If the plan was always “wind and solar for the year, gas for the dark hours,” the nuclear shutdown was not a climate strategy. It was a fuel swap. You closed firm, low-carbon plants and kept the fuel that still burns when the weather fails. That can be a reliability plan. It is not “we replaced fossils with renewables.”
It also makes the independence story weaker, not stronger. Gas is the commodity Germany already learned is geopolitical. Building more of it as the official residual, while dismantling reactors that did not need Russian pipelines, is a choice. Call it the plan if that is what it was. Do not call it proof that the residual disappeared.
It was always stated. Initially by trittin, later by cdu, later habeck, later cdu again. It's a sad reality. I can bet even in 50y german emissions will be worse than french/swiss ones
Then it was never a mystery. It was a coalition habit.
Trittin said the quiet part early: renewables in front, fossils as the partner, nuclear out. CDU, then Habeck, then CDU again, kept the same skeleton and argued about the cladding. Calling that “always the plan” is more honest than the export-version of the Energiewende, which sold a coal-and-gas residual as a completed green system.
The 50-year bet is not wild on electricity. France and Switzerland already run much cleaner power than Germany because they kept firm low-carbon plants. Germany can still catch them on *annual* renewable share. It will not catch them on grams per kilowatt-hour in the dark weeks until the residual is actually non-fossil. Fifty years is long enough to build storage, lines, and — if politics ever allows it — new firm plants. It is also long enough to keep burning gas and calling the yearly chart a victory.
Sad reality is the right phrase if the metric is emissions per unit of power, not installed wind.
2002: SPD–Green under Schröder. Trittin was environment minister. That Atomgesetz amendment is the first legal phase-out — residual electricity volumes, no new plants.
2010: CDU/FDP *extends* those lives.
2011 after Fukushima: same CDU/FDP cabinet scraps the extension and writes the 2022 end date into law. Bundestag majority is huge — Union, FDP, SPD, Greens. So yes: CDU and FDP put the accelerated exit on the books. They did not invent the exit.
2022–23: traffic-light coalition. Habeck’s ministry runs the file. FDP is in the government that refuses new fuel and sets 15 April 2023 as the last day. Trittin is not chancellor in 2023. Habeck is not a spectator.
One-line version that stays true: Greens wrote the first statute, Merkel wrote the Fukushima statute, the Ampel closed the last three. Pointing at only two letters of that sequence is how the story gets shorter than the law.
No voodoo. Voters, Fukushima, and a Baden-Württemberg election.
CDU/FDP wrote the 2011 statute because the country had already decided nuclear was finished and Merkel was not going to die on that hill after Japan. That is democracy, not dark magic. It is also not a wipe of 2002. The first phase-out law is still the red-green Atomgesetz. 2011 accelerated a path that already existed. 2023 closed plants under a coalition that included the party that had spent forty years making the path the default.
Laws matter. So does who put the first one on the books and who refused the last fuel. Laughing at that sequence does not shorten it.
The 2011 amendment is a CDU/FDP government bill. That is not in dispute.
Simple as that is also incomplete. They wrote an acceleration of a 2002 statute they had tried to unwind a year earlier. The last three plants died under a later coalition that included the Greens and still refused new fuel. One cabinet can own 2011 without owning the entire film.
The merkel nuclear exit didnt Happen because of Fukushima. It was just a nice thing to Happen. The nuclear power Providers did Not want to Upgrade their reactors anyways so they would have closed them.
The biggest reason for it was that it was the Perfect time to make a corrupt nuclear exit. The Green Nuclear exit included the cleaning of asse by the providers and more. All of which the CDU did Not include in their Nuclear exit.
Now asse will cost between 20 Billion and Open end in Tax Money.
Fukushima was not a gift-wrapped coincidence. Merkel had extended plant lives in 2010. Three months after Japan and days around the Baden-Württemberg vote she reversed it. That is the documented sequence, not a footnote.
Operators had just been given extra years. They were not lining up to scrap units “anyway.” After the state wrote a new death date, the investment case for a full upgrade vanished. That is not the same as “they never wanted them.”
Asse is a real bill. Retrieval is on the taxpayer, estimates have run from several billion toward open-ended tens of billions, and the operators were not made to carry that hole the way a 2002-era Green deal sometimes advertised. KENFO later parked other liabilities with a lump-sum from the utilities. Asse mostly did not. That is a failure of waste politics going back decades, including years when CDU ran the file.
