this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Germany of course is the country that recently shut down a bunch of nuclear plants + temporarily (we hope) replaced them with coal.
Ah yes. The coal replacement which gave us the lowest coal levels ever. https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&chartColumnSorting=default&year=-1&month=-1&stacking=stacked_absolute%C3%97lider%3D1&legendItems=000001010000000000000×lider=1
Nuclear output 12.2021: 5599.8 GWh
Brown coal output 8.2023: 5422.0 GWh
Black coal output 8.2023: 2049.2 GWh
So if you, y'know, hadn't shut down those nuclear plants, you'd be burning 1/4 as much coal as you actually are.
That's not how reality works. The remaining reactors produced less than 5%. But the money needed to keep them running for a few more years -especially as the shut down was planned for years, checkups and revisions were skipped, no more fuel was ordered- would have come from the same budget that is now paying for grid upgrades and renewable build-up. So keeping them running would have had a minimal impact of a bit less co2 now but a massive damage to the transition to clean energy for the next 10+ years. But that's of course a fact we don't want to talk about in media as that doesn't fit the narrative of stupid Greens having killed nuclear for ideological reasons.
For reference: The shutdown of all but 3 reactors was decided a decade ago, planned for years and came into effect 2 weeks before that new government came into office... the ones they were left with produced -up to their shutdown- ~1,5% of all electricity in 2023. But sure... keeping them alive for the sake of having nuclear reactors (they basically did not have any value other than as a talking point) would have totally made sense... in some alternative reality.