Scandal over Nuclear Phase-Out in Germany: What We Know
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A recent investigation has revealed that the final steps in phasing out nuclear power in Germany were partly based on false information. And doesn’t look like it was a mistake, but a deliberate rewriting of what was originally accurate information. The ministry denies everything. A quick summary of what we know.
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Phasing out Nuclear was a terrible choice and ironically disastrous for the environment.
And the German delegates laughed at Trump when he warned Germany about depending on Russia for enegery
@@knerduno5942 Imagine making Trump look sensible. Those German delegates should feel utter embarrassment for the rest of their careers.
@@InfiniteDeckhand what replaced the generating capacity from nuclear? Oh, right, it was coal. Yep, that certainly was good for the environment. Replacing one of the cleanest energy sources we have, that also offers completely contained pollutants, with one of the absolutely dirtiest ones, that has no clear or easy way to contain the pollutants, is such a genius move, the rest of the world will immediately follow suite! Way to go Germany, show the world how it's done!
Germany is already economically destroyed, there's no coming back.
@@knerduno5942 That is one of the events I always cite. Thanks for bringing it up. I have seen some commentators claim Trump was just trying to "force" the Germans to buy US LNG.
I never understood how the Fukushima accident affected Germany. Are sixty foot tsunamis and M9.0 earthquakes a thing there? 9.
You never know...
Neither earthquake nor tsunami were the decisive factors. Basically it was human error that made the disaster bigger than it had to be. And that was Merkel's motivation to say 'ee cannot handle nuclear', besides wanting to win upcoming elections.
Before that, there were of course the famous incidents like Chernobyl. But there was also a cluster of Leukemia cases in the 90s around a nuclear power plant in Germany, whose cause was never established. It's less well-known outside of Germany but it definitely affected public opinion here too.
Videos of nuclear plants "exploding" makes people afraid. That's it, there's no further thought involved.
What we can learn from Fukushima is that a massive earthquake and tsunami can hit a nuclear reactor and nobody will directly die from it
As a French person, I've had many discussions with Germans about nuclear energy in the past. I'm now wondering how much of our disagreement was due to each of us trusting different sources of information, yet both being confident in their credibility.
Yeah, I noticed that German sources about nuclear power seem to be partly different to English sources.
What I really like about France is they subsidise the electricity costs from what's estimated to be between 59€/MWh and 83€/MWh to 42€/MWh for exports and below that in the country. We wouldn't have much of these discussions if all countries would just equally subsidise electricity.
@@TeamPlanlos France has suffered intense pressures, both inside from the left and the ecologists (who famously also lied even to the president), and from the outside, Germany first of all (which pushed at the european level all possible anti nuclear proposals), and as a result has indeed criminaly underfunded its nuclear program, leading to ill planned nuclear plants life extension. But more importantly, a french power plant could explode at the german frontier, it still would lead to less casualties than simply breathing the air polluted by the german coal powerplants.
@@TeamPlanlos you only listened to what you wanted to right? ^^ Despite all that, since nuclear energy is used, there have been about 10000 victims. Basically 200 per year. Compared to 4 to 7 millions per year because of atmospheric pollution. Or look at the so called renewable, solar panel production demands intense mining, in particular of rare earth, heavy industrial processes, the accidents just from those certainly amount to more than 200 per year worldwide.
@@TeamPlanlos renewable is a scam. Because is does not offer constant production. On top of a horde of other issues. That is why the leftists who branded themseves as ecologists need to lie.
Here, in Spain, our government wants to do the same thing. The funny thing is the the same minister that told Spanish that nuclear power should be removed from Spain is now in central European Bank and she's saying that Europe needs to go for nuclear power. This change of opinion happened to be in one week or a little bit more
Thank you, perhaps it´s a change of mind? Would be hopeful.
@@Thomas-gk42 Chances are that it isn't and as far as I know Europe informed Spanish government of the consequences of removing nuclear centrals and our government answered with a short and moralistic letter saying that's bad just because it's bad. It's strange but it's just one more strange thing happening in our government and probably other western governments are going through processes of this kind too
@@pablomendezjimenez2010 Si. Here in Germany, the atomic exodus was sustained by nearly everyone after the Fukushima accident happened. It´s sad, that a technical topic is so politicized, that a rational debate is nearly impossible. Buenos dias🙂
@@Thomas-gk42 Buenos días and good morning jajaja
It’s all politics and activism being hijacked by those who want to push their own agenda.
The trouble with pressure groups is they focus on one issue and don't see the bigger picture. They also tend to create a dogma that they refuse to challenge when circumstances change or new evidence emerges.
“Dogma”’ is an exactly the right word. It’s like responding to a child who challenges with “why do we …?” and the parent always snaps back with “because I said so!” yet never gives an true, persuasive answer.
@@baomao7243that’s literally why nuclear power was phased out buddy
@@icebird9004 Yeah, i just meant to make light of how little sense it makes to chase “fact free, dogma-based” policy decisions. The answer is always “because I say so” instead of an actual search for truth. And the results speak for themselves.
pressure groups are psychologically and financially encouraged to identify any pattern as evidence to support their cause. It's so deep seated and so important to their self-interest that they delude themselves before they delude the public.
@@reekinronald6776 Once they have a chosen solution, it degenerates into confirmation bias. And given the financial backing of a given solution, it is NOT a search for the truth (unless it is the one bing backed by them).
"It is okay to change one's beliefs based on new evidence."
Not so in the green cult.
"It is okay to change one's evidence based on old beliefs" ~ German Greens.
Except when the Greta-wannabes create evidence out of nothing to get what they want.
Pride comes before the fall
The green party likes to believe it is leftist but it is fundamentally conservative, all of it's motivations are based in fear of change. That won't be happening.
The changes claimed by Cicero were not there. Cicero claims that there was "no statement that a real extension of the operating life with new fuel rods for several years would be possible from a safety perspective." Firstly, there is no mention anywhere of the fact that an extension of the operating life for several years would be possible from a safety perspective. In neither of the two versions. That is wrong. Secondly, the paragraphs on long-term continued operation are still included in both documents.
Another one on the list of outside observers just being lazy about understanding nuclear energy in Germany. No critical evaluation of Cicero's whatsoever - the selective quotation on Cicero's part should have been mentioned.
Seconded -- the blog Volksverpetzer describes the situation very well. By the way, Cicero has sent Volksverpetzer a written warning for their criticism. Interesting understanding of press freedom...
Anyone seriously reading a publication with that title should reconsider their life choices. The original paper was edited by rewriting several paragraphs and a conclusion was added that was not included in the original version. The original version did NOT come to a final conclusion as seen in the edited version. There are several sentences missing in the edited version like the following: "Alle sicherheitstechnisch gebotenen Nachrüstungen und Ertüchtigungen für den Betrieb der Kernkraftwerke wurden getroffen. [...] Aus technischer Sicht müssen Kernkraftwerke auch gegen Ende ihrer Betriebszeit diesen höchsten Anforderungen gerecht werden." It's highly disturbing that people are believing some left wing news blog instead of objectively reading the papers and coming to the very very obvious conclusion that it was edited to sway the reader in the "right" direction.
To be honest I'm a bit shocked Sabine bases their video in Cicero's article. In the past I disagreed with some of her opinions, but they seemed to be based on a solid foundation. Now however, building a video on top of an article published in a far-right magazine who is clearly running a campaign against the green party is shattering.
@@BlockOfRed Don't make a fool of yourself. Start looking on facts and data and don't try to divide everything into good or evil - it's not possible. Unfortunately, thinking in superficial categories is a typical German problem.
As a Japanese guy who works in nuclear energy industry, and does so alongside engineers from Germany, I am not at all surprised by this. No politician seems to be able to keep their political ideologies (unrelated to energy) out of the picture when discussing nuclear energy. What a shame.
Building nuclear reactors on volcanic islands seems political though.
@@mihair2854 Energy issues are always political. Can't help it. It directly affects how much a country gonna be dependent on other countries for basic needs. That said. We are extra careful when deciding on a site to build NPP. Much stricter than what IAEA recommends in terms of seismic stuff. Even the infamous earthquake of 2011 did nothing to the reactor. If that 40 meters tall tsunami hasn't washed away emergency diesels, everything would've been fine. Tsunami which arrives once per millennia.
@@tacticsogreman I always would like to know if simple engineering- fortifying only the critical parts of cooling could have saved Fukushima from the meltdowns. Not whole plant, just critical components. And if it would have been easy/cheap if left to engineers. Red tape of overregulation, endless comities, reports made simple actions not being applied(?)
@@msxcytb You see, there were no problems with cooling systems themselves. Everything functioned as intended after the earthquake. Tsunami also failed to damage the cooling systems. What tsunami did do, was flooding and rendering useless the emergency diesel generators. That was the problem. Active cooling systems need power to operate the pumps. With no power everything stopped working. That's it. Blocks which shared a diesel generator which survived the tsunami had no problems. So it was a double punch of sorts. First the earthquake toppled electric lines and cut off NPP from power supply. Then tsunami took out the emergency power supply. That is why now all NPPs are required to have multiple mobile emergency diesel generators stationed above the NPP. So that if stationary power supply fails they can still provide power while lines get fixed.
@@tacticsogreman thanks for explaining! Is it fair to say that small improvements could prevent consequences and could be implemented for other plants? So that these could be started to provide service for the population.