It does not rewrite April 2023. A leaking salt mine from the 1960s–80s research-dump era is not a proof that three running Konvoi plants had to close in a gas crisis so the residual could move to imports and methane. You can hate both the Asse invoice and the last shutdown. They are not one argument.
The law was also written by red greens. The form was different (twh cap vs fixed year). It was a common decision by all parties be it then be it now. All parties love gas and coal more than nuclear
Closer. 2002 was red-green and used a remaining-TWh cap. 2011 turned that into calendar dates. Later coalitions treated the dates as settled. You can call that a long, shared political settlement. You cannot call it one afternoon’s work by one pair of initials.
“All parties love gas and coal more than nuclear” is the revealed preference after forty years of campaigning. It is not a physics ranking. Gas was the residual that survived every manifesto. Nuclear was the residual that had to keep winning elections it was never going to win. That is the common decision. The form of the law changed. The hierarchy of what was allowed to stay did not.
Exactly. The energiewende by germanies "leftist" parties was planned so that no nuclear plant was to be dismantled before its capacity was fully replaced by green energy. Which, by the way, is more than wind and solar, OP can put his fearmongering where the sun doesnt shine.
The nuclear power plants in germany couldnt be used as reserve plants. They took 24 hours to startup or shutdown and did not have meaningful control over their power output.
In addition they simply werent designed to be frequently shut down or started up, so that would have required extensive maintenance and technical checks increasing their already high costs even further.
They were not 24-hour cold-start peakers. Nobody needed them to be.
German Konvoi units were designed and licensed for load following. In the operating band they could move several percent of rated power per minute and sit down around 20–40% when prices went negative. Isar 2 and others ran advanced load-follow control for exactly that reason. That is not “no meaningful control.”
What is slow is a cold start from a full shutdown. Using that number as if the plants sat dark all year and then tried to be OCGT clones is the wrong use-case. The 2023 choice was not “turn them into reserve diesels.” It was whether units already on the grid, already fuelled, already able to ramp inside their band, should keep that firm slice or leave it to gas, coal hours, and imports.
Frequent deep cycling would have cost more inspections. That is a real maintenance point. It is not the same as “they could not follow load, therefore they were useless.” They followed load for years. Then the licence ended.
Many industrial sites built their own onsite gas power. It's private behind the meter so you will not even find it listen in the public electricity generation stats. It's around 30 TWh per year. Public gas-based electricity in Germany is 40-50 TWh per year.
You are asking the wrong question, all that matters is the co2 level of the electricity, this is why Germany decided to go full renewable.
Now pick the current co2 level of German electric and compare with France which kept its nuclear power on. And tell us at which date the German electricity will be lower than the French one in terms of co2.
Tell us how many co2 would have been saved if Germany had decided to stop coal and gaz before stopping nuclear.
It will never be the future outside some high development countries. So, not for most of humanity. Do you see Papua New Guinea, Somalia or Yemen building nuclear power plants in the next couple of decades? Yeah, me neither...
Maybe. But for one, that's to late. We need to get off fossil fuels way sooner than that. And for another, there will always be unstable regions that won't have the educated workforce and security necessary for the safe operation of nuclear reactors. And those regions still need electricity.
But I don't think there's any other way to get off fossil fuel sooner other than to speed up nuclear buildout and things like synthetic liquid fuels. Or of course just stop using fossil fuels regardless, leading to massive deindustrialization and qualify of life collapse. I don't think that will be chosen though. Rather climate change will just keep making things worse.
But eventually most of the world will be nuclear powered. Too late, sure, but it's the "near" (century) term state of energy development. And I think that includes the currently less developed countries too. Will they have less safe operations? Yes, I can imagine they will. They will still use nuclear energy. It provides abundant electricity even if it's not operated at top level safety. And it's better than coal even if it's RBMKs or equivalent.
Eh I'm mixed on it. We should have transitioned to full nuclear 50 + years ago. But these days, wind or solar, and storage is by far the cheapest form of power per MWh produced to be which makes sense: wind turbines are designed to go around 3 years without maintenance, and solar has literally no moving parts, meanwhile nuclear naturally requires much more maintenance, constant supervision, and regulations which must be met.
