And deaths also spiked, although they're so diffuse only the statisticians will pay attention.
Nuke is clearly safer than any fossil fuel source by a *wide* margin. By some arguments utility-scale solar is safer than nuke--but only if by some miracle you can get virtually all your power from solar. We don't have the storage technology for that and if you have to run the natural gas plant when the sun doesn't shine you put nuke way in the lead for safety.
Another article that neglects to mention that we had already decided to quit nuclear in 2002. But the corrupt government we had in 2010 reverted that.
I'd also like to know what emissions spiked, considering our nuclear policies ultimately didn't change in 2010/2011.
Here are the raw electricity production figures for the timeframe considered in the study:
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
When comparing the year-by-year differences, a few interesting things turn up. For the sake of simplicity, I've only counted wind and solar as renewables and natural gas + black coal + lignite as fossil fuels.
- There have only been two years where a reduction in nuclear was not (over-)compensated by an increase in renewables: 2010/2011 (nuclear -30,8 TWh, renewables +19,3 TWh) and 2015/2016 (nuclear -6,8 TWh, renewables -1,3 TWh).
- Even in 2010/2011, the increase in renewables overcompensated the reduction in fossil fuels (-2,8 TWh)
- There have only been two years which actually saw an increase in fossil-fuelled electricity production: 2011/2012 (+7,2 TWh, still fully compensated by renewables) and 2015/2016 (+5,5 TWh).
- In the entire timeframe (EoY 2010 to EoY 2017), renewable production increased by +94,9 TWh, which is more than the reduction in nuclear (-60,8 TWh) and fossil fuels (-28,5 TWh) combined.
- There've been some internal shifts happening within the fossil cluster. In the first couple of years, natural gas consumption was dialled back in favour of solid fuels, which was then slightly reverted in the later years. This is also the reason why 2015/2016 did not see a catastrophic increase in CO2 emissions - parts of the worst offenders have just been replaced by natural gas.
I'm still not sure how the study reached a conclusion that is kind of contradicting real-world data.
Interesting to see what happened after the 2011 - 2017 timeframe the study looked at:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...
Coal sucks, and they probably could have got rid of it faster, but they still seem on a good path and the story is similar worldwide.
edit: even in the 2011-2017 timeframe they added more renewables than nuclear lost, so it seems odd that emissions would spike, unless there was either a big shift in the coal/gas/import mix, or just a general rise in demand.
Since the HN crowd is really pro-nuclear and in my bubble nobody is maybe somebody could explain how to handle nuclear waste and if modern reators are really as safe as it is often portraied in the comments here.
Even modern reactors would produce radioactive waste, right? In germany we don't have any place that is safe enough for long term storage.
How can this be handled? Would really like to change my mind regarding nuclear power, since it would solve the transitional phase towards renewables.
Also: Quite regurarily cracks are found in the reactors in germany and other countries. Other smaller things happen all the time too. Are modern reactors failsafe? I
Nuclear is the only way to reduce our carbon emissions in both the short term and long term, and the best way to produce energy per unit than any other energy source.
When you remove nuclear from existing supply, you increase your dependence on fossil fuels. Renewables are not able to produce enough energy to cover the absense of nuclear, perhaps in the future, but not with our current engineering.