Germany shutting down last nuclear power plants on April 15th

[nctnico]

This could prove way more practical than hydrogen, but I don't know enough about the proposed hydrogen solution to really say anything about it for sure. It just sounds suspicious, while I know the geothermal storage option does actually work and has good track record, nothing novel in it.

The thing is that hydrogen can be traded as a commodity and/or converted into electricity while heat can not.

That doesn't mean thermal storage isn't on the radar but only for hot water / heating purposes. There are several geothermal plants in operation already and there are some companies that have developed underground seasonal heat storage systems for buildings / district heating but these run into serious permitting issues as it is not clear wether the heat storage system is part of a building or not. So local governments don't know what kind of permit a heat storage system falls under.

Using underground aquifers is more likely to happen (compared to using empty gas fields) and it is being researched as well. BTW, you can't store water in a salt cavern because salt dissolves in water.

[daqq]

That doesn't mean thermal storage isn't on the radar but only for hot water / heating purposes.

There is a concept out there that could do this in theory: https://helioscsp.com/mit-proposes-pv-to-discharge-energy-from-2400c-silicon-thermal-storage/
I'm guessing pretty bad total efficiency, though the output might be utility heat + electricity?

In other news, seems not all German politicians had their brains scooped out when it comes to energy:
https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-energy-nuclear-bavaria-idUKL1N36I0J7

[SiliconWizard]

So with all these great ideas, have we saved the planet yet?

[coppercone2]

I think its a solid plan if it works out in the end, less danger. It seems good land and reputation for safety have become more important for countries then cheap rates. I think a nuclear meltdown is one of the few things that can in 1 day really hurt a country for 100 years to come. You just can't fix that.

I expect the litigation resulting from a nuclear incident in the EU would dwarf savings very quickly. Don't want to pay even more reparations for some cloud of dust you sent to Finland or something lol

[Kleinstein]

That doesn't mean thermal storage isn't on the radar but only for hot water / heating purposes.

There is a concept out there that could do this in theory: https://helioscsp.com/mit-proposes-pv-to-discharge-energy-from-2400c-silicon-thermal-storage/
I'm guessing pretty bad total efficiency, though the output might be utility heat + electricity?

In other news, seems not all German politicians had their brains scooped out when it comes to energy:
https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-energy-nuclear-bavaria-idUKL1N36I0J7

In theory thermal storage at very high temperature could work, but it would be low effiviency when converting back to electricty. At the very high temperatures the stress to the matrials can also be quite substantial. It would also only work on a relatively large scale to keep the heat loss reasonable.

For the idea to restart the residual German NPPs: this makes relatively little sense and also the power companies don't think it is practical, as a restart would take 1-2 years at least.
The plants would need a major revision and there are not even regulations and thus no plans or preparations for that.
The idea of a restart is more like a pre-election idea of someone who is not in charge nor running for the relevant position.  So this is just for publicity.

[Siwastaja]

So with all these great ideas, have we saved the planet yet?

Actually, the real world is much further in "saving the planet" than you understand (you would understand if you looked at energy production graphs and CO2 calculations, but I can see your agenda is preventing you). Many of these "great ideas", mainly solar and wind energy, but also including thermal storage, load management and heat pumping I keep mentioning, are in everyday use and together, significantly reducing CO2 emissions already. It is already showing as a clear difference to the imaginary case in which we would have continued burning fossil fuels for our energy needs. This gap widens all the time. It is large enough now to say it was not a fallacy, which it indeed seemed to many, me included, a decade ago.

It is more difficult to say how the political stability would be if we were even more dependent on fossil fuels than we currently are. We are still seeing a classic fossil fuel war in Europe (i.e., conquer fossil fuel resources violently so that you sell them to others, what USA has always been doing with oil, and Russia does with natural gas), but we are also evidencing coping through fossil fuel crisis with renewable energy, something that would have been a ludicrous, futuristic idea during the previous fossil crisis (oil crisis in 1970's/1980's). In 1970's, the world tried to cope through fossil fuel crisis with load management and nuclear, and currently we are being more successful (to the point of Germany going overboard demonstrating that success, with the outcome some interpret as failure). After 1970's, the fossil fuel use just skyrocketed again with no real solution, as nuclear was never able to really scale up (and cheap fossils stopped the improvements in storage and load balancing).

In other words, your fun-making comments would have flied better in 2011. Now it tells more about you and your inability to accept new data and viewpoints, than about the world around us.