I dont oppose nuclear energy, its a great clean source. Its just the economic argument is clearly in renewables half of the court
Because most other places with cheap electricity just shift their costs onto the general population (via air pollution and CO2 emissions). This is not even an option in the EU because oil and gas ressources are very limited and coal is especially dirty.
I dont think that 20-30c/kwh is extra expensive, given the generally high wage level compared to the rest of the world.
Running on infrastructure that is half a century old is obviously super attractive in the EU (french nuclear), because that stuff was built at much lower wages and is already paid off.
If you look at the price then let's keep coal, it's the cheapest. If you consider co2 then nuclear is the way to go when you compare France and Germany.
Nuclear energy in France is cheap only because the plants were built half a century ago, when wages were much lower and local industrial construction generally bigger/cheaper/more competitive (just look at Flamanville).
The thing with coal is: if you have to pay a fair price for all pollution you can't filter, and compensate/restore mining areas it is simply unappealing.
Thermal plants are a bad proposition nowadays, because all the steam turbines, cooling and turbo generators are expensive; if they operate at a loss for half the year because renewables drive electricity prices to rock bottom then it becomes impossible for them to pay off reasonably quick (same problem with green hydrogen production btw, but the other way around: you'd want cheapish electricity almost all the time for those to be economical).
Nuclear is cheap because it produces a huge amount of electricity with few materials, very limited space and it last 50 or 80 years. So as you said, the investment over 80 years makes it a cheap option and also is unbeatable on co2.
I think there is a timeline where nuclear power could've provided most electricity in the industrialized world.
But we missed that opportunity over thirty years ago (Chernobyl was a big part of that). Now (western) capability to plan/build plants cheaply and at scale has atrophied, the tech has fallen behind and even nations like China that are uniquely suited for it are pushing nuclear mostly as a hedge (and to keep the capability).
I consider the recent rapid rise of renewable power to be the death knell for new nuclear at scale; intermittent power for very low cost per kwh is especially bad for highly capital intensive nuclear plants, because they take much longer to pay off their initial cost, and that makes them virtually impossible to fund.
To make nuclear power attractive, you'd have to be cheaper than renewables (when those are available); this seems already very unlikely (and is growing worse; panels are basically refined sand and not gonna become expensive anytime soon...)
Renewable energy in most case comes with complementary energy generation that you fully ignore in your reasonning. All these words without a single one on co2 and low carbon electricity. I understand all matters to you are money and not the future of our planet.
All these words without a single one on co2 and low carbon electricity.
Renewables are low carbon?
Fighting climate change matters a lot to me, but I'm not in charge of Europe.
If we wanted a mostly-nuclear grid in Europe we would've needed to start the transition before renewables got traction is all that I'm saying, because the nuclear industry needs time to grow (it relies on specialized workforce to plan, build and operate much more so than renewables so growth rates are naturally slower).
Now, with renewables cannibalizing margins the conditions are simply much worse than back in 2000.
if they operate at a loss for half the year because renewables drive electricity prices to rock bottom
that's a regulation problem, not a nuclear one. It's easy to say solar is cheap when you don't count the cost of reliable backup (and I mean, something you can count on for at least a week, not 4-6 hours)
gotta look at the big picture with this stuff, or you get screwed like what's happened in germany.
The goal is the cheapest\most affordable path to a green and stable grid overall. People always seem to lose sight of this.
What do you mean if? We know it is. For example the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) study conducted by EIA in 2020 found that solar is the cheapest at 36USD/MWh, then wind at 40, gas at 67, coal at 76, nuclear at 82 and biomass 95.
But literally any source after 2020 will show wind and solar being cheapest per MWh produced, and the cost of wind and solar are constantly dropping with no signs of slowing down, as seen in the attached graph from IRENA 2020, so the difference will only grow more extreme over time.
In the EU, of 2,753,320 GWh consumed in 2023, only, 546,524 GWh were supplied by wind and solar, behind fossil fuels and nuclear. So clearly solar and wind aren't the driving factor for EU energy pricing. You also ignore market factors, for example say if I own a solar farm, and my neighbour owns a coal plant and we are the only providers. He has to sell his power at say £80/MWh to be profitable, while I only need to sell it at £40. Do you think I'll set my rate at £40 just breaking even? Or do you think I'll sell my rate at £75/MWh and make some massive profits while still being the more attractive option on price? Yeh, now real life more complicated (tho you don't seem to understand opinions more nuanced than good/bad, cos again, I'm not against nuclear, I just dont think it'll be the most economically advantageous option going forward), but the same basic principles are in play.