Churchill famously quipped that you can trust America to do the right thing - after having exhausted all the alternatives. Germany is still exhausting alternatives.
So is the US. At some point, the love affair with wind and solar will fizzle out and we go nuclear and solve the problem forever.
What exactly are you waiting for America to do for Germany? Churchill was talking about America joining the war efforts in Europe.
Churchill - me no like at all - ask India - about him - the rotter. Fare thee well.
@@chrisquinn394 - ... Yeeesss... Work with it... Germany may well exhaust all of their baseload alternatives - before returning to nuclear, eventually.
@@chrisquinn394 you can read words it seems But you're not yet capable of understanding what they mean
Never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by corruption when it comes to politicians and their advisors.
A revelation of corruption also has a "them" with malicious intent. So the fix changes from "don't be stupid" to "get rid of them," circumventing the ability to consider credibility. And yes, Corruption is a significant problem also.
@@luck484 They did it to serve the US so you can say it is corruption. Germany and Japan are vassals since 1945.
you totally have that backwards mate. Stupidity is a *requirement* for entry in to politics, intellectual folk do NOT do politics.
I thought the consensus was that it was Russia. I remember reading several articles on how there was a lot of evidence of Russian involvement. Money transfers from Russia to German politicians was the most damning one iirc. And not only did Russia benefit, the timing was suspicious. I forget what else there was, but it seemed obvious back then. Don't know what happened, but I guess proof was found that it wasn't them? You'd think someone would make noise otherwise.
@@VikingTeddy it's always russia or quatar when europe shafts it's self.
2:12 "Industry pressure then had them postpone the shut-down" is quite the framing. The government decided to extend the usage. That's what happened.
Your version implies that a shutdown isn't inevitable, when it is.
@@Hesnotoneofus The shutdown was decided a decade ago. You'd have had to order new fuel rods (no overnight shipping available afaik), we don't have enough experts to further postpone a shutdown now, we dismantled associated infrastructure, again, for a decade. At this point in time, the shutdown was indeed inevitable. We just postponed it.
I have several technical tops against the continuation: - As you mentioned the safety checks were postponed. IMHO doing all the necessary checks would take at least a year PLUS all the flaws that the checks unveil have to be repaired (OK as you mentioned, then new fuel would have been on site). - The 3 sites are quite old. They should have had continuous updates through the years. This is all missing. - These remaining 3 plants do not make a lot in our consumption. 6% power (at their peak power) seems more a part of daily changes. - Today German /Europe electricity is much more complicated. For me the most critical point is to manage the grid in more intelligent ways than before. This for me is still missing. - What 2023 missing most was "regulative power" - the quick response to shorts. But nuclear power is traditional continuous power.
KZhead says the video contains paid ads. After I watched the video I came to the conclusion that she got money from the nuclear industry. I guess this channel is just propaganda.
For a while there, I thought you were talking about Sweden. Political parties and individual politicians responsible for closing 6 of our 12 reactors refuse to take...responsibility. We are many who remember what happened...
At least we got to vote about it some decades ago...
@@adragoor You mean when we got to vote "no", "no" and "f*ck no"? Yeah, all three options were "no" options. Why? Because after the TMI accident, Olof Palme - that had defended nuclear power until then - did not want to spend 6 months before the general election answering questions about "Harrisburg", and so he caved immediately to Fälldin's demand for a referendum.
Sounds like another major problem Sweden shares with Germany.
@@michaelkarnerfors9545and you didn't bother founding your own party? Stupid
Sweden = Norway ordered from Wish.
The tragedy of us in Germany is to ruminate. A country of Siemens, Linde, countless inventors and great scientists is paralized. No batteries but Diesel, no storage systems, no heat pumps, no suitable grid. It is like the Romantic followed the Enlightenment. We should be deeply worried.
Öttinger? And voting €DU...
Will Germans hold politicians accountable and change their voting ?
@@gregor-samsawell, politics is problematic, my car is automatic and electric😂
That country with Siemens, Benz, Linde, etc. happened when Germany had a top-notch educational system. Free schools, free state funded universities. These days, many politicians prefer to lower taxes rather than employing enough teachers and outsourcing science to commercial companies rather than funding universities. Not all, but too many of them.
Well, 16 years of "driving on sight" maybe wasn't the best way to get into this new century. It is the bitter irony that it weren't the green party with their fundamentalist wing preaching the future with carts drawn by horses which ruined the car industry and forced us into relying on cheap gas - it was a conservative government, not willing to get anything done, and promising that it could go on that way forever. And they will win the next election, because germans just love being lied to when it means they can dream on a bit longer....
I highly recommend watching the latest Markus Lanz episode where Habeck directly explains what contributed to this decision making process. It may not suit some people's opinion, but it might make you question the "scandal" tag from this video's title.
3:00 this was not simply a rewrite. It was an added conclusion based on new information at a later date. The conditions that were previously defined as necessary for a safe continuation (the timely procurement of fuel rods and coordination with the security agencies and operators) had not been met. Therefore, the logical conclusion was that a safe continuation could not be guaranteed. That conclusion was also not the only argument and was not directly translated into policy. The reactors did get a brief extension to make use of the remaining fuel.
Unfortunately this doesn't matter to some physicists (and many laypersons) and the benefactors of centralized energy generation + distribution.
This is some important context
Still it is a shame no weight given to the near term future energy needs, although expensive to maintain...keep a proper staff that can operate the plant, order a load of fuel, and otherwise maintain the plant while it is shutdown! Texas is now paying the price for necessary backup of our wind and solar, billions of dollars paying to keep a large number of gas fired plants operable and fuel secure during the winter...made necessary by an "anomalous" winter storm (from my experience, once in a decade) that forced about 40% of customers offline for days. Most gas fired plants can't compete in the power market during the winter time...wind and solar and a base of nukes supply most of the demand...market power is cheap. So, statewide ten degrees F temperatures and two snowstorms over five days, market power is at the max of almost $10,000/MW-hr ($10/kW-hr...a one hundred watt incandescent bulb costing one dollar per hour! A twelve kW generator spitting an ounce of gold every day.)...Response to the outrageous price was muted...hell, if it wasn't already running, it was frozen, including the extra needed gas supply! Two hundred dead, we had a fireplace and propane stove for survival. Advice: Make sure you live near a hospital because they don't get cut off! Texas is the story of the complete destruction of the old "regulated" order, in which a Commission would rule on a utility building a new plant with inclusion of costs in the utility's guaranteed rate base, to instead put all power supplies on the bidding market to meet a wholesale demand. The only problem...the unrecognized cost of supply assurance!
@@danielmcwhirter wasn't TX staying disconnected FROM the national grid for the operators of the plants/network to carve up their captive customer base exactly to NOT have to follow supply assurance rules?
@@danielmcwhirter and please be aware that the German energy sector is carved up by 4 big entities who prevented the establishment of small (decentralized) regenerative energy providers about 15-20 years ago (when conservatives had political power for over a decade) which lead to the mess they find themselves in these days. That the Greens are not wizards is to be expected.
What about staff? If your country decides to shut down nuclear power, it would be reasonable to assume that skilled staff start to leave and reskill.
That's part of the problem the UK has with building new plants now, many of those with existing skills are in their 60s+ now.
The staff isn't immediatly gone, as it takes some time from ending the production of electric energy till the power plant is in a state where it needs only very few people to walk around. So the lack of staff isn't a problem at once, but they getting old and no new younger staff had been trained.
Germany was leading in building nuclear tech. It’s just a joke what happened. Even if we decided now to go back to nuclear we wouldn’t even have the skilled workforce anymore. There’s no more going back unfortunately
@@red.aries1444 Yes. What highschool student in his right mind would have gone to university to be a nuclear power engineer from the 1970s onward. Besides, we need all the nuclear engineers we can find here in Ontario.
They will be replaced by hostile immigrants.
As Germany foreign affairs minister say "You need to change your policies 360° " 😂😂😂
Lol
- Revolution...
Oh my, she actually did say that.
Maybe she thinks they are fermions?
The correct is 180° and NOT 360°; -)) from a mathematician point of view.
Nice to see a scientist calling out the duplicity of politicians.
Calling out yes, but maybe she should have asked herself if that really is so necessary. Those papers published by Cicero are heavily framed and extremely shortened. The decision making process was quite simple. - a new nuclear power plant takes us 20 years to build. - it costs 60 billion EUR, money that cannot be spent in other places - we have nowhere to deposit our nuclear waste - the existing nuclear power plants mostly reach end of life and their fuel was not necessarily readily available - the vast majority of Uranium comes from Russia - we managed to escape natural gas dependency from there, now we'd open up uranium dependency as a new chapter I believe this video just barely scrapes by the label of misinformation. Sabine usually does better, thankfully.
@@NevermindXY It was actually not about new plants being built but still running power plants being decomissioned before their end of life. The mentioned report examines the political corruption leading up to the controversial decision to shut the plants down in spite of the ministry's outspoken position on reducing CO2 emissions on the one hand and soaring energy prices and an ever destabilizing power grid on the other.
@@PalaRobe The changes claimed by Cicero were not there. Cicero claims that there was "no statement that a real extension of the operating life with new fuel rods for several years would be possible from a safety perspective." Firstly, there is no mention anywhere of the fact that an extension of the operating life for several years would be possible from a safety perspective. In neither of the two versions. That is wrong. Secondly, the paragraphs on long-term continued operation are still included in both documents.
