Germany is still a net exporter of electricity, even with eight nuclear plants offline.

Additional storage capacity will be added over the next years, probably as pumped storage in Norway.

Nice that  someone is willing to state that the power has to come from somewhere, and that all sources of power have costs.

The costs of nuke and coal don’t seem different in magnitude to me, just in type.

I will buy this book by MKB, if I can download it from Amazon onto my Nook.

The nuke lobby clearly spends lots of money trying to push its propaganda all over the internet. It fools some people, but I think  a growing number see the lies about the “golden bullet” new technology which distracts us from what they are selling *now*.

Fortunately, I think the nuke lobby are hitting a brick wall: economics. No amount of propaganda can change the reality that nukes are not economical. Worth a read:

* Nuclear Power: Climate Fix or Folly? “After more than half a century of devoted effort and a half-trillion dollars of public subsidies, nuclear power still can’t make its way in the market.” http://www.rmi.org/cms/Download.aspx?id=1138&file=E09-01_NuclPwrClimFixFolly1i09.pdf

* Statistics refuted nuclear lobby. Despite the nuclear phase-out Germany remains an exporter of electricity. And at current market prices are not higher than before the disaster in Fukushima. http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftaz.de%2FDeutschland-exportiert-weiterhin-Strom-%2F!84270%2F&act=url

Nukes hinder climate change mitigation by stealing massive sums of money and resources from renewables which can be deployed quickly and cheaply, unlike nukes. Germany have worked this out and a growing number of countries are joining them.

Nuclear is a failed 20th century technology. This is the 21st century and renewable energy is the only viable solution for the future.

P.S. I note this article is the only thing you have commented on with that username. Another nuke shill turns up to try and manage the message….

I do support massive investment in renewables. And Nukes. Otherwise we’ll have renewables and fossil fuels with the attendant pollution and climate change. 

And yes, France is investing in renewables, and they export power.
 
PS:  Your assumptions about nationality are quite funny – I spend a lot more time in asia, south america and europe than in usa. 

In comparison, the French are *forced* to buy electricity from Germany, Spain, the UK, etc. because their inflexible nukes cannot meet demand when it is too hot or too cold. This partly explains why the French are now making massive investment in renewables.

Looks like you’re getting your world view from Fox ‘News’. Don’t.

It’s only slightly more advanced than Hero’s Engine, and far less sophisticated than the 2000-year-old Antikythera Mechanism.

Also like all other fuel cells, it does not create energy magically – it converts a fuel (typically hydrogen derived from natural gas or propane) into electricity.  Some fuel cells have higher efficiency than a bog-standard natural gas fired power plant, but in practice this is unlikely to be realized since the fuel cell will require larger investments in construction, fuel processing and maintenance.

Hydrogen fuel cells that are reversible – such as the typical PEM type – are equilvalent to batteries.  Remember, pure hydrogen does not occur in nature, so you have to make it.  The reason George W. Bush loved the “hydrogen economy” idea so much is because that idea is based entirely on preservation of existing economic power structures – the hydrogen will be supplied by Texas Oil Barons and frackers, who will deliver it in diesel trucks.

1. It’s expensive. Every pro-nuclear person acknowledges this, but then they seem to forget the problem instantly by the next sentence. So let’s repeat that one more time. IT’EXPENSIVE. A recent study showed that per reactor costs have risen in the US from $3 billion in 20o2 to $10 billion in 2010. The argument against nuclear is that it comes a great financial cost, is seen as a risky financial endeavor by investors, and it  takes a quite awhile to come online and start seeing returns (both power and money-wise.) I am the first to say that cost should be no issue when trying to save the planet’s climate system, but if being expensive isn’t a problem WHY EVEN SPEND THAT MONEY ON NUCLEAR? One of the big arguments against solar/wind/experimental is that they are “not cost competitive” or “they are too expensive to compete in the market.” Nuclear is exactly the same, if not the most expensive of the alt-power generators, so why does that issue not hold true for nuclear? It should be a question not of baseload power (which some argue is not relevant for alt-power at this time) to how much of it can we get and how soon?

