I’ve never understood the anti-nuclear movement. Let’s give up one of the cleanest and most efficient ways to generate energy because reasons?
Cool graph and all, but nuclear power is not the way to go. It’s slow to construct, not flexible at all and very expensive. Building new reactors just isn’t viable when there’s wind and solar.
It’s slow to construct,
This often has to do with expertise and demand. If we aren’t building them often, it becomes more difficult to build them.
not flexible at all
What does this mean? It boils water. How flexible does it have to be to boil water?
very expensive.
So is the environmental crisis.
It very much is the way to go for many countries. Nuclear is expensive, but it takes up significantly less space, and is significantly more stable than solar and wind. They all should be used, but saying nuclear is “not the way to go” is flat out wrong.
I can only speak for Germany, which has more than enough space for renewables
They phased out nuclear after Fukushima because they were worried that all the tsunamis Germany has may also trigger hyper-specific vulnerabilities in their reactor designs.
It’s ironic, how quickly three mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are struck from collective memory. I’m pretty relaxed about nuclear energy though: I will probably be dead and buried by the time these reactors would go life. And young men now have the right to repeat their grandfathers’ mistakes, it’s their world, and their taxmoney. That doesn’t mean I won’t join the protests, should a reactor be planned within 300 miles from my home, but I would protest in a relaxed sort of way, can of beer, chitchat, veggie hotdogs, catching a bit of sun.
3 Mile Island was an overblown media sensation. Chernobyl was a poorly designed and poorly maintained facility doing a live stress controlled by complete morons that literally could not have happened in the next generation reactor design. Fukushima took a literal force of nature to cause an issue and even then it was originally designed to handle it but cost cutting during construction moved the backup power source too close to the water.
Meanwhile the current generation reactors, even discounting SMR, are designed to make those failure modes physically impossible. The ultra-modern SMR designs are already producing commercial power in China with North America following suit in the next 36 months or so.
The plan of the anti-nuclear crowd was to replace it with renewables, but then people kept voting rightwing parties after the nuclear phaseout was made into law. Nowadays rightwingers keep floating the idea of getting back into nuclear, but the electricity companies want nothing to do with it and no one actually wants to pay for it.
And despite all that, fossil fuels are still in the process of being phased out.
But renewables have replaced it? It looks like renewables are over 50% of power generation. Not sure where bioenergy falls though.
The issue is that renewables could have already (mostly) replaced fossil fuels in electricity production, which would have been better in the short to mid term. What OP is wrong about is blaming the anti-nuclear movement instead of the pro-fossil fuels “movement” (fossil fuel company lobbyists).
Yes, that’d have been ideal. But what you said was still wrong, right? Nuclear went down and renewables went up. Therefore renewables replaced nuclear.
Hell, coal is even at like a third of its peak.
Fair, it would have been more accurate to say that the plan was to replace both nuclear and fossil fuels with renewables in a reasonably short timeframe.
But given the current political trajectory, coal use is going to increase again - AFAIK it already did in the US.
If the demand is faster than the curve to replace fossil fuels, and then nuclear starts to go down thanks to not replacing old reactors, we’re going to go back to the fossil fuels. Because apparently we can’t touch demand, that has to go up.
The chart in the post indicates that demand went down … some of that might have been replaced by electricity imports depending on what the chart actually shows, but AFAIK those weren’t that substantial.
I hope all those anti-nuclear people enjoy all the coal they’re burning.
Meh. Why are you trying so hard to blame it on the overwhelmingly leftist anti-nuclear movement, instead of the overwhelmingly rightwing fossil fuel lobby goons?
I blame the fossil fuel lobby goons too.
Because there’s more to blame, and being right or wrong, than what fucking team someone is on. Because of anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany, Germany is right now burning millions of tons of coal more than they would be if they’d kept up nuclear. And these are plants that already existed, that were switched off early. So the biggest modern objection to nuclear power - that it’s expensive compared to renewables - did not apply, because those costs are almost all incurred in construction and decommissioning.
