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| Germany shutting down last nuclear power plants on April 15th |
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| asmi:
--- Quote from: Neutrion on April 14, 2023, 12:04:42 pm ---And that is why the green import taxes are going to be needed, and they are in planning as far as I know. So companies can move, but than soon they can only sell their products to elswhere. --- End quote --- That is yet another ideological delusion. Reality is Europe needs China's products much more than China needs Europe as a market, because China has alternatives, while Europe does not. |
| Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: Kleinstein on April 14, 2023, 01:16:13 pm ---For Germany it may have been the better decision to run the NPPs a little longer. Given the relatively good safety level / record (execpt for the high temperature thorium one) it would have made more sense to shut down the NPPs in Belgium and keep the better ones in Germany running. Still the difference to coal is not that big and ideally, without the war in the Ukrain it would have been gas and not coal to provide a little more power. Neither nuclear nor coal are desireable, they are best avoided both. --- End quote --- Indeed; the story for both nuclear and fossil fuels is ending, and good riddance. Investing in those in the long run in 2000's has bad endings. Case study Finland: In 2002-2003, when the rest of the world is moving away from building new nuclear since the golden age in 1960-1980, we decide it would be an excellent idea to build another (edit: partially) state-owned plant; and that it has to be a novel construction which has been never built before. The thing that was supposed to finish in 2009, finished in 2023, after being postponed by 22 times, and 165% overbudget. At 8.5 billion EUR, it became the most expensive construction project known to human kind. In 2017, during the freaking war in Ukraine (reminder: which did not start in 2022 but 8 years earlier), Finnish government decided, against all expert advice including the board of Uniper itself, that it would be an excellent idea to invest our taxpayer money in Russia's gas pipe to German customers. Think about the business opportunities! So our state-owned energy company Fortum bought the completely zero-worth German gas company, Uniper, for 8 billion EUR. As it was obviously falling apart, we kept pumping more money in just to finally hear in 2022 that Germany is going to nationalize this zero-worth business. I lost the count of exact sum of money we finally subsidized German gas bills with as it become pretty complicated, but I guess it's in the range of 20 billion EUR. Which is a lot for a country with capita of 5 million. I don't blame the politicians who decided on the nuclear in 2002. Wrong choice in hindsight, but renewables did not have any track record back then. It is easy to say now that this 8.5 billion would have been better spent by not doing anything until 2012 and then building a shitload of wind power with even half of that money. But this is in hindsight. However, investing massively in fossil fuels; and specifically on Putin's fossil fuels, during wartime, cannot be explained away. With all of this tragedy of extremely poor political choices, all that was left was getting more in debt, enjoy cocaine, implement better media control, party like no tomorrow, and get massively more in debt. Finally this year, many would agree with the media that our healthcare system has basically collapsed. Most of the attention has been in extremely poor financial policy by said cocaine party government and the massive amount of debt they signed into; but their consequences will be seen in the future; one can't blame them alone; they walked into a broken system which they just were unable to fix. What was almost dismissed was the cost of poor energy choices, namely trusting nuclear and fossil fuel sources. It is sad to see some people seem to think the problem is in renewable energy, when it's really fossil fuels that let us down again. And nuclear's not much better. Everything except renewable energy is failing. Those who said it already 20 years ago were right, no matter how hard it is to admit this. |
| shapirus:
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on April 14, 2023, 02:12:05 pm ---state-owned --- End quote --- = --- Quote from: Siwastaja on April 14, 2023, 02:12:05 pm ---postponed by 22 times, and 165% overbudget. --- End quote --- |
| Neutrion:
--- Quote from: asmi on April 14, 2023, 01:57:15 pm --- --- Quote from: Neutrion on April 14, 2023, 12:04:42 pm ---And that is why the green import taxes are going to be needed, and they are in planning as far as I know. So companies can move, but than soon they can only sell their products to elswhere. --- End quote --- That is yet another ideological delusion. Reality is Europe needs China's products much more than China needs Europe as a market, because China has alternatives, while Europe does not. --- End quote --- Why would it be ideological delusion to require a level playing field? Anyone could buy chinese or american stuff in the future as well, just have to pay the enviromental cost difference. Even now there are pretty high import taxes on some goods which dont't fit into some regulation, this is not new. The Hungarian nuclear story is almost as succesful as that our finnish brothers in the north: In 2013 just at the dawn of emerging renewables we signed a contract with the russians for a new nuclear plant planned to be ready in 2023 because of course renewables are just a green joke and we are much smarter than that. Russian, because only Russia provided a good credit for it because of course private companies not wanted to touch such an investment but in their nightmares. And the state did not have the money. Western or japanese stuff would also be even more expensive. Obviously we got into an EU court case with our austrian neighbours who don't reall want more NPPs in the EU, and other legal EU battles about state sponsorship. When we got through it, than came the realization that the russian plans were not in accordance with EU standards so a redesign has to be done. That was even before the war, without the sanctions. Now at least the costs were fixed and to be beared by the russians, but how that would be possible with all the sanctions etc. is a big question. Maybe they can use some cheaper materials, chinese fake chips or spare costs here and there... Inbetween we also realized that the cooling water in the Danube will not be enough during the summer drought periods, so we might even provide Romania with substantial amount of fish soup in the future. (There is an older NPP there working at the moment too.) Fortunately we only digged out the holes for the fundaments, so not too much money is spent. Inbetween we seamlessly got more solar capacity in 5 years than the NPP would have, and struggling to integrate it. Yes I know it is not a substitution, but still it shows the trends. But also this amount of solar would squeze out the nuclear energy from the net during the daytime, so they are not even compatible with eachother. During this period the germans went to more than 50% renewable on average. |
| Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: Neutrion on April 14, 2023, 03:24:37 pm ---Why would it be ideological delusion to require a level playing field? Anyone could buy chinese or american stuff in the future as well, just have to pay the enviromental cost difference. --- End quote --- Exactly, and Chinese are happy to sell. They know how to be cost-competitive and how to do business. The "boohoo EU bad, China good, we need China, China gets mad and stops supplying us" story is just fear-mongering, nothing else. All China wants is business relationships with basically everybody, and EU is a huge market anyway because people here still have a lot of money at their disposal, compared to developing world (China is more interested about their natural resources). |
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