Summary
A new Innofact poll shows 55% of Germans support returning to nuclear power, a divisive issue influencing coalition talks between the CDU/CSU and SPD.
While 36% oppose the shift, support is strongest among men and in southern and eastern Germany.
About 22% favor restarting recently closed reactors; 32% support building new ones.
Despite nuclear support, 57% still back investment in renewables. The CDU/CSU is exploring feasibility, but the SPD and Greens remain firmly against reversing the nuclear phase-out, citing stability and past policy shifts.
Yeah but this is for areas that don’t get enough sun or wind to meet their energy needs. The make small scale nuclear reactors as well. And cities themselves, being supplied by nuclear plants, are juicy military targets too. If a bomb lands anywhere near a city including the plant, it’s bad
Which is almost nowhere. There can be intermittent issues, but those can be overcome with a larger network and grid-level storage.
Which are less efficient, so even more expensive.
Not sure what your argument here is, because no matter what kind of energy production you’re using, bombing a city is always bad. But it’s much easier to cause great harm with nuclear than renewable generators.
But renewables aren’t being replaced with this, fossil fuels are. The grid level storage is significant and requires significant mining and upkeep for that, and it’s very inefficient. We need blended energy sources for safety, with a mix of water, wind, wave, solar, geothermal, and nuclear
No, renewables have to be replaced by nuclear. Nuclear is incredibly expensive (the most expensive form of energy we have). If you don’t run it at capacity 100% of the time, it’s even more expensive.
All that money can either produce a small amount of energy if we go with nuclear, or a larger amount of energy if we go with renewables.
Grid-level storage is getting more and more efficient - a couple of years ago, the combined cost of renewables + storage got smaller than the cost of nuclear. Nuclear is still getting more expensive, whereas renewables + storage is getting cheaper and cheaper.
That’s because nuclear is arbitrarily forced to be expensive due to regulations and legal stuff. If that wasn’t included in the price itself, it would be significantly cheaper. However, nuclear took such a big hit politically that it increased costs as less plants were built. It’s not so much that renewables are per se cheaper, but rather than nuclear gets artifically inflated. Further, I’m not opposed to renewables, I just think nuclear is needed in addition to renewables since it is better for carbon emissions and we have a carbon issue. It also saves on space where renewables can cause greater environmental impact in terms of taking up space or wildlife fatalities.
Again, weird you don’t mention wave or geothermal at all as renewables that have access to near constant power generation.
Sure, nuclear could be much cheaper! But it would also be much less safe, because all the regulations and “legal stuff” are what forces the people running the plant to run it in a safe way. The same goes for renewables, but if renewables fail, they don’t contaminate the surrounding area for decades or centuries, so there are far fewer of these regulations. If you disagree, I challenge you to provide examples of unnecessary regulations that make nuclear so much more expensive. Show us the numbers.
There are many great ways to deploy renewables so they support the environment. Have you looked at the environmental impact of the mining required for nuclear plants? The impact they have on the rivers they use for cooling, and so on?
It’s pretty weird that “renewables” somehow doesn’t include those for you.
There is basically no place in the world where you cant use either wind or solar.
Yes, there are, especially if you don’t want to deforest land. And wind and solar and not constant sources. A mix of sources are needed. That you havent mentioned geothermal or wave energy shows that you’re kinda out of your depth here. I’ve gone to many engineering seminars about this, we must have a mix of energy sources and we must use nuclear if our goal is to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions. Other sources of energy all emit too much carbon.
Wow what kinda propaganda seminars are you sitting in? Did they also tell you that “just one more lane” would fix traffic? Wind turbines recoup their entire production and installation carbon emissions in a few months. PV panels in like a year.
I attended an engineering college for my engineering degree.
And no, we specifically discussed this about lanes and trains and buses etc. Just like we discussed nuclear energy.
How do they sequester the carbon they emit? Do you have a link to an article that can explain what you’re saying? Or are you saying its carbon emissions are less than coal or gas, which is different than not emitting anything at all?
If you wanna look into it, the term you need to search for is “life cycle assessment”.
This is a kind of report usually by some kind of government agency that creates a very detailed list of materials and energy required to manufacture, transport, install, operate and maintain an installation.
This is then compared against existing electricity production systems that will be replaced by the new one to calculate how long it takes to make up the initial cost both monetarily and emissions wise.
The resulting time frame will drastically vary depending on the supply chain, location, grid capacity, storage capacity and such. The following is a plot from the linked study which combines results from many different studies. They typical lifetime of one of these turbines is 20 years, so you are looking at a ~20x payback factor if it replaces fossil generation (coal/gas/etc).
https://www.climatexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/main_report_-_life_cycle_costs_and_carbon_emissions_of_onshore_wind_power.pdf#page=43
https://earth.org/nuclear-energy-carbon-emissions-lowest-among-electricity-sources-un-reports/
I’m not arguing against solar and wind. I’m arguing for nuclear in some places, due to: 1) space 2) consistency 3) low carbon emissions, and pointing out that the high cost isn’t due to the technology but to regulations and legal practices that have artificially inflated the costs.
How are you so uneducated?
With minimal storage, gas peaker plants that only run like a day per year and a grid spanning several countries it is a breeze to have wind and solar only. Probably not even all of the above are needed.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/10/planetary-boundaries-breached-nature-climate-stories/
We can’t emit more carbon. Like really, we cannot. We have to sequester it. Gas plants still emit CO2. Nuclear is fine and works well, and doesn’t emit CO2.
Everytime a new climate model comes out things get more and more dire. We needed to stop emitting in like 2000, ASAP is what we have to do now.