[madires]

My opinion on shutting down all nuclear power plants: it's total nonsense! Shutting down an old plant for safety reasons is fine, but it should be replaced with a new and hopefully better one. With the shift to electric cars and heat pumps for heating we'll need about three times the electric power we're generating at the moment. I don't see how we could achieve this by just adding more PV and wind generators. And we also need more transmissions lines. As a German saying goes, electric power comes out of the wall socket. But nobody asks how it gets into the socket.

[Neutrion]

AFAIK hydrogen storage in salt caverns is being build to store 36000 metric tonnes of hydrogen (as a start). The empty gas fields can potentially hold many times that much. So there isn't a practical limit in terms of storage capacity that is and/or can be made available in the NL.

The calculation has many factors. Nuclear, solar and wind are more or less on par where it comes to price per kWh to generate in the NL; around 4 euro cents per kWh. Transport costs through the grid are about the same or higher. This already shows that just looking at generation costs is going to skew any comparison if you don't take transport costs into account. Roundtrip efficiency for hydrogen is around 50% but is likely to improve significantly over time. But even at 50% efficieny, you are only looking at a price increase ballpark 33% at the consumer end because the transport costs are still the same (excluding taxes which make the relative cost for storage even smaller). Alternatively the hydrogen can also be used for an industrial process or vehicle that needs hydrogen anyway. On top of that, the NL intends to import and distribute hydrogen through the several sea ports it has which have direct pipeline connections deep into Europe.

And again, the nuclear power plants aren't intended to just produce hydrogen. Hydrogen production is supposed to happen when there is excess energy or when the hydrogen supply runs low. The nuclear power plants will primarily be feeding the grid.

But this is the point, the 4 cents/kWh is only valid for old nuclear plants. You can not base the calculation on that. (And we of course COMPLETELY exclude the waist storage price for tens of thousends years)The prices in Olkiluoto if you count with 8,5 billion euro cost and 50 years of working would be around three times of the 4 cents.. I also read some 11billion Euro may Siwastaya can check that. Hinkley point C is not ready yet but already way over the planned costs.
So if this is how the calculation was made than it can not be valid. And basically all the extra costs only to justify some extreme rare Dunkelflaute events, which could be countered by just keeping the gas plants in readiness and not building anything.

Also no other information is aviable on the H2 storage? Costs, power etc.? I tried to find some, but found nothing so far in english or german sites.

I really would like to see how the argumentation went, as with the floating wind turbines countries like Holland will have enormous wind power potential in the near future.

[BravoV]

Does the Green party, its officials and supporters, sort of celebrate this , at least symbolically ? Maybe singing kumbaya ?

Its quite an achievement, have to admit that. 

/sarc

[tom66]

So with all these great ideas, have we saved the planet yet?

Actually, the real world is much further in "saving the planet" than you understand [...]

I am always surprised by how much opposition there is in engineering circles to a change to the status quo, when it is clear there are significant advantages to moving away from it.

Regardless of anyone's particular acceptance of anthropogenic climate change, it is clear that it is unsustainable to continue to extract and use fossil fuel energy to power our vehicles, electricity grid and heating.  Countries which supply this resource are often politically unstable compared to European norms, and shortages (often politically or economically motivated - see OPEC, and Russia) can lead to the price increasing considerably, creating the risk of fuel poverty and economic harm. 

There are health impacts and non-CO2 environmental impacts of fossil fuel usage too.  For instance oil spills, which can be economically devastating to areas, and there are concerns over fracking.  Using fossil-fuel powered cars in cities has done significant damage to public health too.

A renewable supergrid with storage leads to a possible future where energy is so cheap we are incentivised to use it whenever possible.  It means we need to adapt how we use energy, but incentives will reward those who are most able to do so and significant opportunities will arise from this.  At the same time inefficient industry that relies on continuously cheap power, at the expense of everyone else, will need to adapt or die.  But that's life.

Yes, there will likely still be fossil fuel usage (or synfuel) in 2050, because some applications are challenging for batteries or hydrogen. So we will need to be pulling CO2 out of the air for those applications, as well as to undo the CO2 emitted so far. 

[Siwastaja]

heat pumps for heating we'll need about three times the electric power we're generating at the moment

This is an excellent point. I once calculated it, and the bog standard air source heat pump is better bang-for-buck harvester of renewable energy than a home PV system. What's even better, it harvests renewable energy during calm wind and darkness.