@@mststgt - Sabine is not "just barely scrape[ing] by the label of misinformation". She more or less repeats the Cicero story, which was already debunked, without any critical distance. Sad seeing a scientist falling for ideology.
There is an important sentence at the screenshot at 2:49: "Ob längerfristig ein unterbrechungsfreier Betrieb erfolgen kann, ist ohne Klärung unter Beteiligung der Betreiber, Hersteller und Landesaufsichtsbehörden sowie deren Gutachtern nicht zu beantworten" - "Whether uninterrupted operation can take place in the long term cannot be answered without clarification involving the operators, manufacturers and state supervisory authorities as well as their experts". This question had not been answered at the time as the paper listing optional ways to continue operations was written. So we do not know yet what those experts have said, but we know that the enterprises operating the nuclear power plant where not very happy with the decision of chancellor Scholz to disregard the warning in the final version of the paper and to extend the operation of the nuclear plants beyond the scheduled date of Dec 31, 2022 by 3 months. (Their unhappiness had mostly economic reasons, however.) New (or refurbished) fuel rods would have to be bought from Russia, by the way, the same way as France does to this day ...
It's really funny. Nuclear fangirls and -boys yell "ideology" all the time, while most facts vote against nuclear. Which unmasks nuclear as the actual ideology.
@@traumflugi dont want to generalise and play in teams of fanboys and haters, but this comment section seems incredibly into nuclear to a degree where they don't care about the facts...
@@homeape. Indeed. After one can no longer deny nuclear is quite expensive, the only argument I can find here is "renewables can't do it". And there it stops. Or messy details at best, like e.g. "the grid is insufficient right now", ignoring extending the grid is part of the plan and already happening. Really remarkable for a science oriented viewership.
I think it is not about nuclear power in itself, but about the beliefs of the „political enemy“. For germany: The greens are against nuclear power, thus we must be for nuclear power. Nobody cares for facts.
THIS!
It does appear to be a remarkably stupid idea to close down existing power sources before there are new power sources available to replace them.
Except we're talking about a total of 3 reactors that provided about 1-2% of total power and have already been replaced here. It's not nearly as big a thing as the media make it out to be.
@@Llortnerof He is not talking about the remaining ones, but the ones that have been closed off in the past 20 years. This was even talked about in the video.
@@hamsturinn That decission was backed up by the majority of the population of Germany.
@@hamsturinn Well, it's no more appropriate for those, either. Germany is not currently facing an electricity shortage and has not for the last 20 years. Seems replacements were in fact available. And for what it's worth, nuclear was mostly replaced with renewables. In fact, renewables are now a greater fraction than nuclear ever was.
@@Llortnerof I think the stupidity lies in them not phasing out gas and coal. Instead they try to phase out something much safer like nuclear power.
Idiotic removing nuclear stable power in countries that lie on relatively stable ground, like in Scandinavia. No big eartquakes, no tsunamis, no wars, no hurricanes or twisters. It should be expanded here instead. More nuclear power to give the world electricity enough for electric cars, trucks, ai, iot aso.
Also the same with the Tesla factory arson, that was approximately just as stupid, I mean, what was the intended message exactly "We want petrol cars instead let's burn this shit down"?? Are these people eating shit for breakfast or are they stupid for entertainment purposes?
But only until the Uranium runs out - 100 years, at current rates. Better to work on fusion, since there's a lot of water on the Earth, and in the Solar System.
@@januslast2003 you are aware that there are untapped uranium deposits out there?
@@januslast2003 Yes we will have fussion just in the next 20 years this time
@@januslast2003 When uranium runs out simply convert to thorium. Far more abundant. And it's stupid argument anyway, "oh no, we will only have clean power for the next 100 years"...
About 150 years ago, my state’s legislature tried to legislate the value of pi. Fortunately, one of them was a mathematician and was able to convince them that it was a bad idea.
That's a bit of an urban legend. Grain of truth, but not quite what is seems.
@@lesliemacmillan9932 That someone in Indiana tried to legislate pi=3 is an urban legend. He really tried to legislate a method of squaring a circle that only worked if pi=3.2. 😂😂😂
i think the value of pi is pi. can we legislate this? 😂
@@tami6867 Unfortunately, there is no law against being stupid or uninformed.
@@tami6867 If pi is pi, what is pi?
No matter which nation it is,politicians seem to be incompetent or corrupt or both.
they are always good representations of the people who votes for them
I disagree, it feels as if there is active competition in the race to the bottom. As a Brit I take pride in the number of strong contenders we have in this race.
Here in the UK the hot air generated in parliament is re used to heat kew gardens. 🤭🤭🤭
When are you expected to have an elected parliament again?
Replace Nuclear with Hot Air and Lies, as there's usually an abundance of both. 🤪
Best comment award
energy can only be extracted if theres a Potential. Hot air, even with an almost abundant supply, is not enough 😆😁 cheers 👍🙂
Sabine is slowly waking up. It's a long journey, but in a few years she's going to be asking taboo questions like why the great barrier reef still covers the same area or why sea levels haven't risen.
There is also a lot of Hot Air and Lies surrounding EVs, some of which which she believes. Our US grid will be fine with just a little upgrading, mostly because more and more people are installing solar panels and batteries. Prices of these have fallen an insane amount, and will continue to. Also, solar panels, EVs and batteries will act to even-out the electricity load. There is definitely a concerted effort to tear down EVs, but they rely on a kernel of truth, and a grain silo of misinfo.
@@governmentis-watching3303Both of these statements are verifiably false. Sea levels have risen consistently year to year for decades and the Barrier Reef has suffered mass bleaching events reducing hard coral cover every other year for about a decade. Just because you stop looking for information doesn't mean the information isn't there.
The real question here is not science but the abillity to judge what is scientifice, opinion and desire. That is where the debate should have been about. Not only todays politicians fail in that, but society itself as well. Too much has been dominated by people who consider dogma as being right. We need to talk about this.
I mean I understand some concerns with nuclear but it isnt justify getting rid of nuclear and opting for carving out a full mountain to get lowest quality coal just to keep lights turned on.
Once nuclear power became politicized, that was the end of any rational public discourse.
Wind and solar are also politicized. Right wing politicians are always trying to prevent their installation in the US, and they also have to deal with entrenched fossil fuel interests and burdensome regulations. Trump has convinced his followers that windmills cause cancer. Still, wind, solar and grid storage keep getting built and keep getting cheaper. The nuclear industry needs to stop making excuses for their cost and public relations failures.
That´s exactly the problem.
debating anti-nuclear types is a lot like debating religious zealots
@@kellymoses8566 That's because they _are_ religious zealots. They just lack the necessary self-awareness to realize that they worship that which they do.
Oh hi, Cliche Kitty. Enjoy your days before Domo-kun finds you. (Sorry for thread hijack, Sabine!)
Proper decision making needs reliable data reporting. Without it it's all headless chickens running around. This is the sort of thing that needs prison time... It undermines everything.
" reliable data reporting" - we've had a 'reliability' showcase during the recent covid madness. It's not a coincidence that 'politician' and 'liar' are almost synonyms.
Well there was a report that listed the options and the challenges and a conclusion was drawn. The conclusion was to run the remaining three nuclear plants for some months longer, but not to extend nuclear power for years. AFAIK, eot even Cicero claims that the report was unreliable.
4:43 "for example we pretty much all heat with oil and gas here" Oil is actually rather used for transportation than for heating. Gas though, is mostly used as heating. Well technically combustion engines run on heat generated by burning oil, but we are nitpicking here.
Reuters article from about a year ago on the law to phase out fossil fuel for heating says 25% of German households use oil, 50% gas. So, may want to recheck things there.
It's like phasing out chemotherapy and not cigarettes
Exactly!
no. first of all, nuclear is not like chemotherapy, it doesn't remove the cancer (CO2) out of your body. if coal is cigarettes, then nuclear is vapes. and we have been phasing out both.
@@yonaoisme No. If coal is cigarettes, nuclear is Zyn (nicotine pouches). We need our energy somehow. Nuclear is by far the most efficient source of it, with no additives or extra bs, and the least dangerous waste product.
@@morkallearns781 both cause cancer, and for some reason you don't think quitting (solar) is an option. idk why the same people smart enough to not fall for oil propaganda are now falling for nuclear propaganda.
Yesterday (26.4.2024) there was a Bundestag debate (20/11145) about if nuclear power was a viable option for the future. In his speech, Robin Mesarosch (SPD) described a scenario if Germany really tried to reinstate nuclear power as a primary energy source: There were many major roadblocks such as missing qualified staff, no one wanting to invest, no available insurances, fuel rods mostly just from Russia, and it thus of course being far more expensive than renewable sources.
"being far more expensive than renewable sources" I'd like to see the numbers on that. I can't believe it is true if the regulatory environment is not unreasonably punishing for nuclear.
That is all well and good, but all renewable sources suffer the same problem: They can't be made to deliver the amount you need when you need it. They will always be supplemental in nature, and once you reach a certain over capacity threshold they become financially infeasible. So the backbone of the infrastructure needs to be either fossil-thermal or fission-thermal (or fusion-thermal "in 30 years") so you can make energy on nights where the sun don't shine and the wind dies down (but everyone is still charging their cars because they need to go to work in the morning).