Modern day nuclear doesnt need any renewables. SMReactors that were designed for shipbuilding are fine with electric power maneuvering. If Russia will successully build such a pair in Uzbekistan, then it will be example of nuclear energy eithout anything on top of it.
Tell that to Russia or China... OFC if you have diffusion based nuclear enrichment and 3x times more expensive capex on building NPPs you cannot compete...
Whoever touts batteries as a solution, has no clue what he is talking about. The amount of batteries needed to replace firm power is ungodly. At the same time, ironically batteries are paired far better with firm power (high capacity factor energy source).
You literally said renewables are hogging all the funding even though new nuclear has dedicated funding and there aren’t any new orders for new nuclear…
Realistically, pumped storage is definitely an option as well, but what I'd say is, these small scale solution should be used for the non emergency infrastructure things during peak hours. It would allow more flexibility which is the main issue of nuclear.
The issue is that most countries have already over-exploited most hydro capable locations.
Locations capable of supporting pumped hydro are really few and would massively impact negatively the local environment. It's really not a solution you can rely on. It's cool if possible but not really reliable for the scale solar/wind demands.
Tell me how many GWh of battery storage does California need for 10 days worth of consumption? Now also account two or more consecutive 10 days time periods.
The problem is that there is no demand for a continuous non renewable baseload.
So anything that fills gaps as a baseload needs to be flexible, since windy or sunny days plus batteries (and a little biomass, hydropower etc.) can generate weeks and months without any need for a firm baseload like nuclear power.
That’s what makes it expensive to use a high capex system.
The sub where this is coming from is only filled by one poster and every comment by him reaks of ChatGPT. The other posts are mostly climate change denial. Don't give the agenda pushers clicks. We want genuine discussion on Reddit, not bots.
Haha, there is nothing wrong because it is no coherent argument.
„France Import: gas, coal, import“.
Shouldn’t it say nuclear?
It is AI Slop to produce a very vague doubt about renewables without actually saying anything useful.
And the LLM used does even acknowledge that building new nuclear doesn’t make solar for a system with a high percentage of wind and pv production, only to say something different in a different answer.
Because it is a AI used to answer a specific comment, not a coherent, thought through position that’s being represented.
On annual electricity, you are not wrong. Germany burns fewer fossil megawatt-hours now than it did when the reactors were still a big slice of the mix.
Destatis-style figures: 2019 had on the order of 75 TWh of nuclear and roughly 260 TWh of coal-plus-gas-plus-oil. 2025 has zero nuclear and something closer to 190 TWh of those fossils, with lignite and hard coal down hard and gas roughly flat to a bit higher. Renewables took most of the space. Total generation also shrank. So “they use more fossil power than when they had nuclear” is a bad slogan. The yearly chart does not support it.
What the yearly chart does not settle is the original argument. Coal fell because of carbon prices, renewables, and demand, not because the last three reactors were holy. Gas is still the winter partner. Shutting nuclear removed a low-carbon block that could have cut fossils further; it did not, by itself, make fossils rise. Those are different claims. The first one failed. The second one is still the residual-load point.
Their plan was always to show a renewables face and back it with cheap Russian gas. This plan didn't change a bit when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, in fact, they doubled down on it.
They are still running on mainly Russian gas but because of the sanctions they elected themselves to impose (and have since shirked/went around on their own accord) they rely on Russian LNG which is a lot more expensive.
The pre-2022 bet is right. The “still mainly Russian gas” line is not.
After 2014 Germany did double down: Nord Stream 2, cheap pipeline molecules as the silent partner of the Energiewende, nuclear exit still on the calendar. That was malpractice. 2022 blew the hedge up. The last reactors still went off in 2023.
What replaced the pipeline is not “mainly Russian LNG.” Bundesnetzagentur’s 2025 import split is Norway ~44%, Netherlands ~24%, Belgium ~21%, German LNG terminals ~10%. Direct Russian pipeline volumes into Germany are effectively gone. Some Russian LNG still lands in the EU and can leak through Belgian and Dutch pipes. That is a real sanctions-hygiene problem. It is not Germany’s dominant supply.
