this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
77 points (93.3% liked)
Europe
1509 readers
340 users here now
News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)
Rules (2024-08-30)
- This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don't overly distort the content.
- No links to misinformation or commercial advertising. When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
- Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don't post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don't troll nor incite hatred. Don't look for novel argumentation strategies at Wikipedia's List of fallacies.
- No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism.
- Be the signal, not the noise: Strive to post insightful comments. Add "/s" when you're being sarcastic (and don't use it to break rule no. 3).
- If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
- Light-hearted content, memes, and posts about your European everyday belong in !yurop@lemm.ee. (They're cool, you should subscribe there too!)
- Don't evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
- No posts linking to speculative reporting about ongoing events with unclear backgrounds. Please wait at least 12 hours. (E.g., do not post breathless reporting on an ongoing terror attack.)
(This list may get expanded when necessary.)
We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.
If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.
If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the mods: @federalreverse@feddit.org, @poVoq@slrpnk.net, or @anzo@programming.dev.
founded 4 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This comment is a preventative measure:
No, Germany didn't replace nuclear with coal. They replaced it with renewables.
Coal power production is now much lower than before they shut off their nuclear power plants, and shutting off nuclear was an important incentive to build more renewables.
That's... One way of looking at it. Another way to look at it is: "the closing of nuclear power plants has allowed gas and oil plants to stay in operation".
But it could have been even lower.
No it couldn't because nuclear power plants are much too inflexible in their power output to fit into a grid designed for renewables. Wind power often had to be shut down when its output was too high for the grid cause you couldn't shut down the nuclear power plants.
This is a myth, most of the nuclear reactors can be throttled down, it is not instant but they can go as low as 20% in around 30 min.
The thing is it is much easier to stop a wind turbine than to throttle a nuclear reactor, and unlike fossil fuel power turbines most of the cost of the nuclear reactor is fixed cost, whether the reactor is running or not it still costs the same.
Afaik, German reactors were designed to be throttled to 60% capacity, within around a week. And doing that too often wasn't safe either. And there was no economic incentive to do so because a reactor throttled is not a reactor earning—you have to do a bunch of extra work to throttle the reactor and you're only conserving negligible amounts of fuel.
I am not deep enough in the topic to know whether that's a limitation due to all the German reactors being particularly outdated. But "30 min" and "20%" sounds more like an emergency protocol to me rather than any kind of standard procedure.
The PWRs most prevalent in Germany did control their power output by modulating the boron content of their primary loop coolant in regular (non emergency) operation. This is a slow process, but it was done deliberately, because using control rods for this purpose would lead to inefficient fuel use due to uneven fuel burn.