Meanwhile even US get the Rusky non sanctioned Uran😂
Nuclear fuel is available from US (and I think a few other places as well).
@@fewwiggleIt's far more expensive to build a completely new nuclear powerplant than it is to build solar panels with an equivalent power output. However, the way to avoid building new nuclear reactors, is by NOT SHUTTING DOWN EXISTING ONES. Keeping the existing installations running is rather cheap
It's so simple. Nuclear is fascinating, yes, I get that. Been in the inner part of ITER - impressive. Yet, why taking the risk when simple clean energy is clearly cheaper? There is a vast, vaaast area of unused roof space that can be used to generate clean, cheap and most importantly decentralised energy. Nuclear can not beat that, even disregarding the intrinsic risk. EVs can be used to buffer on cloudy / no wind days. This time you got it completely wrong Sabine.
because nuclear power is a complete technology and wind/solar etc aren't without storage. We have no good solution for storage and the only relatively viable ones is likely to be a horrible environmental disaster for the areas in which it's mined and the surrounding ecosystems... also the labor conditions for the slaves are kinda bad but nobody really cares about slavery.
"Nuclear can not beat that, even disregarding the intrinsic risk." It can at night. Nuclear can generate power 24/7. Solar cannot, so requires huge investments (of materials, land, research effort, manufacturing-related pollution, and money) in energy storage which are otherwise not necessary.
Base load.
Look at the numbers please, renewables will not be sufficient, if you want to decarbonize traffic (EVs) and residential heating (heat pumps). While we elaborate, the incredible dangers of climate change are already on the run!
2021 Harvard, Univ. College London, etc... puts deaths caused by fossil fuels at about 5 million. A year. So, 2 years, tick tock, and all the deaths from nuclear, the war uses included, become a rounding error. So. What's that about risk?
Doesn't Germany purchase nuclear power from France? Highly ironic and a funny policy workaround.
And France buys renewable electricity from Germany. This is the normal European electricity exchange. By the way, France had a problem with the electricity supply from its nuclear reactors in 2023 because there was too little water in the rivers. It's good that Germany is relying on renewable energies.
France never was against renewable energy tho@@user-fg6hp2bl3z
However they managed to do this, it's one of the all time dumbest decisions.
We need to reduce carbon emissions! I know how, burn more coal.
"If you're in dilemma what is the correct choice, check first what the German government chose, then choose the opposite." - Peter Zeihan, geo-strategist (not the original wording, but the original meaning).
@@zyeborm And the funny part is, the coal germany uses, brown coal, is not only super toxic and polluting, it's extracted by strip mining sad remains of precious ancient forests - you can't make this shit up, if someone wanted to write cartoon villain destroying environment for kicks, it would be german politician...
Nah --- nah Fare thee well.
@@p4nz9r60 while true in recent years, Zeihan is also someone who likes to listen to his own words and repetition of facts derived from naked tables and statistics very much, while not taking changes in mentality, reality or circumstances in mind....
Politicians never want to admit they were wrong or admit they made a mistake. They won't get reelected if they did.
let's see if Sabine does
Actually, knowing the difference between solid scientific knowledge, and so-called scientific knowledge that is not so solid, is what matters now more than ever before.
The problem, Sabine (also my daughter’s name), is the outright lying. We cannot accept any government official lying, not once, not ever. If an official lies, there must be immediate accountability by handing out the harshest of penalty. The crime in this case harder millions of people and was treason.
Who determines what is a lie? Think carefully, because you just made them a dictator.
A short time ago, another ministry lied for years about the noise of wind turbines. Another one about the possibility of a general car toll. Presently, one is lying about synfuels. I assume we will have a load of stepdowns shortly. 😂
Thank god, there was no lying involved.
@@SebastianBoecker Good points!
The laws that could put punishment on politicians lying or doing damage to the country could be made by...uhm...politicians? It is very unlikely, that there will ever be such laws.
I used to be very active in an environmentalist youth organization here in Norway in my teenage years. Most of the stuff we focused on was stopping the expansion of the Norwegian oil fields, and the improvement of railways over car traffic. But whenever I visited the central office for the organization I'd see these old "Nuclear? No thanks!" buttons and posters laying around. Already back then, when I was young and naive and tended to go along with the opinions of those around me, the animosity towards nuclear power struck me as strange. Europe depends on Norwegian oil and gas - if we take that away, what were they hoping to use in order to meet the growing energy demands? Solar, wind, wave and tidal, traditional hydro power... We had the data for all of those things, how much energy those sources could deliver. Printed in our magazine every other month or so. It didn't add up. There was - and still is - literally no way to meet our energy needs solely with completely renewable sources. Even if they were built non-stop with fanatical fervour across the continent, the energy demands would soon catch up and exceed what completely renewable power could deliver. There were lots of smart people in that organization, they must have been able to crunch those numbers. Yet, there was no push to change the strict stance on nuclear. Perhaps it was that trap you mentioned - not wanting to admit that they had been on the wrong track for so long. Ignoring the data in favour of the agenda is just par for the course.
I'd vote green today, the other parties are not doing enough against climate change. That said, parts of the green movement are completely delusional about the energy requirements of modern life. They don't mind making everyone poorer for the cause, unnecessarily so. If there was a new green movement, with a positive outlook regarding energy, I'd vote for them in a heartbeat. We could do sooo much with electricity that we simply aren't.
you shouldn't be too vocal about things that don't add up. the hive mind will subtract you from the equation in an instant.
@@thomasfsan If you want to stop the anthropogenic contribution to climate change (once you've decided that warming is worse than another ice age) be prepared for economic upheaval that will make the pandemic pale in comparison.
"There was - and still is - literally no way to meet our energy needs solely with completely renewable sources." That is the point.
@@UncleKennysPlace Oh yes, it’s going to be terrible. It’s why I don’t want to faff around with renewables, in a changing climate.. But build solid, predictable, 80+ years lasting power plants. All over the world. Renewables, without proper storage solutions, are just a more awkward way to keep using fossil, that will undermine the whole project.
I wonder what these safety requirements are that Germans are quoting but so many other countries are not quantifying. I get that it could simply be a yes or no decision based on enormity of risk. That this happened when the German prime minister was a PhD in QM makes me really wonder what was going on in Germany.
Special interest groups trying to eliminate competition in the energy market, and attempt eventual consolidation
Could ahve been the FSB trying to keep Germany buying gas...
@@tomriley5790Russia needed the money + the dependency made Germany ever so understanding of Russian points of view. It was really just a continuation of a long-term strategy of the Soviet Union.
wow data from 2022? im a bit shocked about the one sided report.
Data from 2023 in any type of large-scale analysis is still being collated. The year ended only four months ago. You think 2023 will be miraculously better somehow?
@@lesliemacmillan9932 Yes. The usage of coal for example spiked for one year in 2022 due to the unexpected shortage of gas from russia. In 2023 this plummeted again to it's lowest value since 1965 and mostly got replaced by imports of renewables (due to them being much cheaper).
@@sebastianhaban1366 Imports of RENEWABLES? Where do they come from? Do you have references? What I know is, that Germany imports plenty of LNG since the russian pipeline was destroyed, partly from US fracking, which is even worse than buring the own brown coal.
@@Thomas-gk42Wind Energy from denmark for example
@@stevenrichman7101nice, but not sufficient
Didn't Ciceros article get debunked? Volksverpetzer found things not adding up or something like that.
Thank you for sharing. You are right on track. Everyone stay safe, warm, happy,dry and healthy. From Henrico County Virginia
I´m busy dusting, but it´s only a few qm, just enough electric power for my own little household. Thank you for a balanced and realistic report. I like to add, that the beginning of the end of nuclear power in Germany was allready in the early 90s, cause they closed the nuclear industry (in Hanau) and the fast breed reactor (in Kalkar), that was ready for the grid never was used. So the dependence to the neighbour country France began.
France and germany are dependend on each other.
@@aculleon2901 that´s right of course, and it´s ok, but Germany missed it to produce own fuel elements and build a waste deposit.
@@Thomas-gk42 The DDR produced its own fuel. That was a shit idea tho and we are still searching for a permanent waste deposit in germany.
@@aculleon2901 We don´t need it anymore, after we decided to burn coal and LNG. Problem solved. Seriuosly, in Western Germany we had a production of fuel elements in the Hanau nuclear industry, that was closed. And if you don´t want to find, what you are looking for, you of course won´t find it.
You will be completely content when you actually totally disconnect from the grid.
First, although I sometimes don't agree with you, I am always interested in your very well done videos. There are nowadays no problems with electricity supply, even without nuclear power plants. France has too much capacity installed since the 70s and, if you consider France and Germany as a whole, nuclear power has a very big part in the energy mix. Furthermore, this energy is purchased cheaper than if it would be produced by nuclear plants in Germany. The supply security for Germany cannot be seen as an only national issue, because Europe has a common grid and a free electricity market. The most secure electricity mix is done by a decentralized production system. Don't forget, a nuclear power plant can be a target for terrorists and in the worst case, a primary target for Wladimir Putin.
Russian attack on germam power plants is a highly unlikely scenario as they'd have to get over germany's allies first (Sweden and Poland would not a easy walk judging by russian performance in Ukraine). The only way to destroy germany's power plants for russia is to deploy ICBM's, but don't they carry nuclear warheads anyways? By the way - Ukraine has a few nuclear power plants, yet despite the war going on it does not appear russians are willing to cause any catastrophic event so far.