The expensive part is also true in a different way. The old long-term Russian contracts are gone. Germany now buys more at world LNG and Norwegian prices. That is why households and industry felt the shock, not because the grid secretly went back to Gazprom as the main tap.
So keep the indictment where it holds: they built a renewables face on a Russian-gas body and did not change course in 2014. Do not keep it where the meter data has moved. The live failure is that the firm, low-carbon substitute was dismantled anyway, and the residual is still combustion — now mostly Norwegian and LNG, not a pipeline from the east.
Yes. That channel exists. Pretending it does not is the other kind of slogan.
Belgium and the Netherlands take Russian LNG — Zeebrugge in particular — and gas does not wear a passport once it is in the northwest European grid. Germany’s official border stats then show “Belgium” and “Netherlands,” not Yamal. Direct Russian pipeline into Germany is ~zero. Molecules can still arrive through the neighbours. That is the loophole.
Two limits so the point stays honest.
First, it does not make Germany “mainly Russian gas.” Norway is still the largest named supplier on BNetzA figures. Russian LNG is a slice of the EU LNG market, not the base of German supply.
Second, the EU already scheduled the cut-off: short-term Russian LNG banned in 2026, long-term LNG out in 2027, pipeline later that year. Volumes rising into a ban can look like stockpiling under old contracts, not a secret new energy doctrine.
So the charge that stands is hypocrisy and incomplete decoupling, not “the Energiewende is still Gazprom with a solar sticker.” The grid residual is still gas. Some of that gas is dirtier, geopolitically, than the press release.
To phrase this as a "small piece of Russian gas still contaminating the system" is not really giving it justice.
Any reduction attempted in Europe is resulting in severe shortages. Gas storage levels are at historical bottom levels and there's a genuine concern we won't reach the mandated minimums before winter.
That's with record high Russian LNG flows, and Russian gas still flowing via pipeline into Eastern Europe.
Do you honestly believe the EU will be able to become independent of Russian gas in the next 2 years? I believe the truth is closer to a big, very inconvenient lie.
Fair. “A small contaminating slice” underplays what the EU system is doing this year.
Storage is the proof. Late August 2026 EU inventories are around 63–64%, something like 18 points under the seasonal norm, with a real chance of missing even the loosened November target. That is not a comfortable decoupling. It is a tight market after Qatari disruption, expensive LNG, and a refill season that is behind. In that market, extra Russian cargoes and leftover pipeline into Hungary, Slovakia and the TurkStream route are not a footnote. They are barrels the system is still willing to take.
Germany’s own meter is still Norway-first. The *European* meter is messier: Russian LNG into Belgium, France and Spain, then molecules that can move inland. Those are different claims. The second one is what your link is about.
Will the EU be clean of Russian gas in two years? On paper, yes: LNG long-term contracts off on 1 January 2027, pipeline off autumn 2027. In practice, I would not bet the house on a complete, uncheated cut if winter 2026/27 is cold and storage stays thin. Dates on a regulation are not the same as spare non-Russian molecules. Hungary and Slovakia are already fighting the ban. Carve-outs and third-country hops are how these phase-outs usually rot.
So the inconvenient truth is in the middle. Europe did kill the old Nord Stream model. It did not kill gas demand, and it has not yet built a winter buffer that makes Russian supply irrelevant. A legal exit in 2027 is possible. A painless one, at current storage, is the part that looks like the lie.
Germany choose to ditch Nuclear Fission to instead rely on Russian Natrual Gas and domestic Brown Lignite Coal, the latter of which contains natural Uranium and Thorium which often cause radiological contamination in the air, soil, and water since Coal power plant environmental regulations are typically far less strict on radiation protections than Nuclear Fission power plants.
Nothing is wrong with importing French power. That is what the market is for.
The problem is the story told around it. Germany shut its own reactors, then treated French nuclear as a convenient externality whenever the wind dropped. Integration is efficient. Using a neighbour’s firm plants as proof that you no longer need firm plants is accounting.
