this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Because Germany decommissioned their Nuclear plants before they did so with coal plants (or gas plants, which they keep building)
Sure, but price is a function of availability and demand. The price is low because it's pretty available and the demand is nothing like that of oil, LNG or coal. Plus Canada and Australia have some of the biggest reserves in the world (3rd, 4th) and they are western democracies we can rely on. Also, Uranium isn't bought JIT, but it's bought years in advanced so that it can be enriched and stockpiled, this means that it doesn't feel the price fluctuations that much.
As for renewables, I don't know if you've noticed, but most solar cells right now come from China, if they were to stop selling tomorrow (for one reason or another) we'd be kind of screwed anyway. Maybe a good mix and diversification is the best answer here. And yes, I know that you don't need China to keep operating your solar cells, but they are kind of needed right now to make the transition, new cells will be needed to replace old ones, and we also need batteries, which they are now leading production of. Unless we move manufacturing back (which we should do, but that's a decades long process we can't possibly rely upon) we are still reliant on an external state to undergo the ecological transition.
Maybe it won't really be necessary, some 4th gen nuclear reactors promise to be able to use spent fuel for their reaction (also Thorium, which is extremely more abundant than Uranium). These are now like fusion reactors, which are permanently 20 years away, but we are building them right now. Some of these plants will go online this decade afaik, and if they deliver, many more will surely follow next decade.
Using spent fuel should shorten the estimated containment time from tens of thousands of years to 300 years, which should be enough to just say, bury them and leave.
This is an issue we might be able to fix without hoping for magical technology. Also because it doesn't touch only this argument, but pretty much everything happening in the country. We can't just say "Germany can't make any big project" and leave.
Yeah but that is done. There is no way to reverse that. The thing we need to talk about now are options to coal based plants which are nuclear and renewables. So if anything we need to discuss the pros and cons of those two. Noone here is saying that the coal plants are a good thing.
Germany had one of the biggest sectors for photovoltaic cells. They are closing and I agree we should be moving production back to europe. Right now there might be enough knowhow left so it does not take decades to do so.
If we can actually use spent fuel. That's a big if I don't want to gamble on. Also 300 years is still a very long time. 300 years eralier society was so much different than now, we can't possibly predict what's going to happen in the next ~10 Generations of humans.
My point isn't "do nothing instead of nuclear power" though. My point is that many smaller projects seem way more likely to succeed in the bigger picture even if some of them fail or are delayed, which is what reneweable energies are suited to. The success of the transition is also about people being able to trust into the success of the project. And I don't think many people have a lot of trust into germanies ability to bring big projects to a successful end. I'd like that to be different, I do, but that's just not what I have experienced in my lifetime.