This situation is genuinely crazy
Is "installed capacity" the rated capacity of the wind turbines?
That's how I interpret Sabine's comments on the graph shown at 4:30. She said "that the installed capacity, not the capacity that we actually get".
Installed capacity is the (maximum) nominal power of the plants.
should be something like maximum possible output assuming perfect windspeeds and full-strength sunshine through cloudless skies. (in germany...).
Installed capacity is the rating the selling company gives their stuff and does not tell you what it will actually produce on a regular basis -- purely marketing.
And in Germany, and other countries too, there is the extra problem of network capacity.
Sabine goes Parteipolitik. Ob das der richtige Weg ist? Von der zweifellos fundierten Erklärung von Wissenschaft und Kosmologie zu parteipolitisch gefärbten Schnellschüssen mit zweifelhafter Substanz. Das nerft.
Ich bin von Sabine ihrem Beitrag enttäuscht. Hatte mehr Tiefgang zu den Kosten von Nuklear erwartet, weil das nicht mehr zu bezahlen sein wird.
@@berndschauer1332 Mach dir die Mühe durch ihre playlist zu gehen, oder ein Stichwort ins Sucheld einzugeben, bevor du meckerst. Sie hat eine Menge an Berichte zum Thema gemacht, auch zu den Kosten.
Harald Lesch ist allmählich verbrannt. Sie wird ihn langsam ablösen. Natürlich wird sie den Aufgabenbereich erben, dazu gehören auch wissenschaftliche Stellungnahmen zu aktuellen politischen Ereignissen. Das gehört alles zum Programm.
Wenigstens den verschwindent irrelevanten anteil den nuklear an der Primärenergie hat. Aber im Ernst, Sie hat sich nahezu null zum Thema Energietransformation informiert und fasselt so ein Stammtisch Zeug. Absolut unverantwortlich, da sie ja als wissenschaftlerin wahrgenommen werden will.
Ich bin irgendwie auch sehr verwirrt und enttäuscht, was mit diesem Kanal passiert.
Good engineering is simple. If your engineering calculations state that X is required, a safety margin of at least 2X is designed and built. Fukushima was not a nuclear failure, it was an engineering failure by not removing the possibility that a possible tsunami in an earthquake zone could knock out the emergency generators. Ditto for Katrina, where the pumps were knocked out by lack of fuel to the emergency generators. Real world example is the requirement for 90 minutes of emergency lighting backup for many buildings, despite the fact that most people will exit a building way before the 90 minutes expire.
But the nuclear way was a stupid one from the beginning. It was never cheap, it was just subsidised. And even if they change their minds again, a new reactor won't be online before the end of the next decade. So it absolutely does not make any sense to build new fission reactors.
It has everything to do with so much undeserved vilification and unexplainable fear that stems from the vastly blown out of proportion "dangers" surrounding the energy source.
Unexplainable fear? Tschernobyl, Cattenom and Fukushima.
@@0lhe Two of those accidents were done so long ago that we literally didn't even have the safety standards we do now and, for the safety standards that did exist, they were not followed. Fukushima was an engineering mistake, not a nuclear power mistake, where the back up generators were flooded because the engineer didn't take into account "this carbon copy of an earthquake proof plant from california may not be equipped to handle tsunamis in japan." The fearmongering is specifically funded by Gas and Oil. Take a look at the funding of every "anti-nuclear" group out there and you will see gas and oil, the current biggest money makers in the energy sector, are the ones funding them. The fear *is* unreasonable, especially in countries like Germany where natural disasters are particularly rare and the ground is stable. It was made unreasonable so that the gas and oil companies can stay in business.
I'll be VERY surprised if Russia doesn't have it's hands in this. They stood to gain a lot, and the timing is too perfect. And I guess people forgot that two years ago a German politician got caught receiving money from Russia. Where there's one cockroach, there's several.
It's odd there's a scandal of a phase-out, usually it's the other way lol.
It always happens when ideology collides with reality. Usually ideology wins...
@@DemolitionManDemolishes Well, its not ideology. The cdu did get payed by RWE. Up to 200.000€ for a Part-time Job etc. So phasing out of coal would have affected hundreds of Jobs for cdu politicans. Phasing out of gas/oil would have affected dozens of Jobs for spd politicans (see Nord Stream 2 for example). The law was finally passed by the cdu fdp. Their only ideology is “money”.
4:40 according to a report by the Frauenhofer institute, windpower was by far the largest contributor to the german grid in 2023. I would love a deepdive about the different ways the energy mix is determined, and which method might be the most "honest".
Sabine, I feel with every video, there is some key information missing. About the "trap" statement: since the current government is a very different one that brought up the end of nuclear power, it is currently in opposition and actually proposing to keep nuclear power up. Which is weird to me, but should be worth noting. The second thing is, that the whole discussion from a German perspective is not limited to German power supply. In fact the whole discussion includes possibilities to import power from other countries and it is accepted, that this implies using nuclear power since these decision are taken already and won't changen these countries. So why building again even more of these than necessary just to produce an inner-european oversupply? Alternative supplies for heating are for example geo-thermal sources and mostly decentralized options including the reduction of demand.
Nuclear energy doesn't help with heating buildings. Fuel rods were imported mostly from Russia, where uranium is mined in an extremely dirty way.
Not all fuel rods can be used safely past their date. It depends on whether the fission products create cracks in the rods. Fission products can be a larger volume vs the original. If these cracks allow water to leak inside & boil it could shatter or explode the rod. The contents may settle to the reactor bottom, get in pipes, and create a real problem. It sounds like these rods were ok, but that's not true of fuel rods in general.
They must have hired a guy from Volkswagen.
Or from FSB...
Or from KGB
Woke diversity hire.
They hired Greta Thunberg and Klaus Schwab
Parliament has a duty to inform itself. If they can't even do that right, they aren't fit for purpose. Don't tell me about how those innocent fools were simply duped by the big bad whoever. It's their job. Period.
thank you for the video. as a german myself, i can only shake my head in disbelief when i look at the energy politics of our government
We have now reached a fraction of 50% renewable energy. This is the right way. Renewable energy systems produces energy without fuel costs. The nuclear reactors were only producing a fraction of 5% at the time they were switched off.
The Cicero-article was debunked. There was no scandal. The Energiewende is the best way to protect the climate.
The aversion to nuclear power astounds me. It’s one of the cleanest power sources available to us and can only hasten reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Thus, I am utterly bewildered that so-called environmentally conscious groups are so strongly opposed to nuclear power.
The main reason for that might be that environmentally conscious groups consider a bigger time frame, not just the next quarter.
The next quarter? We have at our disposal enough fuel, considering all sources and fuel rod reuse, for 1000s of years. By then we will have fusion and/or much better renewables .
Nuclear power promised to be extremely resistant to disaster and failed to deliver on that promise. I dislike environazis too, but nuclear power industry did miss the mark badly.
I have only been in Germany for 18 years - not all the facts with moi. Germany - still does not have a safe nuclear dump - after about 50 years of service. No one wants one - in their vicinity. I read once - that the plan was to send all this waste - to Russia - it has imploded - and the waste remains toxic - for 1000's of years. Why me worry? From Mad magazine - methinks. It ain't clean at all - purify and clarify your thinking - and maybe find a real therapy -for this unclean dangerous filth. OK? Fare thee well.
One dimensional thinking
Their self-righteousness is greater than your need for reasonableness. They are, after all, saving the world. You know, the world... bless their little hearts!
There have been a few research papers done by international teams on future world wide energy requirements and they look bleak, even if everyone goes to nuclear power. Perhaps you can do a video on that.
My biggest problem is I don't trust private stock driven companys to run nuclear power ... I know too much how they work.
I put a good deal of the blame on Gudrun Pausewang and on our teachers that made the reading of her works mandatory in grade school.
Didn´t read the book, but the movie was totally missleading and shows a lack of knowledge.
We will not "replace" the fossil chunk at all. We will switch to heat pumps which will use only 20-30% of the energy to begin with.
I think you are confused there. If you switch from gas heat to electric heat pumps you will need (much) more electricity, not less. It's only if you switch from *electric resistance heating* to heat pumps that you save electricity. You can't replace the fossil chunk with heat pumps unless you can generate the electricity somehow. Wind and solar doesn't look like it's going to meet your existing needs, much less the extra needs for heat pumps. What you really have to do if you want to get by with wind and solar is de-industrialize Germany and live with the lower standard of living that comes from having all those industrial workers working in coffee shops instead of in unionized factories. That will help save the planet if that's what you want to do. Of course China and India don't care about climate change, so they will do their own thing, making stuff that Germany used to make to sell to the world.
@@lesliemacmillan9932 "You can't replace the fossil chunk with heat pumps unless you can generate the electricity somehow." Right. But right now most germans are heaing by burning gas or oil in a furnace in their basement. And with a heatpump with an efficency of 300-400% (for every watt of electricity you put into it you get 3-4 watt of heat energy out of it) it is literally MORE efficent to burn the same oil and gas in oil/gas power plant at 30% efficency, transport that electricity to a home and run a heat pump there. So we will need MORE electicity but WAY LESS energy overall just like OP said.