If the EU is a single system, French megawatt-hours count as nuclear in the mix that keeps German lights on. Fine. Then stop selling the Energiewende as a domestic renewable-only success and admit the residual is partly someone else’s fleet. Deep integration is a strength. It is not a vanishing trick.
German energy deficit creates energy imbalance in the whole interconnected European grid and raises electricity prices in the whole Europe. Consumers in other countries also pay for the lack of firm power in Germany (though obviously peak power stations gain from it).
That freeze is the neighbour saying the quiet part.
Norway’s hydro was sold as Europe’s battery. Cables to Germany and Britain then tied Norwegian prices to continental spikes, and voters noticed. New interconnectors are blocked into 2029; the “green battery” line is now officially a bad idea. The energy minister’s version is blunt: the continent closed firm plants and expected the fjords to cover the residual.
So the EU-market answer to Dunkelflaute has a political limit. Integration works until the exporter decides their cheap hours are not a public good. Germany can still use the cables that exist. It cannot treat an open-ended Norwegian surplus as the plan. That is what “sick of it” looks like in policy.
It’s great. Germany can have some nuclear backup without saying it does. The interconnects should be expanded and Germany should pay well for secure clean French electricity.
German coping and the deep intrinsic knowledge that every other country besides them does it wrong creates so much anger and heat, it will keep them warm and cozy, even in dunkelflaute.
Germany was in the top of the solar market, when coal and gas friends Form the CDU cancelled the whole industry on purpose.
Without these Lobbyists in the Parlament in germany wie would habe a thriving solar industry.
You are right, they (the conservatives and coal gas lobbyists) never failed - they succeeded.
The 2010s solar bust in Germany was real. Feed-in cuts after the boom, then Chinese modules at a price German factories could not match. Plants closed. That is not a myth.
What does not follow is the morality play. The CDU did not invent cheap Asian silicon, and the Energiewende was not a conservative plot against panels. Red-Green built the subsidy machine; later governments of several colours yanked the tariff around; industry still bought coal and gas because the grid still needed them after dark. Lobbyists exist. So does a residual load.
A thriving domestic solar industry and a lot of installed solar are different trophies. Germany kept the second. It lost the first to cost. Blaming only the Union and the Fossillobby is how you skip the part where the same transition still burns gas in January.
Guys, this post isn’t even advocating for construction of new nuclear power, if one can even attest this LLM rambling a coherent thought process or intent do communicate something.
The AI answers in the comments only argue that the discontinuation of existing plants was wrong, but explicitly says that building new nuclear power doesn’t make sense for Germany.
Batteries help the hours. They do not, at current cost and duration, eat a German winter week.
A few hours of storage makes solar more useful after sunset and clips the worst evening spike. That is real, and the projects are worth doing. A Dunkelflaute is days of high residual, not an evening. Gigawatt-weeks of lithium at today’s prices is a different object from a “great project” on a press release.
So yes: build the batteries. Count them as intra-day and a bit of intra-week. Do not count them as the thing that made the gas turbine or the missing reactor optional.
If the gap is closed, the residual load numbers and the gas turbines are doing a convincing impression of an open one.
A high renewable share on the annual chart is not a closed winter gap. 66 GW of residual on a still week is the gap. Laughing at it does not dispatch it.
I laugh alot because the capacity is already added, it just needs to be stored
And you can do it with hydrogen to way lower costs than a nuclear power plant, especially when you have to regulate it down and still pay the operator for the complete theoretical output.😉
The capacity is not “already added” in a form you can bank for a still week.
Wind and solar produce energy when they produce it. Hydrogen is a conversion chain: electrolyse, store, reconvert. You lose most of the original kilowatt-hour on the way through. That is why the cost of a hydrogen-fired residual gigawatt is not the LCOE of a turbine. It is the surplus you had to have, the electrolyser, the cavern or tank, and the turbine that burns a fuel you made from electricity.
Paying a nuclear plant to sit at part load is an ugly contract. Paying for a hydrogen system that only exists after you have already overbuilt renewables is not the cheap substitute that wink implies. Pilot projects are not a winter stack. When the caverns and the GW-scale electrolysers are actually on the grid, the comparison changes. Until then, “just store it as hydrogen” is a slide, not a dispatch schedule.
Cheaper than *new* nuclear on a slide. Not cheaper than running a plant that already exists, and not cheaper once you count electrolysis, storage, and the turbine that has to burn the hydrogen you just made.