2. If Nuclear were to play a major role replacing coal in worldwide power generation, that would mean a lot of people would have nuclear. Sounds a bit redundant, but again you have to think a little about that. The problem here is two-fold: the more you open the door to nuclear, the more the chances of sub-standard operations and accidents increase, and secondly nuclear power generation capability goes hand in hand with nuclear weapons capability. First I think it could be argued that the increased suspicion of nuclear has lead to fairly intensive oversight of operations around the world. Even with this oversight, incidents occur fairly regularly (from mere anomalies to major incidents.) Increasing the nuclear portion of the portfolio means increasing the cost of oversight by regulators but also likely less oversight in general as the number of plants increases, especially in developing nations where legal frameworks hold less sway….and more incidents from shoddy operations. Which leads to the second problem; proliferation. With more plants online around the world, more countries gain the ability to produce nuclear weapons, which we have deemed unacceptable. Iran comes to mind straight off the front page of the news today. Iran is seeking to generate baseload electric power from nuclear, but the U.S. will not allow them to pursue their legal right to do so because the same technology is used for developing nuclear weapons. While developing nations like China and India already have high demand and nuclear weapons and are already a concern for both state and terror uses of nuclear devices, increasing the supply of weaponizable nuclear material will never be allowed in other nations.

Just some food for thought before you watch a pro-nuke documentary (apparently.) 

If you’re concerned about climate change (and which sane, informed person could not be?) then it’s another reason to oppose nuclear power.

* Union of Concerned Scientists Position on Nuclear Power and Global Warming. “Prudence dictates that we develop as many options to reduce global warming emissions as possible, and begin by deploying those that achieve the largest reductions most quickly and with the lowest costs and risk. Nuclear power today does not meet these criteria.” http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/ucs-position-on-nuclear-power.html

Only renewable energy can scale fast enough to mitigate climate change.

Repeal the Price-Anderson Act. It may have been necessary back in 1957. (Nukes were more dangerous back then.) I don’t think it’s needed now.

I don’t know why I signed up to post that, but hey.  Basically, organized crime has its fingers in just about everything here.

So to paint the Germany decision to not extend running time beyond 2020 (almost six year past the original shutdown date which was only “abandoned” six months earlier) is just outright dishonest.

Why? Nuclear power has been with us for more than 50 years. It was supposed to provide us with an abundance in electricity with no little side effect. We had several bad accidents happen and even 50 years in we have not figured out what to do with the waste.

Every time this gets pointed out someone from the Nuclear lobby springs up and tells us that the “golden bullet” is just around the corner, we just need to have faith in them and all will be fine. Oh, and if we dare to switch the nukes off we will all freeze to death or sweat to death.

The reality in countries like Germany is not supporting those fantasies. The entire nuclear lobby is full of FUD because they full well know that they have a product that very few people want, so they try to scare people into compliance.

Germany will not build more coal powered plants because there is no appetite for it and the lights won’t go out either just because they delay the shutoff of the nuclear reactors by six years.

I really wish the Anglsophere would pull their collective heads out of their collective a$$e$ and REALLY take a look at the realities in Germany instead of parroting the lines the nuclear lobby so successfully places all over the place.

The real problem for Germany is that since they privatized the Power infrastructure back in the 1990s there was very little done to expand it. So now they are running into problems distributing the power efficiently.

But hey, if it isn’t happening in America, it’s not happening anywhere else either. Unless it’s something bad, in this case the inverse applies.

Much more so as, without anybody in the Anglosphere ever noticing, Germany had already planned to phase out nuclear power by 2015. Only after heavy lobbying by the industry did the conservative Government reverse course in the fall of 2010 only to then do another 180 after Fukushima and gifting the industry another six more years of running time in the exchange for six months of “business as usual”.

How, even nine months after the fact, the majority of the English speaking world has not clued in on this is a mystery to me. The only explanation I can come up with is that there is a huge pile of “journalists” and bloggers out there who are willfully ignorant on what the situation in Germany has been over the last 40 years with regards to nuclear power.

By the description of the Frontline piece they also seem to have missed this not so small detail.

Once again you’re repeating the lies of the nuclear industry. Recently scientists found over 9,000 Becquerels per kg of  soil in Osaka Bay, 600 km from the Fukushima plant. Dead whales are floating around in Tokyo harbor. 20% of Japanese fish tested in November, from a sample of 1100 catches, were over their new limit for contamination. Areas well beyond the Fukushima exclusion zone are higher than the mandatory evac areas around Chernobyl- some residents beyond the exclusion zone are losing their hair, teeth and fingernails. Dead seals with symptoms mimicking radiation poisoning in humans are washing up in Canada, Alaska and Russia with a disease that can not be attributed to any virus or bacteria. Even in the Bay Area, recent milk samples are again over the EPA’s limits for cesium after having been below that limit for 6 months. Yet, nuke pukes and their useful stooges continue to deny the seriousness of this accident while promoting an industry that exists only due to fuel cycle subsidies provided so nuclear capable nations can continue to service their weapons arsenals.