Some German politician speak about past errors, but they don't intend to correct them. There is still a very vocal opposition to nuclear energy. Because Germany can always fall back on coal, it's politically easier and cheaper to not change anything related to nuclear power.
Considering the article is talking about the UK, which recently axed a significant portion of its new high-speed railway corridor: don't count on it.
Even worse: railway electrification is not at all a given in the UK. A big downside of being the first country to roll out railways is that a huge number of railway lines (crucially, including tunnels and overpasses) were built to the dimensions of early trains. In practice this means that electrification isn't just adding some wires, it means having to re-dig all of the tunnels and having to raise all of the overpasses. To illustrate, the UKs universal loading gauge is small enough that you can't even fit regular intermodal container trains into it - and that's without overhead wiring!
There'll be no new third rail electrification, though (apart from some minor infill, or reorganisation around depots).
The conversion of remaining mainlines to 25 kV overhead AC is going slower than anyone wants, but already over 70% of passenger rail journeys use electric traction (and actually more like 80% by passenger kilometers).
There are an awful lot of low-traffic rural lines that it won't be economic to electrify using current technology, so we'll need to rely on battery electric for those.
Either way, it's largely orthogonal to the problem of electrifying road transport.
With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.
> Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.
They do if you start from ambient temperature, but they can be more effective if they are pumping heat out of the waste heat stream of a process. This requires different working fluids than lower temperature systems, though.
Most industrial heat energy is not consumed at very high temperature. IIRC, 2/3rds is at less than 300 C.
Electric resistance heating might also allow PV to dispense with auxiliary equipment, like inverters, so even if inefficient that might not matter as much. Heat also allows easy long duration storage at scale, even at rather high temperature, so resistive heating can be used with intermittently available cheap surplus power.
For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient. This process is accounting for 1–2% of global energy consumption, 3% of global carbon emissions, and 3% to 5% of natural gas consumption.
Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Heating storage (also cold storage) in industrial applications is possible and is done, but in many cases you are limited by allowed temperature range of chemical/physical processes. For example you are limited on the lower side by melting temperature of material and on higher side by high temperature corrosion.
In cement industries models have been developed to flatten the grid's hourly demand curve by minimizing the industrial customer's hourly peak loads and maximizing the shifting of demand to off-peak periods.
> For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient.
I should note that this process doesn't require external heat input (except at startup). The reaction is exothermic and the excess heat is used to make steam that either is used to make power or to provide steam to other processes. It does require pressurization, but that's an input of work, not heat.
It would be nice if the process could be run at lower temperature, but we just don't have the catalysts for that.
> Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Electric resistance heat is very storable and can provide heat 24/7, possibly even 24/7/365 at high latitude with PV.
You have to include the costs of conversion - gas power plant. Also you have some some losses during conversion from heat to electricity, a modern gas power plant can be up to 60% efficient.
Germany has switched from one gas supplier to different gas suppliers.
The past Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck famously once sad:
“Nuclear power doesn’t help us there at all,” “We have a heating problem or an industry problem, but not an electricity problem – at least not generally throughout the country.”
Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974.
"As a direct result of the 1973 oil crisis, on 6 March 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Messmer announced what became known as the 'Messmer Plan', a hugely ambitious nuclear power program aimed at generating most of France's electricity from nuclear power. At the time of the oil crisis most of France's electricity came from foreign oil. "
"Work on the first three plants, at Tricastin, Gravelines, and Dampierre, started the same year and France installed 56 reactors over the next 15 years."
How do you measure health effects of different sources of electric energy?
If you compare deaths per TWh, then nuclear power is much, much safer then coal energy.
One source of this media. Media loves to write and talk about nuclear incidents and really blow this out of proportion to real health hazards. For decades, newsrooms have operated under the premise that 'if it bleeds it leads'. If something happen infrequently and could have big impact on many people it makes more interesting news story.
Flight industry has similar public perception problem. Transport statistic shows that travel by airplane is safer the car, yet much more people fear flying then driving. A deadly airplane crash is reported in all newspapers, the daily deaths from the car crashes are not even mentioned.
Popular tv-series "The Simpsons" (three eyed fish, green radioactive goo), movies Spiderman (if I get bitten by a radioactive spider), Hulk (gamma rays make you super strong), China Syndrome, the german movie "Die Volke", etc., doesn't help much with education about nuclear power.
Deaths from burning coal don't get much attention in the media, because the happen continuously each year, over decades.
> Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974.
This is 2026. Doing things in 1974 isn't an option because time's arrow points the wrong way.
If you want Europe to do things now that it should have done in 1974 you'd need to explain how it'll stall on all the consequences for years. France, which you held up as a model says it can build a nuclear generator in about 5-6 years, but none of these optimistic projections came true this century, more typically the plant takes 10-15 years and it can be more.
So, suppose they start today likely they'll say the generator goes online in 2032. How does that help with the crisis Trump caused this month ? Worse, come 2032 the date is likely to be 2040 instead.
Now, renewables go a lot faster. For solar it's genuinely possible to get paperwork done in January and be selling electricity made with those panels by summer. It's not easy, plenty of projects will be delayed out a 1-2 years, particularly if local government don't want the project, but with a following wind it can really be the same year. Wind is slower, but still you will almost certainly build it and switch it on in five years, the optimistic guess France never hits for its nuclear plants.
Going up from what date exactly? Construction start is when you already have all plans approved, permitted and financed, so 4 years from construction start is far from "putting up a plant in 5 years". So, some examples for 5 years all in?