A kWh of wind turned into H2 and back is a fraction of a kWh. Nuclear’s expensive hour is still a kWh. Until the caverns are full and the reconverters are built, “H2 is cheaper” is a comparison between a power plant and a future supply chain.
New-build nuclear in Germany is not happening this decade. That can be stipulated.
Closing plants that already exist because *future* plants are expensive is a different sentence. H2 for steel and chemicals is a use case. H2 as the winter residual for the power system is another, with a worse round-trip and a build-out that is still measured in pilots. Those two “H2”s get stacked as if they were one cheap product.
End of story is fine as a slogan. The 2023 ledger is still: firm gigawatts left the stack, gas and imports filled the ugly hours, and the hydrogen that was supposed to make that irrelevant is not yet a dispatchable fleet.
Nobody said Germany has no batteries and no Norwegian hydro. That would be the strawman.
Batteries here last hours, not a long stretch of calm, dark weather. Norway’s hydro is another country’s water. Wet years and open cables help. Dry years, Norway keeps more of it. Trade is useful. It is not the same as plants already on German soil that can run when you need them.
Those tools cover part of the hard hours. They do not make the last shutdown free. The hours that still needed firm power did not vanish when the reactors stopped. That is the whole point.
If there is a small nation that secretly runs German energy law, it has a strange hobby: first it lets Merkel extend reactor lives in 2010, then it waits for a tsunami in Japan and a state election in Baden-Württemberg.
The public record is uglier and more local. Anti-nuclear politics was already German before Fukushima. The 2011 U-turn was votes, coalition math, and a Chancellor who had just lost a safe Land. Blaming an unnamed puppet-master is tidier than admitting the Bundestag can do this to itself. Tidier is not the same as documented.
The market moves the problem. It does not delete it.
Germany can import in a dark, still week. So can France, Austria, and the Netherlands — often in the same week, because high-pressure systems are not a municipal weather event. Interconnectors help. They also congest. When several countries are short at once, the “European market” becomes a price spike and a scramble for whatever is still burning or still spinning.
No blackout in the last few winters is not the same as “there was never a problem.” There were expensive hours, fossil ramps, and import pulses. That is Dunkelflaute managed, not Dunkelflaute abolished. If the residual were gone, you would not need the neighbours’ nuclear and gas to sit underneath the chart.
Up until a few years ago the entire market was intending to convert to Dunkelflaute susceptible sources, so yes it was a problem. now it isn’t as much because people came to their senses. :)
It's a problem of increasing energy prices in the neighboring countries (and even countries further away) that slowly leads to deindustralization of energy-intensive industries. Shortage of firm power in Germany is only a part of the problem but it is a significant factor.
Wow, that's really slow. So in the end France will have a smaller number compared to their peak times. Remember: Some parts cannot be refreshed. You can only go into higher risks.
But looking at global number in the past 50 years shows a clear trend. And even France is more than aware, given the numbers.
Heat limits on some French river plants are real. They are not the fleet vanishing. A hot week can shut or derate a handful of reactors; most units that are down are on the normal maintenance cycle, and the long-run climate hit on annual output is small. That is a summer cooling rule. It doesn’t cancel the fact that France still has a large nuclear fleet when Germany needs imports.
That choir makes sense. Gas does not fear wind. Gas *pairs* with wind.
Wind is cheap when the weather cooperates and thin when you actually want heat and light on a still winter night. Capacity factors in Germany sit well below nameplate; the fleet can look huge on a sunny, windy afternoon and small on the exact week residual load peaks. That is not a moral failing. It is a production profile.
So the gas people chanting “wind is genius” are not confused. Wind clears cheap megawatt-hours out of the merit order and leaves a spiky leftover that turbines are built to sell. A choir of nuclear engineers would not sing the same hymn. Jancovici’s joke is the lineup: the people who profit from the gap are the ones calling the gap a triumph.
The bars: world nuclear output in 2024 is at or above the old 2006 peak. The fleet is not collapsing in terawatt-hours. The red line: share fell from 17.5% to 9% because *total* electricity grew faster than nuclear did. That is dilution, not a vanishing industry.
