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.