(www.euronews.com)
There are some very nice natural swimming pools in the local area thanks to that, for example:
https://www.kudyznudy.cz/aktivity/koupaliste-u-libuse-v-lule... (stone quarry, IMHO one of the best summer swimming pools anywhere)
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zatopen%C3%BD_lom_v_Blansku (stone quarry)
https://www.jednoustopouceskem.cz/listing/lom-kaolinka-prime... (kaolin mine)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAL_d-5FsGQ - Tioga Pit Mine (225' deep)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Mine_Pit_Lake (450' deep)
https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2026/07/wasser-mangel-...
Climate change, as your article says.
It also says that they want to use those new lakes as reservoirs to help out the situation.
So it will be rough for the area. It’s man-made though. That’s why I compared it to the Colorado basin situation around lake Lake Mead. Here is another article: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/spr...
Projects like Garzweiler and Hambach were expected to take 25 to 30 years to fill up, but with droughts like this summer it might take much longer and the water would have to be diverted from already stressed ecosystems like the Rhine.
This whole topic has become much more complicated in the last years...
What you're thinking of is the processing aspect of mining, which is a whole different beast.
When I was a kid I remember a number of very old stone quarries that had been allowed to fill, then years later they had to put up warnings for people to stay out because the high Ph water was dissolving metals into it.
https://www.thw.com/projects/49-senior-living/323-berry-coll...
Turning old brownfield into usable and livable space is a win all around
In the 1990s, we lived on a lake in Indiana that was reclaimed from strip mines. Recommended.
https://www.cityoftenino.us/parks-recreation/page/quarry-poo...
This quarry in chicago used as a storm water buffer is cool. It would be interesting to drive over it when it is full.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/environment/2026/07/11/chicago-...
One might think that they've come to the conclusion that it's time to phase out coal and move towards renewables. But coal is still big in Germany, and with the current Minister for Economic Affairs, Katarina Reiche [1], the fossil fuel lobby has installed a puppet in that position, one who is going all in on fossils again and pushing legislation that makes it much harder to expand solar and wind capacity. Even though no one needs coal anymore, big companies like RWE still forcibly demolish villages to expand their mines and show off their power .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherina_Reiche [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausstieg_aus_der_Kohleverstrom... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
Germany isn't keeping their coal-fired power plants and they're not building new gas-fired power plants despite the energy transition but because of it.
You're spreading conspiracy theories when you claim Katherina Reiche is a fossil fuel puppet. She is doing what has always been the plan for the energy transition: Building gas-fired power plants.
That plan is even in the DENA study for the energy transition:
https://www.dena.de/fileadmin/dena/Dokumente/Pdf/9262_dena-L... (p. 29)
And before you claim DENA is some sort of fossil fuel lobby organization, they're not. DENA belongs to the German state and was founded in 2000 by SPD and Greens:
4 hour storage battery operated renewables are now cost competitive with gas plants.
" Most of these events occur from October to February; typically 50 to 150 hours per year, a single event usually lasts up to 24 hours "
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-robert-habeck-coal-e...
I wonder how that happened…
A study found that most of the contamination these days doesn't come from Chernobyl anymore but from nuclear weapon tests.
https://www.infranken.de/bayern/warum-wildschweine-in-bayern...
PS: hunters with contaminated boars have to pay for the disposal themselves but can get the money back from the state. So, like with everything around nuclear: in the end it's the taxpayer who has to pay for it.
https://www.bayern.landtag.de/www/ElanTextAblage_WP17/Drucks...
Renewables like solar have a per-MWh generation cost of zero. You literally have to make the electricity price negative before it makes sense for the operator to shut it down. Their profitability depends only on the average electricity price: the high market price during the winter makes up for the near-zero market price during the summer.
In a free electricity market there is absolutely zero demand for a power plant which generates a constant amount of power and acts as the "base supply". With dirt-cheap renewables its capacity simply isn't needed during the summer and its nonzero running costs makes it unable to compete. What is needed instead is a peaker plant which can supplement renewables, and which is profitable when it operates only during low-sun low-wind "dunkelflaute" winter weeks.
Nuclear is fundamentally incompatible with this. It is the most expensive form of electricity generation and its costs are dominated by the need to pay back a massive construction loan. In a free market a nuclear power plant would only be able to operate for a few weeks per year, which instantly kills its business case.
Want nuclear? Then you'll have to accept that it will require huge government subsidies, and that during high-supply moments you'll be turning off free renewables to make space for expensive nuclear.
If anything, one could say that renewables will be the new base load supply. The real question is: who will be doing the peaking?