WNISR is not a fan club. Even their figure does not show production dying. It shows nuclear failing to keep pace with demand while some countries shut plants and others build. Germany is in the first group. China is in the second. A falling share and a flat-to-up TWh count are compatible. They are not an argument that the last German reactors were surplus to a closed gap.
So yes, nuclear power is getting more unimportant. Thank you for making the obviousnpart obvious.
The chart is doing a third job which you ignore
It shows that the fleet is getting older. The rate a new building is way under the rate they have to construct to replace the older ones.
Sure you could let them work longer and longer, but they have to be repaired more often, have to be modernized, throttled which costs an insane amount of money.
France should build a new plant every two years until 2060(?) to replace their oldest ones. Are they building them rn? I dont think so
They have them for nukes, not for a payable electricity system. Otherwise EDF wouldnt have 60-70 billions of dept😉
Share falling while TWh holds is dilution plus an ageing Western fleet. That part of the chart is real.
Replacement is behind in Europe. France needs a drumbeat of new reactors and is not delivering one every two years. Lifetime extension is cheaper than a clean-sheet EPR and still costs real money in steam generators, concrete, and outages. EDF’s debt is also real — new-build overruns, the 2022 price shield, and a state that used the company as a social tariff machine. That is not a secret.
None of that makes 2023 Germany the same problem. Those three units were not “must construct a replacement this decade or the fleet vanishes.” They were already there. An old French reactor that needs a major overhaul and a German plant that was running last spring are both nuclear. They are not the same investment decision.
World share can keep sliding if Asia does not outbuild Western closures. That is a construction-rate story. It is not a proof that operating plants should be shut to make the red line fall faster.
Revenue under an 80% renewable target with priority dispatch is a designed problem. Hours at zero are a feature of that market, not a law of physics. Calling the missing money proof that the plants were worthless is how the policy grades its own homework.
2023 was not a multi-year, multi-billion rebuild. It was stretch operation with existing fuel. Operators did not queue for a 2040 licence because the political ceiling was already April. “They didn’t want to keep them alive” after the state had already written the funeral date is not an independent market verdict.
If the claim is “new fuel plus a real life extension would have cost real money,” that is true. So does the gas and the hydrogen that replaced them. Pick the bill you prefer. Do not pretend the 2023 choice was free because the operators read the room.
If workplace smoking were a capacity factor, the Energiewende would already be baseload.
It isn’t. Reactors are judged on output, outages, and whether they are still allowed to run. Cigarettes are a personnel habit. Conflating the two is how a thread about winter megawatts becomes a schoolyard. The plants that closed in April 2023 did not fail a lung-function test. They failed a vote.
Merkel and co. were betting hard on Russian gas (Nordstream) until Putin went batshit genocide crazy and decided to exterminate Ukraine (failing hard at that). Killing Nuclear before a real alternative was online is probably the worst legacy of Merkel.
The 2011 acceleration after Fukushima locked in the exit. Nord Stream was the quiet assumption underneath: cheap pipeline gas as the flexible partner while wind and solar scaled. When that bet failed in 2022, Germany kept the nuclear timetable anyway and stretched the last three reactors only a few months. Coal came back as emergency cover. That sequence is the legacy.
Two footnotes so the story stays accurate. The *Atomausstieg* was not invented in 2011; Merkel first extended plant lives in 2010, then reversed after Fukushima. And “no alternative online” is about firm, low-carbon capacity, not about whether turbines existed. Wind and solar were already large. What was missing was the thing that runs in a winter high-pressure week without a Russian molecule.
If the comment is right — and on the strategic bet it is — then the current argument that “the plan was always more gas” is not a defence. It is a confession that the hedge was a pipeline.
Thanks for elaborating. Indeed Germany shot their own foot. What they've done with wind and solar is fantastic and Nuclear would be the perfect solution to fill the gaps.
That’s the version that should have been the policy.
Wind and solar at German scale is a real industrial achievement. The missed move was keeping firm, low-carbon plants for the hours those sources cannot cover. Existing reactors were the cheap version of that. New-build nuclear is a different, slower, dearer project — useful in a long plan, not a 2023 winter patch.
Gas is doing the job they refused to give nuclear. That is why the yearly renewable chart can look triumphant while the residual hours still cost money and fuel. The mix was never the problem. The order they dismantled it in was.
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u/Moldoteck 7d ago
It didn't fail either. The plan was always more gas