It was a massive own-goal.
We’re constantly making stupid decisions concerning energy. I mean we know about the planet, climate change, sustainability for a long time. Even the predictions in old geography books I found from the 80s are pretty much the right direction… First decision to eventually maybe cut down on nuclear was in 2002… We could probably have settled it by now. If it weren’t for stupid politics, big oil and gas lobbying and our politicians (to this day) trying to get hooked on energy from some wannabe dictators who (surprise) are going to blackmail us at some point.
I think the only sane option is to -at some point- get over it, look ahead and try to come up with a solution. And that’s a big investment into renewables, storage and the energy grid. So by now the first people we need to blame is everyone who isn’t en route towards a better future. I mean we can also blame Merkel. But that in itself isn’t going to get us anywhere.
Sure we are. But I reserve a special place for people who understand that we need to get off fossil fuels but can’t see that that is the most important energy choice of all, by several orders of magnitude, so that if you have the choice to do something else that might be a good idea in its own right, but it would make achieving that harder, you absolutely should not take that choice.
Hmmh. I mean there’s basically 2 options in the mid- and long-term. Renewables, and fusion energy (but we haven figured out that one, yet). Everything else is in limited supply. Oil and gas is predicted to last us for another 50 years, we got plenty coal, that’s a few 100(?) years and uranium is about 40 years until it gets proceedingly more expensive to dig it up. So we shouldn’t be investing in either of those more than we absolutely have to. Though I read maybe we can invent technology to pull uranium out of the ocean at a somewhat reasonable price.
Nuclear reactors are built with a lifespan measured in decades, not centuries, so investing in them when there are decades of economically viable fuel left is reasonable. I couldn’t find your 40 year number (I saw 230) but either way, it shouldn’t be a problem.
It will be a problem at some point, but not so that we should avoid it now.
Your own graph shows coal power has halved.
That graph looks a lot like coal mine s the source with the biggest decrease
you missed the green part of the graph…
to anyone interested, i suggest taking some time browsing through live data, it is quite cool…
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/
At least they got use out of their reactors for a while. Austria went and built one and then decided to just never turn it on.
I’m surprised that electricity use is still at 1990 levels.
The graph doesn’t show electricity use, it shows electricity generation. Electricity generated elsewhere doesn’t show up in the graph.
Edit: BUT apparently Germany does indeed use less electricity than in the 90s. source. Not exactly the sign of a thriving nation.
Everything is significantly more efficient these days. You can run 10-100 modern led lights on the electricity used by 1 conventional bulb, and heat pumps can be upwards of 400% efficient. All of those efficiencies really ad up.
but heat pumps aren’t replacingresistive heating. The vast majority of german houses are heated by oil or gas furnaces. I have lived here for 30+ years and have only ever been in 2 Houses heated by resistive heat. I just looked it up and the percentage was just 5.9% in 1998 and fell to 2.5% in 2025, while the percentage for heat pumps grew from 0.2% to 4.5% in that time. Last year 67.9% of new flats were equipped eith heat pumps. That combined with the imcrease in electric vehicle use should cause an increase in electricity used, and it’s weird that it doesn’t.
I wonder how much of that is due to moving manufacturing abroad… though there were also serious efforts to make electricity use more efficient. Plus Germany started seriously getting into EVs in the 2020s.
I think it’s that, we have less heavy industry, less manufacturing, but also population is fairly constant, we’ve been about 80mio people in 1990 and we’re still about the same (83.5mio). We use more electronics. But electronics also made everything 50x more efficient…
Plus Germany started to seriously get into EVs in the 2020s.
that isn’t really a plus in the context of a question: “how is it possible that the electricity consumption does not grow significantly?”