Oh ffs. Nuclear power is not clean. Look what the GDR left us with the Wismut "heritage" - mining for uranium is incredibly toxic, and safely disposing of the spent fuel and all the other irradiated remains is incredibly expensive.
We just don't see it in our Western nations because we get our uranium from Russia, other -'stan countries and remote regions in Australia and Canada where barely anyone lives to care about the destruction.
As for the disposal, over half of the already measly budget for the Ministry of Environment goes to take care of the nuclear waste - 1.4 billion euros A YEAR [1]. In contrast, only 400 million euros are spent on environmental production. Nuclear power wasn't just never clean, it also was never cheap because the true costs were never accounted for.
Want to convince people that nuclear is a bad idea? Forget about the waste, the dangers, and the overseas environmental impact, and instead focus purely on the cost. The business case for nuclear in a renewable-heavy grid is extremely poor, and very few people like nuclear enough that they would willingly pay massive subsidies to choose it instead of any of the alternatives. For most people nuclear is a necessary evil and a magic-solve-everything solution to the climate crisis: they don't like it enough to stick to it when more attractive options exist.
lol, wtf?!
Before becoming a minister she was employed by E.ON (for non-Germans: one of the big four energy companies in Germany) to lobby for their interests.
She is _the_ prototype of a fossil fuel puppet.
Uh... Whut? They're not just building them, but actively subsidizing them: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-government-appro...
Because of pinky-promises about 'hydrogen' some time in future.
“Part of Lusatian Lakeland – now Europe's largest artificial water landscape”
Even that’s debatable, I think, given, for example:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alqueva_Dam: a 250 km² artificial lake
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd_Reservoir: over 3,000km²
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJsselmeer: 1,100km²
=> it depends on such things as whether you call a reservoir a lake, how you define “water landscape”, etc.
Alternatively, flood the mineshafts and set up heat exchangers. Wait for Co2 turbines to become viable and get rid of gas.
Because production costs aren't what's setting the prices, supply and demand is.
Cheap solar and wind power doesn't help when it's not available.
So yeah the cost is in moving and storing the electricity by maintaining and expanding the infrastructure.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/fifteen_minutes
Very useful.
If we would have, it would look much different now.
If you believe in the transition to renewables, Germany fundamentally does still need gas turbines to make that happen, more than we currently have.
And that's exactly what Germany is doing. Their natural gas plants only run ~15% of the time. Usage is going down faster than capacity is going up.
https://unpopular-truth.com/2024/07/05/natures-influence-on-...
Also, have you ever done some research on how winds work? They're usually blowing (or not blowing) across the whole continent.
So, yeah, Dunkelflauten usually cover the whole continent.
https://communities.springernature.com/posts/quantifying-the...
Ed Conway released a video on the UK's gas network and disaster planning[0].
As shown in their documentary, a shutdown of exports to Europe would only require 2 or 3 failure events (low production from wind/solar, high-usage of gas for power/heating, disruption or cessation of imports via gas-tankers, well-placed damage to the gas network, extreme weather in the north sea). To maintain pressure in the gas network, they would begin shedding the largest loads first, exports to mainland Europe is #1 on that list.
Let's also not forget Nordstream and the disaster that caused when it mysteriously blew up. Before those pipelines exploded, there were protests in Germany because people were struggling to heat their homes.
Nuclear isn't vulnerable to any of these issues, we're very lucky that construction and investment has continued these past decades. /s
Nuclear is unsuited for this problem. Europe needs something that will supply approximately all of its power needs for only a few days a year. Europe already has enough natural gas storage to do this. If you built enough nuclear to cover all its power needs for a few days a year you'd have enough nuclear to supply all its power needs 365 days a year. That would work great, but it would cost tens of trillions.
I could only find news on the opposite: https://www.oedigital.com/amp/news/540213-siemens-gamesa-ceo...
1. There should be plenty broken up press board after the apocalypse. It is apparently quite flammable but sometimes gives off bad emissions. Perhaps you should set up a website where people can print a guide to press board emissions, so we all will know which to cook foods with and which to only heat with.
2. And there should be plenty of auto tires. Here's a fella who needs only a few tires each day to heat a 12' x 16' corrugated metal siding workshop:
https://www.farmshow.com/view_articles.php?a_id=1072
Another article with photos:
https://www.farmshow.com/a_download_page.php?aid=MzI4Nw==
3. Finally we see:
"Study Shows Dangerous Plastics Are Being Used As Fuel To Heat Homes":
https://www.slashgear.com/2075676/plastic-fuel-burning-heat-...
So I don't see a problem finding dry combustible fuel, In fact gathering fuel will be somewhat like gathering manna in the desert!8-))