@@sebastianhaban1366 But just like I said, you will need more electricity, which it looks like Germany will have some trouble coming up with if it doesn't want to burn gas or coal to generate it. I know how heat pumps work. You do save total energy using them compared to burning gas in your house. Yes. But so what? Total energy doesn't matter. What matters is the costs of using one form of energy over another and how electricity is generated. This will vary from place to place around the world. If natural gas is abundant but electricity is scarce, you are wiser to burn the gas for heating, cooking, and drying clothes as we do, and use the electricity (some of which is generated from gas) for things like running refrigerators and data-server farms that gas can't do. You don't save money if natural gas is cheaper per mega-joule than electricity is. We've been through this in Ontario. Natural gas would have to double in price for heat pumps to become price-competitive in the warmer parts of Canada. If the heat pump has to work as an electric resistance heater because it gets too cold for the heat pump to work, then the electricity becomes four times as expensive as gas would be. (Gas by pipeline is cheap in Canada.) On the counter-factual, if you live in rural areas where houses don't have connections to the gas pipeline, you have to get propane delivered by truck, which is much more expensive than pipeline gas. Then heat pumps will save money because they allow electricity to be used more efficiently than as resistance heating or using the propane furnace. So before you go promoting heat pumps you need to figure out what the relative costs of the inputs are to see whether they save money or not. Even if it is more efficient in thermodynamic terms to burn gas in a turbine and make electricity for a heat pump than to burn the gas in the house, it may not be cheaper in dollars, *because the conversion of gas into electricity is not free.* What Americans and Canadians -- I don't know about Germans -- won't agree to is being told they have to install heat pumps at greater cost to themselves merely to reduce CO2 emissions. Not going to happen here.
@@lesliemacmillan9932 Well tha might be true for canada but absolutley doesn't apply to germany at all. We have a way warmer climate during winter at night on average it only gets as low as -5 C most places (if you are not up on a mountain top or something) so heatpumps would work perfectly here. We also are a very desley populated country. So much actually that 14% of our heating is done by "district heating" wich means one heat plant produces hot water that gets pumped into the individual houses of a whole city or district. So centralised heating is actually not uncommen here while rural areas withou conection to any kidnof pipeline are rather rare. So us going the route of heat pumps while more cold european countries like sweden, norway and finland use them plenty already makes lots of sense
@@sebastianhaban1366 Oh right. I had forgotten about district heating. Thanks.
Don't know what's the point of lamenting Nuclear Power Phaseout now. The last few powerplants had only a small part in our grid and building new ones takes years. Not to meantion that they have to account for new safety standards which heavily increases their price and building time. In addition, those that cry for Nuclear Power now, are the same people that take to the streets if you as much as suggest building a plant in their vicinity.
I live near one of the last running power plants and it saddens me to see it go like that. Never had a problem being around it and I think people who have a problem with it are not well informed. Though I like coal as a cheap and easy to establish electric energy source I wouldnt like to live around one of these plants actually. I visited the coal mines of Aachen one time and there the air quality was really poor even though they have rather modern exhaust treatment. When you look at the pollution and subsequent health effects of different power generation methods you can see that nuclear is among the safest and coal burning is actually leading emitter of radioactive material and cause of cancer. The decision of phasing out nuclear energy prematurely lead to higher energy prices and heavier reliance on coal, oil and gas so I dont think this has done any good, which in turn leads me to, yes, lament the phaseout 👍
4:48 the total energy consumption chart looks really scary, only 1/5th is CO2 neutral and Germany is a rich country trying really hard to reduce CO2.
This is for all the energy consumption, not only electrical energy. It includes heating, industrial usage, traffic etc.
@@jurgenhahn3306 Yes. And we are planning to do all that with CO2 neutral electricity sooner or later. There is a long way to go.
@@mullergyula4174 No, we're not. Some of that just can't be replaced with electricity for practical reasons. For other parts, it isn't necessary to include that extra step.
They are trying really hard using the only means that is guaranteed to fail - "renewables". That's the problem. It would be difficult even if they had the sense to focus on the only means that has a chance of succeeding: nuclear.
@@Llortnerof Just try to explain this simple fact to german Green Party - good luck!
04:00 the blades of those wind turbines appear to rotate in the wrong direction
It would be cool to see a deeper dive in price of energy vs cost of energy. There are complex market phenomena that make the energy produced by renewables in germany particularly pricy.
I think there are some issues with running fuel rods longer than their design life. Yes, it can be done, but I think the longer used rods become unrecyclable or a more difficult disposal problem. Something about the different mix of radioactive byproducts after extended use. Not sure if the problems are practical or just economic.
Does the Ministry not have a document management system? Even Google Docs has all the history of every document with who edited/added/wrote what, when, etc. The excuse of not knowing who edited it is pathetic
Government IT is usually decades behind the 'real world'. Plus, there is probably the desire to NOT have a way to hold people to account.
They might have a notepad somewhere
@@Iohannis42 🤣
@@fewwiggle That's ususally the realpoint of bureaucracy yes. In the words of The Aristocratic Ustensil: "Take some f***ing responsibility!"
Individuals in positions of power, is humanity's largest problem.
Nah, people participating in collective delusions are.
Humanity is humanity's biggest problem. This includes individuals who feed massive collective delusions 😉
Anarchism
@@24killsequalMOAB Sure ... But delusions are invented and perpetuated by individuals who seek positions of power. So, it's a chicken and egg problem.
@@ZappyOh wrong every individual has the power to not participate, the moment you do, is the moment we fall
I had no idea, why are people still scared of nuclear power ? there have been teething troubles but it's safe now if rules are followed. Absolute madness....cheers.
Yeah? It's save? You wanna visit the Zaporiziah NPP in ukraine while it's getting shelled every now and than in this crrently ongoing war? I'm sure the IAEA is only fearmongering when they say a nuclear accident is very likely to happen there, right? There is no natural disaster or anything. That is a situation controlled to 100% by humans. And my learning of it is that we as humanity can not be trusted with nuclear energy when some of us literally try to shoot explosives at it...
"Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht, Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht,..." Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) And for non-German speakers it roughly translates as: 'If I consider Germany at night, I can't sleep any more'. These are the opening two lines of his poem 'Nachtgedanken'. Nuclear power has joined an excruciatingly long list of things and activities which are Verboten. About the only things which are permitted are nude sunbathing and drinking in public.
They panicked about Fukishima, which was irrelevant to the DE power stations.
Well there was chernobyl before...
@@Thomas-gk42 What about EBR-II?
@@switted823 ?
@@Thomas-gk42 You're bringing up Chernobyl, well EBR-II is just as relevant. What about that? Do you know what EBR-II was and in what year it was demonstrated?
@@switted823 No, I don´t remember that short form.
Frau Hossenfelder redet davon, dass die Politik nicht in die psychologische Falle gehen soll und strickt sich ihre Präsentation so, dass es in ihr Narrativ passt. Ganz zu schweigen davon, auf welcher "journalistischen Analyse" sie ihr Plädoyer stützt. Glanzleistung der wissenschaftlichen Analyse. 🥳
Yeah, it’s gotta be an organized campaign. The questions are whether it’s “green” or Russian and whether it’s bots or real (dumb) people. I have reported you for misinformation, of course.
@@peterfireflylund😂 Check the statistics on energy production and emissions in Germany before you answer. Energy use from RE increased by +10% in 2023 (due to the shutdown of NPP) and reached almost 70% of total annual demand. In contrast, coal emissions have fallen to the level of the 1950s. And today we have 100% RE in the grid. ✌️
@@droops6840 Mhm that Sounds good but you're not giving the full information / See the greater picture. How much ist the total Energyusage today and lets say 2022? 2017 almost 530twh 2022 only 495twh Sure if we lower the Overall consumption (Like we do If we're in a recession caused by Bad politics) the percentage goes Up you should present the absolute Numbers. 2017 191 twh 2022 254 twh 2023 272 twh BUT the biggest Problem is we cant use all of the generated Energy thus causing billions of Costs for us tax payers (through the EEG) not to mention the largely increased need of "redispatch". Cost for Not used Energy: 2021: 2,1 billion Euro 2022: 4,2 billion Euro 2023 Not published yet And 2024 will be insane based on your numbers
Ach, die Frau Hossenfelder - unsere tanzende, singende Drittmittel-Ex-Physikerin tritt nun auch noch in die Fussstapfen der berühmten Antonia Rados, Nichts was Babsi H. nicht könnte. Und, Florence, KIKERO, wenn Sie es schon auszusprechen versuchen, KIKERO, eben so wie KIRKE, KIRKUS oder KLAMAUK. Küsschen
I was doubtful of nuclear energy. But since hearing the very low number of deaths per type of energy, I have changed my view.
Did you compare the contaminated areas?
