like you've made an automatic assumption that keeping those nukes going no matter what it costs and no matter how long it takes is the best option. Keeping those German nukes going may be the nuclear engineering equivalent of a squirt of WD40 and smack with a hammer, in which case fine, but it may take years and multiple billions. I've looked and I can't find any good estimates as to the viability and costs of keeping them running beyond waffle and speculation.EACLucifer wrote: ↑Tue Apr 12, 2022 5:52 pmResponding again with a link to some actual numbersbjn wrote: ↑Sat Apr 09, 2022 8:53 pmMost of the gas on Germany is used for industrial process heat or space heating, so even if they used no gas fired electricity generators they’d still need gas to stop people freezing in winter. You can’t flip to heat pumps and electrical process heat in a time scale less than a decade.EACLucifer wrote: ↑Sat Apr 09, 2022 11:36 am
Germany's refusal to reactivate/prolong the life of existing reactors is particularly indefensible. Though it might take a year or so to get reactors back online, building gas infrastructure to avoid dependance on Russia takes time, too, and unlike that approach, reactivating/maintaining reactors cuts out the carbon cost, and the geopolitical worries that they would just be transferring their dependence to a different tyrannical petrostate.
Given they are where they are, what would be the best use of resources you propose to spend on getting end of life nukes working again (which will probably take more than a year)? Would you be better off throwing them crash programs for household insulation to drastically reduce the need for that gas in the first place.
Germany uses about a third of its gas for power generation. Their current policy of shutting down functional reactors will increase that demand substantially, making them more dependant on gas from Putin's Russia and other petro-tyrants. If they instead reversed that policy and reactivated reactors, it would generate enough power to effectively eliminate the use of Russian gas imports, and largely eliminate the use of gas for power generation in general, reduce carbon emissions and reduce air pollution, given they are, at present, still intending to burn coal for the rest of the decade. With the reactors already existing and just requiring a little work to get them running again, there is no equivalent investment that could do so much good for weaning Germany off Putin's exports and carbon emissions in such a timescale.
Since the Bucha atrocities were discovered, Germany has sent a billion and a half euros to Putin to pay for gas. Fuel imports are one of the few things preventing the Russian economy - and thus war machine - from collapsing.
The German Green Party is effectively willing to put convenience and anti-nuclear paranoia ahead of opposition to climate change and genocide. I'm often dumbstruck by the sheer selfishness of western political movements across the ideological spectrum. This is one of those occasions.
When you look at what Russia earned from its exports in 2021, oil and oil products netted them nearly 22 times what gas did. Those ratios will have changed somewhat as the price of gas has skyrocketed, but even so, if you want to hurt Russia economically, you should be prioritising turning off the oil taps.