Germany wants to be climate neutral by 2045. But a panel of government climate advisers says it’s already in danger of missing a key target to cut planet-heating emissions by the end of the decade.
Germany’s climate advisory body has called for new policy measures to slash greenhouse gas emissions, warning that the country looks set to miss its 2030 climate change targets.
In a report published on Monday, the Council of Experts on Climate Change said Germany was unlikely to reach its goal of cutting 65% of emissions by the end of the decade compared to 1990 levels.
The panel, which is appointed by the government and has independent authority to assess the country’s climate performance, said sectors such as transport and construction in particular were struggling to decarbonize.
The findings contradict statements from German Climate Protection Minister and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who said in March that projections from the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) showed emissions were falling and Germany would meet its goal.
Building nuclear takes on average something like 15 years, so I don’t see how this is going to help. Germany’s coal will be shut off by 2035 anyways.
Besides, Germany already has a huge problem because no one can figure out where to put the nuclear waste they already have (one of the supposed “secure storages” is now leaking water and will likely poison the groundwater in a huge area, and will need to be reopened and cleared, costing untold billions).
At this point, even the major energy companies say it’s not realistic nor beneficial to change course to reenter nuclear.
Building EPRs, yes. Not Gen II reactors, which could be built and running only 4-5 years after the beginning of the construction.
Only to be replaced by gas, which is still far from being carbon free.
No one can agree on where to put nuclear waste. This is not some unsolvable problem, it’s just anti-nuclear that opposes every solution given by scientists.
Pretty much every nuclear reactor that’s recently been built has been crazily over budget and significantly late. It seems it is usually a decade later than planned.
Anyway, the beginning of construction is a highly misleading timeframe. There’s a long process before construction even starts. Not unique to nuclear reactors.
I dislike nuclear reactor discussions because of similar arguments. E.g. “new technology” fixes some problem, while ignoring the drawbacks. Or when it is pointed out that the approval process can take ages there’s often the “just force it through”. For years I’ve seen people advocate for SMRs. Which turn out to be to have loads of drawbacks, yet again.
If someone says that it’ll take 15 years then the person didn’t solely mean the actual construction. They mean from wanting it to having it working.
If a city decides on a new area for homes the actual construction of those homes is just a tiny part of the whole process. If you buy such a new home there can be a huge difference to when you signed for it and when construction starts. The contract is about start until end of construction, the mortgage around it is not, at least in Netherlands.
If you look at the EPRs, well, we can thank the Germans who co-developed the project, and pushed for excessive requirements making the design complex, such as the double containment and the system to make maintenance possible without shutting down the reactor. Requirements that the French didn’t need or want, but which were accepted as a concession to keep the Germans in the project, before they slammed the door anyway.
Even Okiluoto and Hinkley Point can be regarded as serial entries, so different are they from Flamanville, and so much work had to be done to simplify them.
Let’s scrap the EPR design, go back to Gen IIs for now, since we know they’re reliable, safe, cheap and easy to build, and move straight on to Gen IV when it’s ready.
You still have nuclear power plants, you don’t even have to start from scratch. But yes, NIMBYS are a significant problem, but renewables are already facing this problem too, and it’s going to intensify greatly with the amount of space it takes to build wind turbines, solar panels, and the colossal amount of storage it takes to make them viable without fossil, hydro or nuclear power.
I’m talking about Gen II reactors like the 56 that make up France’s nuclear power fleet, which are tried and tested, safe, inexpensive, efficient, and have enabled France to decarbonize almost all its electricity in two decades. I’m not into technosolutionism, I’m into empiricism.
Okay, so the 4 Blayais reactors, totalling 3.64GWe (equivalent to almost 11GW of wind power, but without the need for storage or redundancy) were connected to the grid 6.5 to 8.5 years after the first public survey, made before the project was started.
I’m not claiming that every reactor project will be built so quickly, but we have to stop pretending that nuclear power is inherently slow to build. It’s the lack of political will that makes nuclear power slow to build, and it’s not an unsolvable problem.
interesting idea, though Chernobyl and Fukushima were both gen2s 💀
I guess it could be made more safe cheaply with modern electronics and software (seeing IoT/“AI”/boeing software engineers in a nuclear facility would freak me the fuck out though)
Both Chernobyl and Fukushima could’ve been avoided/reduced in effect with good failsafe software imo.
I kinda doubt we’d be able to make gen2s cheaper than gen3s (at least in small capacities) though, because their production lines and designs would’ve been long shut down/forgotten
The reactor that exploded at Chernobyl was an RBMK model, not a PWR. This implies major design differences from French PWRs, including:
Two things to note: the USSR knew about these defects years before the Chernobyl disaster, but the scientists who raised the alarm were neutralized. The other is that the explosion and fire in the reactor were caused by the failure of inexperienced technicians to follow procedures, under pressure from senior management, because the plant was to be visited by a high-ranking official the following day, and therefore the tests they were running at the moment had to be completed at all costs.
Chernobyl exploded because of the USSR’s cult of secrecy and appearance, causing incompetence and corruption.
For Fukushima, it should be noted that Fukushima Daini, although closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, but with better safety standards, was only slightly damaged and even served as a refuge for tsunami survivors.
For Daichii, same thing as Chernobyl, we have a very long list of failures and even falsifications by TEPCO dating from 2002, and even more in 2007, with alarms sounded on all sides by seismologists and scientists of all sides, and the government did not react.
We must understand that these are not disasters that happened out of nowhere, that we could never have predicted, and even less that we could never have avoided. It was a very long succession of bad choices by the incompetent and corrupt.
But despite all this, the Fukushima nuclear disaster caused no deaths, and Chernobyl only killed a few thousand people at most. Nuclear power, in its entire history, has killed only a fraction of what coal kills each year.
It has already been done, and without AI/IOT or anything of that kind. For the French REPs, this resulted in the implementation of additional testing protocols (I know that they tested accelerated aging over 10-20-30 years of parts like cables, for example), addition of generators, renovation and improvement of industrial parts, etc.
No. Fukushima Daichi’s walls were just not meant to handle more than a 5 meters wave. It took a 14 meters high wave right in the face.
The industrial fabric has been crumbling for a long time, that’s for sure, but at least the designs are much simpler, and we have thousands of engineers working on gen IIs and can contribute their expertise. We don’t have any of that on the gen IIIs.
I agree with your points anyway but I still believe better electronics/software would’ve at least reduced the extent of the Fukushima disaster, because iirc one of the big problems was the inability to operate even low power electronics because of the backup power failure.
I’d think that the giant environmental consequences of the disaster could’ve been mitigated if things like pressure sensors from the reactors were visible by operators after the power loss and depressurization vents and the emergency core cooling system could’ve been activated.
imo the software shouldn’t have let the backup batteries to die running the cooling pumps when it would’ve been very important for reducing the overall extent of the damage
Yeah, that thing with the SMRs/ Gen II reactors turns out to be not so much a thing: https://ieefa.org/articles/small-modular-reactors-are-still-too-expensive-too-slow-and-too-risky
Gen II reactors are the reactors design which has been built between the 70’s up to 2000, it has nothing to do with SMRs.
My point was that there’s no reason to insist on a ridiculously complex reactor design such as the EPR (which is a Gen III reactor), and that we can simply go back to the proven designs of the second generation for two or three decades, until we finish developing the fourth generation, which has real arguments.