It basically acts as a multiplier: you feed it with X amount of electrical energy of any origin, and it produces 2..3*X amount of renewable energy originating from solar, seasonally stored by our atmosphere and the Earth itself. Therefore, it's also a partial solution to the storage problem.

While running a heatpump from a renewable energy source means harvesting even more renewable energy (obviously great!), running it from nuclear or even coal source still means harvesting renewable energy - this is not obvious to everyone.

Therefore, keeping the nukes running for a while more while allowing the gas price to skyrocket due to the political difficulties, would have allowed electricity price to go down and gas price up, driving people to finally install those heatpumps, which should have happened ages ago; and has happened in Asia no problem, and even in Nordic countries where they are worse, no problem. But Central Europe - nope.

(Exact same logic is true for EVs.)

[Siwastaja]

Yes, there will likely still be fossil fuel usage (or synfuel) in 2050, because some applications are challenging for batteries or hydrogen. So we will need to be pulling CO2 out of the air for those applications, as well as to undo the CO2 emitted so far.

Or just keep using fossils the way* we do now, and have done for the last century.  I don't see it as a big problem as climate negatives scale linearly down and political problems probably more than linearly. The point here is that those niches are truly niches.

*) referring to everything else except quantity

And we need oil and natural gas anyway for chemical processes, manufacturing plastic etc. And some natural gas comes "for free" when drilling oil. As these processes are in place, better keep using them for niche "energy purposes" as well.

But I'm a closet optimist. I really have quite positive outlook of how these energy things are going. We don't really need any silver bullets, and also won't need to change everything. The massive energy reform is now happening and can't be prevented, and fossil fuels will have a supportive small role in the energy systems of the future.

For example, while I'm all for playing with hydrogen and believe we will be seeing probably even significant H2 solutions in the future, it's not the necessary element we need. What's important, giving too much weight for H2 will be a problem, because while we can do without H2, we can't do anything with H2 alone, or with primary bias in H2 solutions.

[Siwastaja]

some extreme rare Dunkelflaute events, which could be countered by just keeping the gas plants in readiness and not building anything.

These near-zero-wind-near-zero-PV "Dunkelflaute" events are by the way of similar rarity (at least in the same order of magnitude) compared to unplanned SCRAM events (following small checkups and fixes) of nuclear reactors - they happen not every year at all, but sometimes at the worst possible moment during the coldest week of the year. This is what makes large reactors like OL3 problematic, too. You lose a lot at once.

This is why nuclear has always been dimensioned with backup fossil fuel production and no one is saying this is any sort of problem. Only with wind power, the critics found this idea of making the need for such backup a big deal. This is what one gets when driven by agenda instead of mental honesty.

[Neutrion]

Therefore, keeping the nukes running for a while more while allowing the gas price to skyrocket due to the political difficulties, would have allowed electricity price to go down and gas price up, driving people to finally install those heatpumps, which should have happened ages ago; and has happened in Asia no problem, and even in Nordic countries where they are worse, no problem. But Central Europe - nope.

(Exact same logic is true for EVs.)

In central Europe you get up to 4-5X efficiency because of the mild winters. You have to calculate with that! By the way in Sweden heat pumps are already broadly aviable, probably they are in clear majority already. But they are mostly geo-sourced.
And now the new german legislation expect every new heating systems to be at least 65% renewable based from next year on. That would also mean mostly heat pumps.
Sometimes I wonder whether Putin is a top secret Greenpeace agent meant to cut short the fossil fuels based buisness modell of Russia, which could do a lot of harm if unchanged.

[Siwastaja]

In central Europe you get up to 4-5X efficiency because of the mild winters.

Note that my notation of "1X input power = 3X renewable harvesting" is equal to COP of 4. That would be typical realistic for central Europe mild weather.

I always want to be a little bit conservative when promising savings, but COP exceeding 4 is indeed possible if the conditions are just right and the devices used in the correct way.

[tom66]

Sometimes I wonder whether Putin is a top secret Greenpeace agent meant to cut short the fossil fuels based buisness modell of Russia, which could do a lot of harm if unchanged.

Putin is a NATO sleeper agent, his goal is to convince all of Europe to join NATO.   