I could have told them this 20 years ago. So here’s the simple problem, but I think you should probably do several videos on the topic. Problem #1. We, even in the west, use the name Tsunami, a Japanese word, for a reason, Japan has a lot of Tsumani’s. There are three plates that converge under the Tokyo, Izu region. The region is very tectonically active. While Fukushima is NE of Tokyo it’s along a significant long stretch of strait plate boundary that has the potential of rupturing in one large event. The problem is that when this fault line last ruptured Northern Japan was still in its prehistoric. Problem #2. Fukushima was built in the late 1960s and Early 1970s its reactors had an estimated 25 year life. This would place them near their replacement life at in the late 1990’s. While they signified that life could be extended, but only with an intense schedule of inspections which included the plumbing system. The primary containment structure and the secondary containment structure. Problem number #3. A geologist had discovery that a large tsunami hit the Sendai region about 800 years ago. The height of the tsunami exceeded the critical infrastructure at Fukushima and other power stations, railways, and barriers. Problem #4. Single point of failure systems. If we want to be honest this is what caused Chernobyl, the attempt to keep a power plant running in a systemic power emergency (in Chernobyls case Jimmying the reactor when the test had already failed). In the case of Fukushima the fact that there was only (I.e. non-redundant means) of powering the plant is a system electrical emergency emerges. And the problem is not trivial because Japan is one of the most disaster prone areas of the world. Typhoons, Volcanism (Mt. Unzen, Sakura), Earthquakes (Hanjin-Awaji, Noda Peninsula Quake, Fukuoaka Quake) are all events that have occurred in the Nuclear Age. Thus back-up readiness is something require in Japan. Analysis of the Fukushima disaster. #1. The power plant was not the worst performing system. Believe or not, this fact needs to be restated. Over 20,000 people lost their lives because of the poor performance of coastal safety systems which underestimated the effects of coastal terrain on magnifying the amplitude of Tsunami’s which we know are going to happen in this part of Japan. Only one person died from Fukushima plant Emergency and his injuries are the result of cardiovascular stress. The disaster was indicative of systemic risk and multiple wide spread single point of failure system. Examples are topped sea walls in which people were an aware at there distance below the peak water heights. Trains and train systems that were washed away. etc. #2. Analysis of the geologist was not taken Seriously. Engineering systems typically have a margin of safety between a ‘stress’ state in a system and the minimal performance state. In this case if you might expect a 15 M tsunami, then you build your critical infrastructure above 30 M. So that even before the Geologist report Fukushima was not built above a margin of safety above the stress state. #3 combining #1 and #2 There was no provision for a failure of two systems. Particular a consideration that two critical systems would fail simultaneously from the same cause. IOW they did not have a functional Tsunami disaster reaction plan. #4 The power plants were not being inspected for problems one might expected in a seismically active country like Japan. Numerous cracks in the containment facilities were found, in addition some facilities were actually built on active fault zone. Systemic risk and failure in Japan. If we really want to prevent high loss of livelihood scenarios we need to examine regional risk. It’s best to do this away from the heavily politicized topic of nuclear power. Fortuitously, finding examples of system problems is not hard in a place where large disasters are an episodically frequent events. We are witnessing at the moment the continuing emergent crisis on the Noda Peninsula in which earthquakes reveal esoteric faulting and house that cannot be repaired and probably should not be rebuilt because of the instability of the underlying soils. A key event in Japan’s recent history was the Great Hanshin[-Awaji] Earthquake of 1995. This earthquake revealed a number of problems. It was said that the fault line was new, then later it was said that it was unknown. Both were not true. The fault line was at surface level in Awaji with a large presentation before agriculture began in the region. The farming activities buried the fault line in order make level fields. The fault line is typical of the type of diagonal fracture one sees as multiple plates merge at different angles, so the existence of such fractures is not unexpected. Moreover the question has to be asked should have the fault line been investigated. The answer here is exemplary of another engineering oversight. “The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge (Japanese: 明石海峡大橋, Hepburn: Akashi Kaikyō Ōhashi) is a suspension bridge which links the city of Kobe on the Japanese island of Honshu to Iwaya on Awaji Island. It is part of the Kobe-Awaji-Naruto Expressway, and crosses the busy and turbulent Akashi Strait (Akashi Kaikyō in Japanese).” The bridge fortunately was in construction, the fault line went under the main span of the bridge as a consequence … “The two towers were originally 1,990 m (6,530 ft) apart, but the Great Hanshin earthquake on January 17, 1995 (magnitude 7.3, with epicenter 20 km west of Kobe) moved the towers (the only structures that had been erected at the time) such that the central span had to be increased by 1 m (3.3 ft).” Had the bridge been completed the result could have been catastrophic. Thus we see the problem here of types of engineering oversights that build risk of system collapse if multiple parallel oversights in the system occur. To re-emphasize the first point, the issue, if you lost loved ones during the great Northern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami is not a nuclear problem, it was a systemic problem in governance. And so it is not unexpected that you are seeing similar problem of governance in Germany . . .politicians are not geologist or safety engineers, politicians want money to flow to their most valued campaign contributors those contributors like TEPCO or HSBEC that they are less regulated, spend less money on risk abatement and so they can distribute more funds to their shareholders. Similarly local municipalities don’t want to raise large bonds to fund seawall projects and invest more effort in ultra wide evacuation corridors. There needs to be independent review boards with the regulatory authority to override decisions made by elected authority when systemic risk is at issue. They need to have the authority to hire the best geologists and invest in research to determine region specific risks before nuclear plants are constructed and fail safe procedure that a free of single point failures. The margin of safety in these various construction projects needs to be scientifically investigated prior to commencement. Once the margin are set the engineers need to set how they are going to comply with requirements. During the operational lifetime of the projects during the down time the engineers need to have free rein over the facilities to look for points of potential failure. Again, the failure of the Francis Scott Key bridge by Dali is not simply a rogue ship hitting a bridge killing some people. It was a failure of safety protocols in the harbor authority, a failure of governance in the region that minimized the risk of collisions (which episodically happen in the US taking down main spans), it was a failure of the bridge authority to convey what types of forces could cause a single point failure. These are all political failures at the federal, state and local authorities that build risk. They want a bridge, they want a bustling port, the ship builders want to big bigger ships . . . . .these all intersect in at a disaster waiting to happen unless the scientist are called into assess the risk and the engineers assess mitigation tactics and the contractors build protection devices.
Well no matter how this come about - I am happy that the nuclear power era is now coming to an end!
So... subsidies with coal and gas?
@@_Hal9000 subsidies to sun- and windpower
@@crossraoads Hm... so... unreliable electric potential?
@@_Hal9000 I think in this context "unreliable" depends on what you referring to?
@@crossraoads The thing is, those electric potential generation methodes rely heavily on weather forcast to be used optimal in the electrical grid, specially if the base load should be kept by those methods. To keep the baseload stable the fluctuations need to compensated by, electrical potential storage or directly from turbines from falling water, steam(nuklear, coal, gas). To only rely on giant electrical potential storage devices, like Li based akkumulators, is just inefficient and way to expensive long term.
"I was told by people I thought knew what they were talking about." That's your first mistake: thinking others know what they're talking about.
You can’t go through life with a zero-trust policy though
@@fruhlingsrolle7303 wanna bet?
Thanks
It's very important to understand that there is no 100% green energy that's totally harmless to the environment and humans. The biggest factor is usually that where there is a lot of energy or potential energy, there is always a great danger. The simplest example is hydropower that has been estimated to have killed the most and it's also very destructive to the environment. Surely we could also just give up on most of the energy we "need" if we were really worried about the environment and health.
It's a shame German engineering and production isn't being applied to the problem of providing nuclear power. It's the kind of industry that could be used to bolster the economy in the face of higher labor costs. (Lowering energy costs.) It takes a developed country with lots of research facilities to tackle this kind of problem. This could be a huge missed opportunity. Nuclear fission still has lots of untapped potential in terms of economic efficiency improvements.
Germany in the 1960s until the mid 1980s was a world leader in nuclear power design and construction. They worked on all kinds of advanced reactor technology and were building nuclear power-stations all over the world. Now you won't find many young engineers in Germany in this field of work. The industry was killed off by green ideologues. Luckily France never took this route. If you want a good nuclear power plant, they are the ones to go to.
@@mikethespike7579 Only if you can afford an EPR. Ever read about the costs for Hinkley Point C?
@@oxybenzol9254 HPC is an example of the finest british dumpester fire. You take the safest and most complex reactor in the world, and instead of benefitting of the hard learned lessons at Olkiluto, Flamanville and Taishan , they modify the reactor, somehow adding on a damn EPR some good 7000 modifications resulting in 25% more concrete and 35% more steel than a baseline EPR. This essentialy made HPC a brand new reactor type with the relative consequences. HPC delays and construction times fall mainly on british regulators
@@oxybenzol9254 Oh, yeah, the costs, the costs, remember how much nuclear power stations cost! Is that why so many poor as dirt third world countries are building nuclear power stations? Or explain to me why France hasn't gone bankrupt yet with its 80% nuclear power generation. The extra costs of building a nuclear power station is saved ten fold over its life time.
@ywtcc What makes you think this? Germany still supports many EU projects on nucler power.
it's so sad when even in the modern era we have people who fearmonger nuclear energy. there's literally no better option to feasibly get massive amounts of clean energy
Quite to the contrary. Nuclear power is not an option to get the massive amounts of clean energy needed to stop climate change, but renewables are. Just compare the succes of nuclear power projects and renewable power projects around the globe! Nuclear power is stagnating at best, solar and wind are growing exponentially.
@@MatjesHunts huh. i don't get your point. my point is that nuclear power is "stagnant" because there is a lot of false information/fearmongering regarding it. once a reactor is built (yes it is somewhat expensive to build, though with modular reactors its not nearly as bad), the fuel itself is insanely cheap and we have way way more of it than enough. for reference, even if all other sources of enriched uranium ran out, we would still be able to extract it from ocean water in tiny amounts and it would still be by far worth it to do for the amount of energy it gives.