The way the EU forces the electricity market to operate makes them completely unprofitable. Renewables are always given priority in the market, which results in other power plants operating at a capacity factor of 30-40%. Since nuclear power plants are mostly capital expenditure-intensive, this makes the electricity they produce absurdly expensive.
Because the way how the EU electricity market operates first to supply electric power are the power plants with the lowest operating costs. This are usually renewables and nuclear power plants. Both are capital expensive and cheap in operating costs.
Usually the capacity factor of European nuclear reactors is higher than 60%.
That’s just a consequence of how they bid. The marginal cost for a renewable plant is zero. It’s non-zero for nuclear power.
But nuclear power don’t want to shut down since that both increases wear and tear and makes them unable to capture revenue when the prices become higher again.
So they bid negative expecting to eat the losses and let more flexible plant shut down first.
Hydropower and solar have much lower operating costs.
All thermal power plants experience wear and tear and have to be regularly repaired and maintained. Nuclear power plants can load-follow (within technical limits), but as the operating costs (maintance, repair, staffing, fuel) are much lower then capital costs it makes economic sense to run them at full power.
Wind curtailment is the deliberate reduction of electricity output from wind turbines, despite their capability to generate power under existing wind conditions. This practice is typically implemented by grid operators to maintain the stability of the electrical grid or to address specific operational constraints.
"paid to turn off"
Wind energy providers in some countries are compensated for curtailment, this a form of subsidy for renewables. It can be payed directly by the goverment, or it is added to the price of electricity for consumer.
According to International Energy Agency mineral demand for clean energy technologies would rise by at least four times by 2040 to meet
climate goals, with particularly high growth for EV-related minerals.
You can recycle the minerals and you should recycle minerals, but almost no recycling technology can recycle 100% of minerals and recycling has always costs attached to it (this can be for example capital costs, building recycling facilities, operating costs in form labor costs for separation, energy costs for melting material and purification processes).
For example aluminum is recycled, not because we have have a shortage of aluminium ore (Earth's mantle is 2.38% aluminium by mass), but because recycling is less energy intensive then production of fresh aluminum.
https://international-aluminium.org/work-areas/recycling/
The worst kind of recycling is decreasing the costs of recycling by outsourcing to third world countries, by exploiting lax environmental regulations or corrupted environmental protection officials.
> aluminum is recycled... but because recycling is less energy intensive then production of fresh aluminum
So what?
> Recycling of EV batteries will lose between 1-10% of the valuable metals
How much gasoline, coal, and natural gas can you recycle?
> The worst kind of recycling is decreasing the costs of recycling by outsourcing to third world countries
That's going to happen as long as those countries are poor. They need to develop their economies quickly to demand better laws. Climate change will be a danger for many of them in the coming years.
Better, less-polluting recycling tech will help them far more than continuing to burn fossil fuels.
I just wanted to show that there no such thing as perfect recycling technology.
If you want to choose least material intensive source of energy, you choose nuclear energy. By choosing nuclear energy you get the benefit of almost decarbonizing you electricity production as can be seen in France.
Nuclear isn't perfect either. You can be embargoed for uranium way more easily, if you don't already have it. It's more expensive to build than solar and takes much longer (and don't BS me with "it's because of the regulations!" - everything, even solar, has regulations that drive up the cost and construction timelines).
If you can build price-competitive nuclear energy without government backstops or insurance, you have my blessing.
I personally think nuclear's time is in the far future when we have more advanced, exotic materials that make it radically safer and cheaper. For applications where solar isn't sufficient, such as space propulsion.
No energy technology is perfect each has it's benefits and drawbacks.
Yes a nuclear power plant more expensive than solar power plant. But an electric grid based on renewables, if we add the costs for storage, backup generator, power lines upgrades needed for smoothing out regional variations of production, is more expensive (or it can be cheaper if you have access to cheap natural gas, Texas power grid).
> But an electric grid based on renewables, if we add the costs for storage, backup generator, power lines upgrades needed for smoothing out regional variations of production, is more expensive
Even the Texas power grid makes heavy use of wind and solar.
> So stockpiling few years worth of fuel is not a problem
Weird you were oddly concerned about being "China dependence for PV" but this you just wave away. Stockpiling a few decades of PV and batteries is also not a problem.
"Rare earths" (not really used in panels) are plentiful too. Refining them is polluting and low-margin so developed countries prefer not to deal with them. Btw uranium is the same.
> Nuclear energy also quite safe
I didn't say anything about it being unsafe. But making it that safe currently costs a lot of money in materials, labor, and regulations.
Honestly it feels like you decided beforehand "nuclear is the way" and are trying to make every fact fit that. Or you're a troll/paid off by Big Oil. Sorry.
Natural gas (40.5%)
Coal (12.7%)
Other fossil (1.01%)
Nuclear (8.47%)
Renewable - Wind (23.2%)
Renewable - Solar (13.7%)
Other Renewables - Hydro, Biomass (0.18%)
Texas has access to cheap natural gas, which is used when renewable don't deliver. In Texas the price is king.
> Big Oil. Sorry.
I would really prefer high world-wide carbon tax. World-wide because cheap Chinese poly-silicon production for cheap PV is an excellent example of carbon leakage.
In Europe between 4–6% of oil and gas is used for producing plastics and globally around 6% of global oil is used. By contrast, 87% is used for transport, electricity and heating.
If we could reduce our oil usage by 94% I'd weep with joy. Yes that's still a lot of oil. But it would be a complete sea change from what is currently happening.
Some German politician speak about past errors, but they don't intend to correct them. There is still a very vocal opposition to nuclear energy. Because Germany can always fall back on coal, it's politically easier and cheaper to not change anything related to nuclear power.
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