[Siwastaja]

BTW, you can sometimes hear this argument: "Olkiluoto 3 got so badly overbudget and overschedule because Finnish authorities were so demanding with safety or outright sabotaging the project". This is an obvious lie and the proof is easy to find; the Flamanville 3 NPP, which had the benefits of being in the homeland of Areva, and starting two years later after using Olkiluoto 3 as a proof-of-concept, is even more overbudget and still not finished:

A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor.[1] In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial introduction date to the end of 2022.[2][3] In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023,[4][5] and again in December 2022, delaying fuel loading to early 2024

At estimated cost of 19.1 billion, it will leave Olkiluoto 3 in shadows and create some of the most expensive electricity known to human kind.

[Neutrion]

In central Europe you get up to 4-5X efficiency because of the mild winters.

Note that my notation of "1X input power = 3X renewable harvesting" is equal to COP of 4. That would be typical realistic for central Europe mild weather.

I always want to be a little bit conservative when promising savings, but COP exceeding 4 is indeed possible if the conditions are just right and the devices used in the correct way.

Oh, I see, I read 2,3 first, which would be already at around minus 10 degree Celsius.

[SiliconWizard]

My opinion on shutting down all nuclear power plants: it's total nonsense! Shutting down an old plant for safety reasons is fine, but it should be replaced with a new and hopefully better one. With the shift to electric cars and heat pumps for heating we'll need about three times the electric power we're generating at the moment. I don't see how we could achieve this by just adding more PV and wind generators.

I don't either, I've said that multiple times and mostly get shrugs.

We'll sure have to shrug a whole lot to get all this electricity generated.

[nctnico]

For the idea to restart the residual German NPPs: this makes relatively little sense and also the power companies don't think it is practical, as a restart would take 1-2 years at least.
The plants would need a major revision and there are not even regulations and thus no plans or preparations for that.
The idea of a restart is more like a pre-election idea of someone who is not in charge nor running for the relevant position.  So this is just for publicity.

Well, restarting an existing plant is quicker than building a new one. The main problem I see is to get the people together with the right knowledge.

[nctnico]

AFAIK hydrogen storage in salt caverns is being build to store 36000 metric tonnes of hydrogen (as a start). The empty gas fields can potentially hold many times that much. So there isn't a practical limit in terms of storage capacity that is and/or can be made available in the NL.

The calculation has many factors. Nuclear, solar and wind are more or less on par where it comes to price per kWh to generate in the NL; around 4 euro cents per kWh. Transport costs through the grid are about the same or higher. This already shows that just looking at generation costs is going to skew any comparison if you don't take transport costs into account. Roundtrip efficiency for hydrogen is around 50% but is likely to improve significantly over time. But even at 50% efficieny, you are only looking at a price increase ballpark 33% at the consumer end because the transport costs are still the same (excluding taxes which make the relative cost for storage even smaller). Alternatively the hydrogen can also be used for an industrial process or vehicle that needs hydrogen anyway. On top of that, the NL intends to import and distribute hydrogen through the several sea ports it has which have direct pipeline connections deep into Europe.

And again, the nuclear power plants aren't intended to just produce hydrogen. Hydrogen production is supposed to happen when there is excess energy or when the hydrogen supply runs low. The nuclear power plants will primarily be feeding the grid.

But this is the point, the 4 cents/kWh is only valid for old nuclear plants. You can not base the calculation on that. (And we of course COMPLETELY exclude the waist storage price for tens of thousends years)The prices in Olkiluoto if you count with 8,5 billion euro cost and 50 years of working would be around three times of the 4 cents.. I also read some 11billion Euro may Siwastaya can check that. Hinkley point C is not ready yet but already way over the planned costs.

There are litterally hundreds of nuclear power plants on the world and the majority is build within planning and budget. If you look closer at the power plants you mentioned, you'll see that incompetent governments where duped into greenlighting projects that where cleverly setup to leach as much money from those governments as possible. Maybe even on purpose by people within those governments to setup the projects for failure. The exception doesn't make the rule though.

As I wrote before: the time the waste is extremely radioactive, is relatively short. Order of magnitude 100 to 200 years. Not the millenia environmentalists tend to claim; their claims are based on wanting to wait until the radiation is zero but that isn't part of their FUD story. And neither is the fact that nuclear waste consists of toxic metals which remain toxic until the end of the the earth's existence.

Where it comes to H2 storage: Hystock mentions a 98% roundtrip efficiency for underground storage. So for every euro worth of hydrogen you pump in, you get 0.98 euro worth of hydrogen out.

[Someone]

AFAIK hydrogen storage in salt caverns is being build to store 36000 metric tonnes of hydrogen (as a start). The empty gas fields can potentially hold many times that much. So there isn't a practical limit in terms of storage capacity that is and/or can be made available in the NL.