Justice? Will anything happen to the person, who I’m sure did not act alone, who altered the report? Even given the altered report, people should have known shutting done reliable nuclear power was akin to shooting oneself in the foot.
"it's the right thing to do, bending the rules is worth it. History will be on our side" *sigh
Well, Cicero making a mountain out of a maul hill comes at the time their preferred party, which in fact is very much a cause for this country not moving forward in any way in every single government it was part of, is fighting to get above 5%. It might be unscientific to consider this, but this is purely ideological and has minor relevance. And frankly, for a science commentator is a bit embarrassing to jump on their bandwagon without pointing that out. But then again, a scientists mind probably fails to grasp the cynical way the none-scientific world works, which is not nearly as free of intentions as what they are usually dealing with...
Yea I am also somewhat surprised of her not even mentioning that Cicero is basically Breitbart News and everything should be taken with a grain of salt as there are political motivations in play
@@Bobylein1337 That would be Compact, which operates on the extreme right. Cicero is rather neoliberal/libertarian, but not necessarily less populist.
How much is the rather non-fact-based anti nuclear feeling in Germany encouraged by the inclusion of Gudrun Pausewang's _Die Wolke_ in the school text-book canon? Some decisions about mental health here in New Zealand were shaped by the fact that _One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest_ replaced _The Catcher In The Rye_ as the approved novel for high school English (curriculum designers always wanting something that will really engage the kids, whilst not realising how out of date they are). It is, alas, easy to demonstrate the power of literature for ill; harder to show it as a force for good.
The installed capacity versus energy production is quite striking for the renewables. As Peter Zeihan says, its not particularly sunny or windy in Germany.
Peter zeihsn invented numbers in his video. Just invented them.
@@tiro0oO5 I wasn't using his numbers I was using the numbers that Sabine cited in this video. I don't blindly believe everything he says but his opinions are provocative and run counter to the mainstream media so I take note of them and when I find another person/channel that corroborates it, I become more convinced that his opinion has merit at least on this particular topic.
Perhaps politicians should at least have some rudimentary understanding of the things they are voting on.
Sabine, you said that “someone who was not part of the expert committee rewrote the version”. But that's not quite right. Both versions are available online and anyone can read them. If you compare them, you will see that nothing has been changed, only a “conclusion” has been added. And yes, this conclusion says that it is not recommended to keep the power plants running for several years. So the “scandal” is basically someone in the ministry adding a conclusion to a document. To be honest, I think this is simply his job. He reads documents from expert commissions and adds conclusions. You could argue that his conclusion contradicts the content of the document, but even that is questionable. The document states that it is possible to keep the power plants running for several years, but this is associated with many challenges. The conclusion then states that it is not advisable. You, Sabine, say yourself that it wouldn't make sense to do this at such a late stage. So maybe this guy from the ministry just did his job: reading a document, coming to a conclusion and write this down. He doesn't removed anything from the document, so everyone who read this document could still come up with a different conclusion (at this point, the Cicero article seem to just lying, cause they claim that paragraphs would have been removed, which seems to be not the case). So I ask myself: where is the scandal here? This is now the second time after the RKI papers that someone has simply pulled a “scandal” out of a hat and everyone is talking about it, but no one actually reads the original documents.
The scandal is that this channel continues to spread such information. I canceled my subscription.
You seem to imply that because the outcome was the same, the Green Party, and the bureaucrats who lied are absolved. On the other hand, had they done nothing - had they merely let the report be published as-is, and then the outcome was the same - they would not have had to lie! The problem isn't the outcome, the problem is the lie. Bureaucrats should not change reports to satisfy political masters, and political masters should not ask them to. Politicians should work to persuade people on their interpretation of the fact, not 'change' the facts themselves.
Would you mind providing links or exact search terms to find those reports? Pretty hard to wade through all the news articles about this to find the sources and I think your point is critical to the discussion. If it is just a "conclusion" added then this video is absurd.
Also to note: cicero is quite anti-green party and somewhat right leaning, so slander of the green party is expected from them…
I think that the scandal would be that the civil servant's conclusion (which they are entitled to have) is presented without distinguishing it from the conclusions of the expert panel.
Hopefully there's not lies going all the way back to more significant moments.
Like the unconditional surrender documents in May 1945. That would be embarrassing to discover we are actually still at war with you.
Same thing that happened in South Africa in the early 2000's a situation which has now crippled our economy due to energy insecurity
Why extending the operational lifetime of nuclear fission power plants using ²³⁵U, when coal can do it as well? Uranium ores with EROI > 1 will be exploited in about 70 years from now. At the current rate of consumption, BTW. Already in about 35 years, concentration of Uranium within ores will have decreased to a level, where the gCO2eq/kWh-value will be equal to natural gas power plants. Additionally, there is no sensible reason to believe, owners of fossile ressources would abandon their wealth, since human greed has a deterministic value as Gh = lim x→0 of 1/x. Therefore, burning up all fossile fuels will lead us closer to the state of our sister planet: Venus.
So many lies out there
A) Shame the guilty ones, prosecute the guilty ones alive and change the course. B) Re-educate the public C) Restart the reactors that could be reactivated. D) shut down the coal power plants and start buying more power from France- during the most of the year France has tens of GW idling because they build for peak of the winter months. France would get money, Germans clean air and not "clean propaganda year". Voices like yours are important!
France provides gas to Germany, and Germany provides electricity to France.
@@0lhe Just at the very moment France uses about 30GW out of 60GW of nuclear power. Some of that idling capacity may be in refuelling or maintenance, but clearly neighbouring countries could switch of some 20GW of coal and gas. Not doing that means that governments don't really care about climate change(??)
@@msxcytb Why would Germany buy this "idle capacity" for more money that it would pay for other ressources? Do you really want the german public to pay even more for electricity?
@@peter_meyer it would be reliable, ultra low carbon power and it should be cheap- helping France to keep the power plants economical (and building new one's). It would save the expensive and precious for industry natgas. Other resources do not have the same properties. Germany is not doing it perhaps because it would be admitting the failure of energiewende, and they have to pay for miners and operators of gas and coal powerplants somehow. Climate be damned.
@@msxcytb "it should be cheap" now there you got a problem
Back then, I was against the nuclear phase out. I called it stupid reactionism. But now I am not so sure reversing that decision is really solving the problem at hand. Nuclear takes so long to build and we lost a lot of expertise.... Renewables are much easier to implement. I think instead of trying to catch up in nuclear, we should try to lead in other categories, like decentralized solar and storage with V2G being super important. Also deep geothermal and maybe fusion.
I fully agree. I tended to lose some sympathy and friendships in the past, when I insisted, that nuclear was a possibility, to combat climate change. But I finally got fed up and drew my support, when the proponents of nuclear energy _consistently_ failed to follow through with the required actions for that - namely properly organizing the disposal of nuclear waste and recycling processes. Mind you, the state of Bavaria, where they were traditionally the ones drumming the loudest for nuclear, was incapable to get the WAA in Wackersdorf done. And then this deterioration of security in nuclear facilities, not just in Germany: the idiocy of the 'Versuchsendlager Asse', where they failed to do proper record keeping - a thing you usually get taught to do for every experiment in university. The leaks at the rod factory in Hanau Wolfgang. Tepco (Fukushima) not heading the advice of Japanese Government supervisors, to secure their pumps against a Tsunami wave. And now, these are exactly the ones complaining about it. Speed up the grid modernization and the storage solutions, for f* sake, instead of complaining about spilled milk.
@@Misophist Yep, forgot grid modernization... how telling. ^^
"Nuclear takes so long to build" Nuclear is one of the fastest forms of power in years per GWe terms.
Yeah it takes a while to build. Which is why it should have already been started. Fact remains the sun doesn't always shine, wind doesn't always blow, and batteries are not some clean magical fix. Unless you don't like things like KZhead and are willing to revert to a more or less pre-internet age and allow global warming to get a lot worse, should really start the building already. And no, that does not mean the builders and operators get to do any corner cutting, corporate BS either. Marie was right, you can have your cake and eat it.
This is playing out so exactly as I thought it would back in 2011 after Fukashima happened. I was stunned when Angela Merkel - a physical scientist highly educated about the actual physics of nuclear energy - seem to have a major brain glitch that erased her educational background and literally panicked about Germany's active nuclear plants. You expect this from Greens and other soft headed anti technology types, but from a PhD in physical chemistry!?!? The theory of brain damage was bolstered by her inexplicable sudden welcoming of refugees without number pouring in from anywhere and everywhere in 2015. I'm not German, buy does anyone in a position to know have validation of medical evidence that indicate Merkel was operating with a reduced capability of intellect in her last decade or so? As an American, this feels like a Ronald Reagan, or even Woodrow Wilson redux case.
She had a condition called “populism” and Germany suffered under it. She knew perfectly well that both decisions were stupid - “Multi-Kulti is gescheidert”, you know. Alas, the chose treason over reason.
Merkel was a communist plant and russian asset just like Schröder.
People tend to underestimate how much Big Oil and Gas companies, lobbied against nuclear and coal for the past couple of decades.
More like several decades.
In Germany big oil and gas companies are the same like nuclear companies.
Gazprom and russian disinformation campaign played a key role. State of the art psyops.
Green Kabuki Theatre.