It’s a plus for the question of whether Germany’s electricity use has become more efficient. Electrification has been a major trend for decades, yet German energy production (which in Germany generally mirrors domestic demand) has been falling since 2016. If it was just because of manufacturing moving abroad, it should have been falling all the way from 1990.
I know a lot of people nowadays talk about nuclear as this abundant energy source which is much cleaner than fossil fuels but this is exactly what was being said around the 70s, then we had two huge nuclear disasters. There’s two generations here that have starkly different views of nuclear energy.
We’ve already accepted the downsides: we’re all held at gunpoint by thousands of nuclear missiles on a daily basis for the past 5 decades and yet there seems to be more people worried about nuclear power than that. We could just as well take advantage of the upside as well.
The two huge nuclear disasters in question: Unreasonable demands of management and a lack of safety protocol.
Human error is inevitable.
Which is why you design it so human error cannot cause a nuclear incident. Which is what we’ve done with modern reactors. Many newer designs are objectively impossible to melt down, not just from the change in physics, but the safety features which cannot reasonably disabled and the oversight for regular inspections.
Well, everything breaks down after a while. Can’t make an everlasting reactor.
So you can’t completely release it from human error.
Of course, nuclear is definitely better than coal. But it takes so long to build, we’re better off focusing on renewables now. In 30 years we’d have switched almost completely to solar anyway.
Why do you think it takes 30 years? It takes 68 months from bare ground to fully functional.
Yes, but those new designs are more expensive, and since each reactor costs a loooot of money, governments take shortcuts, save money and then accidents happen.
So really, the problem is people all the way down
“people are the problem” is foundation of any social and lot of hard sciences 😂
They’re actually not that expensive, overall. The problem is inefficient bureaucracy around it. As a fun fact you can cut the cost in half by repurposing old coal, oil, and natural gas power plants.
No, we need that money to build out wind and solar now (there’s a climate collapse happening today), we can’t wait 20+ years for a nuclear reactor to go online.
If only we could do multiple things.
Fun fact, you still need base load reactors, and fun fact, it takes 5 years to build a nuclear power plant, to be specific, 68 months. From bare ground to fully online and synced with a grid.
But beyond that, solar is nice and can be useful, wind has some uses in some locations, but you have to be okay with being dependent on China since practically zero other countries make solar panels. There are a few, but 80% of all solar panels sold globally are made in China, and if we include local manufacturing, over 99% of all solar panels made are made in China.
I mean I’m okay with that, but EU people specifically get super weirded out by that. Most developed countries have all things necessary for a nuclear power grid and can ensure they can always repair, fuel, and maintain their power plants.
And building one on a fault line by the tsunami-prone sea
If anti-nuclear people knew anything about nuclear power, they wouldn’t be anti-nuclear. The Chernobyl powerplant was an RMBK reactor, completely different in structure than other nuclear powerplants. The fossil fuel industry loves misguided opposition against nuclear energy. Read about the RMBK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
And the nuclear lobby likes people like you.
Where would Germany get uranium from, by the way?
I hope the nuclear lobby likes me.
By sanctioning Russia and confiscating the uranium they buy, obviously (/s)
Ask them how many people died at Fukushima
Different but wrong. I am always interested to know what people’s guesses are for the total number of deaths caused by Chernobyl, because it’s remarkably low in my opinion. It’s by far the safest form of energy generation. Yes, even safer than wind power… why? Simply because wind is a very energy un-dense source of energy so you need to do a lot of construction to obtain it, and construction is a somewhat dangerous job - there’ll be some small number of people who fall off wind turbines (or off rooves while installing solar panels, or whatever) and the huge number of turbines works out as swamping the small number of nuclear plants and tiny number of deadly nuclear disasters.
Well, USA, uk, China, France etc also do 😝 both graph AND title are clickbait.
What? How is it clickbait? The title explains exactly what the graph displays. How did this offend you?
Obviously, the problem is with the word “now”.
“And now still relies…” it does, in this moment, still rely on fossil fuels.