The calculation has many factors. Nuclear, solar and wind are more or less on par where it comes to price per kWh to generate in the NL; around 4 euro cents per kWh. Transport costs through the grid are about the same or higher. This already shows that just looking at generation costs is going to skew any comparison if you don't take transport costs into account. Roundtrip efficiency for hydrogen is around 50% but is likely to improve significantly over time. But even at 50% efficieny, you are only looking at a price increase ballpark 33% at the consumer end because the transport costs are still the same (excluding taxes which make the relative cost for storage even smaller). Alternatively the hydrogen can also be used for an industrial process or vehicle that needs hydrogen anyway. On top of that, the NL intends to import and distribute hydrogen through the several sea ports it has which have direct pipeline connections deep into Europe.

And again, the nuclear power plants aren't intended to just produce hydrogen. Hydrogen production is supposed to happen when there is excess energy or when the hydrogen supply runs low. The nuclear power plants will primarily be feeding the grid.

But this is the point, the 4 cents/kWh is only valid for old nuclear plants. You can not base the calculation on that. (And we of course COMPLETELY exclude the waist storage price for tens of thousends years)The prices in Olkiluoto if you count with 8,5 billion euro cost and 50 years of working would be around three times of the 4 cents.. I also read some 11billion Euro may Siwastaya can check that. Hinkley point C is not ready yet but already way over the planned costs.

There are litterally hundreds of nuclear power plants on the world and the majority is build within planning and budget.

All the low "priced" nuclear is from life extension, by carving out the capital expenses and saying they are already paid for (and to be paid in future). Forgetting that those projects had extremely expensive energy costs while operating:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/levelised-cost-of-electricity-calculator
So by one economic assessment it does make sense to continue extending operating licenses and run those capital intensive installations into the ground, but it's a sleight of hand to say that the energy is cheap. Only the marginal cost of ongoing operation is cheap.
Back on real figures over plant lifetimes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:3-Learning-curves-for-electricity-prices.png
Nuclear generated electricity is expensive, and not getting cheaper despite what the industry has been promising.  New build is uneconomic if you only want the electricity, life extension is about the same cost as well sited renewables (but with radically different political outcomes).

[Siwastaja]

There are litterally hundreds of nuclear power plants on the world and the majority is build within planning and budge

There are only a handful built after 2000, though. The few successful are in China. Hundreds of financial success stories are from 1960's to 1980's. The art seems to be partially lost. You can't ignore the current track record and just say "hey, all those who failed were just bad implementations, there's nothing wrong with the principle." If this is true, why so many fail? Something has truly changed in how nuclear power is implemented since 1980's. Especially if you want to see more nuclear, this can't be ignored, because poor track record is preventing investments as we speak.

[Neutrion]

There are litterally hundreds of nuclear power plants on the world and the majority is build within planning and budge

There are only a handful built after 2000, though. The few successful are in China. Hundreds of financial success stories are from 1960's to 1980's. The art seems to be partially lost. You can't ignore the current track record and just say "hey, all those who failed were just bad implementations, there's nothing wrong with the principle." If this is true, why so many fail? Something has truly changed in how nuclear power is implemented since 1980's. Especially if you want to see more nuclear, this can't be ignored, because poor track record is preventing investments as we speak.

It is not the "art" is lost, it is just made sure it will be made safer than those old plants. And that costs money in the whole complexity of the process.

Talking about incompetent governments:If Finnland, UK and France are all incompetent well, than we can agree that most of the governments are incompetent so they shoul not touch such projects.
And in China we can not see the true costs, so I wouldn't bet on those being successful.

And neither is the fact that nuclear waste consists of toxic metals which remain toxic until the end of the the earth's existence.

Where it comes to H2 storage: Hystock mentions a 98% roundtrip efficiency for underground storage. So for every euro worth of hydrogen you pump in, you get 0.98 euro worth of hydrogen out.

Heavy metals are toxic, even lead. And they stay toxic even without radiation.

With H2 I meant the full process of production, and storage, but even at around 50% full efficiency of power  - gas - power, it will be much cheaper than a new nuclear plant.

Germany just signd some agreement with Norway and Denmark to buy green H2 so we might have to take a look at those plants. (In planning I suppose?)

[nctnico]

But that still makes Germany reliant on importing energy. There is a large geopolitical aspect to having your own energy supply.