this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I'm also not convinced it's a good long-term strategy based on the other points I've mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn't really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it's just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
watch us be repeating the same excuse in another 50 years. yes, nuclear takes a long time to build but that doesn’t mean we should just not do it.
also at the bare minimum we should not be shutting down functional reactors which is happening in europe.
As I already said I do have a lot of concerns around nuclear power as a long term strategy that I do not see or at least see as less of a problem with renewable energy sources.
I don't know about Europe as a whole but in Germany we did not shut down functional reactors. We shut down reactors of which no one knows how functional they are because no one checked that because they were scheduled to be shut down anyways.
And I'll repeat again: discussing if this was a mistake is such a moot point it literally doesn't matter now. It's done. Discussing this again and again just takes up everyone's time and energy without any productive outcome.
That's functionally the same thing. And it does matter to discuss. Even if you believe the ship has sailed in Germany, it hasn't elsewhere, and Germany's experience can be useful to learn from.
It's not. Not knowing if something works is far removed from knowing something does in fact still work. Discussing this again and again with the same arguments on both sides is not fruitful. And it doesn't help making any of the current decisions around our enery supply for the forseeable future.
You said:
If they weren't scheduled to be shut down in the first place people would have known they worked.
Or they would have known that they don't work. Thats the thing. It is very much possible that further operation of these reactores would have been economically insensible. Maybe the repairs would have been so expensive and timeintensive that it would be easier to build new ones. The point is noone knows.
We can argue all day if what the CDU decided together with the owners of the plants was a good decision or a bad one. Nothing productive for the discussion around renewable energy will come out of that discussion. The plants are closed and they wont be able to get up and running in the forseeable future.