In the coming weeks, Germany will reassess its policy to close its three remaining nuclear power reactors as the country faces a potential gas supply shortage this winter, a spokeswoman from the economy and climate ministry said on Monday.
Under current German law, the nation’s three remaining reactors – totaling 4.1 GW in capacity – are due to close by the end of the year. [bold, links added]
But there is growing pressure on the government in Berlin, including by the Free Democrats – part of the coalition government – to extend the reactors’ lifetimes to help the nation save needed gas.
“In a crisis, you have to decide appropriate to the situation and based on clear facts,” ministry spokeswoman Beate Baron told reporters regarding the lifetime debate over the three reactors – Isar 2 (1.4 GW), Emsland (1.4 GW), and Neckarwestheim 2 (1.3 GW).
In its assessment, the German government will focus on southern parts of the country, especially in Bavaria where there are very few coal-fired units to replace gas ones and where the state’s government has hindered wind power expansion over the past years, according to the ministry.
Germany’s nuclear phase-out was prompted by Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power disaster in 2011.
But Russia’s war on Ukraine since February has spiked gas prices and seen reduced flows from Europe’s main supplier of natural gas.
Also, there are concerns that the key Russian-owned Nord Stream 1 pipeline linked to Germany will not restart or will operate at significantly reduced capacity after planned maintenance ends on Thursday, raising doubt about whether Europe can refill its gas storage to levels needed ahead of winter.
The government is currently running a second “stress test” for the winter, expecting fewer gas volumes available and more nuclear outages in neighboring France than in the first round in May with gas prices above the previously modeled EUR 200/MWh level, according to the ministry.
In France, nuclear availability is currently at 24.8 GW, less than half the installed capacity of 61.4 GW due to safety checks at several reactors.
In May, operator EDF cut its nuclear output target for this year to the lowest level in 34 years.
In the first stress test in spring, the German government pointed out that nuclear units would hardly help to save gas as gas demand in Germany was mainly driven by heat production and industrial use.
Read more at Montel News
Die Schoene Deutschland
is going to rethink its suicide pact?
Exactly how many litersteins of starkbrau
will help them regain their senses?
Isn’t it amazing that the prospect of freezing or starving focuses the mind?
Well said. Self-interest, self-preservation is the invisible hand that serves society best. Think, people, think!
The indoctrinated generation has no idea there are only three sources of energy that have built the best fed, longest living, most prosperous human conditions that have ever existed. They have no idea that recycling the basic ingredient of life on earth, CO2, is the greenest contribution to life that human beings have ever made. Ever made in our short couple hundred thousand year existence. Fossil fuels (84%), hydro (7%), and nuclear (7%) are the only fuels so far that can produce the cheap, abundant energy that modern life requires. They imagine that this energy can be replaced by energy sources that don’t work when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. They imagine a climate catastrophe that just doesn’t exist – temperatures remain well within the ongoing three million year normal, natural pattern. Yet television “journalists” imagine every heat wave is somehow unprecedented. The reality is these temperatures have happened five hundred times during nine hundred-year interglacial cycle peaks over the last three million years. The reality is the thermometer was invented in an uptrend in temperature just after the “Little Ice Age” of the 1600s. When you could ice skate on the Thames. An uptrend that has repeated over 500 times in dozens of interglacial phases of our ongoing Pleistocene/Quaternary Ice Age. The coldest 12 degree C normal, natural range of temperature since multicellular life began.
At the minimum you should link sources with proper research that supports your opinion. Or are your sources are imaginary too? Ignoring all the facts that don’t fit in your image of the world? The highest CO2 level in the atmosphere was ~300ppm in the past million years. We’re over 400 right now, almost all of which got pumped in the atmosphere during the past 100 years. Yet you claim you have it all solved, and this is business as usual. I have no illusion, I know for sure that we have too many people not thinking or thinking your way and this will sabotage any effort to stop crises from happening.
So the actual output from oceans which make up 71% of earth’s surface, massive water vapour in our atmosphere, (a real warming item,) volcanos (up to 20 erupting at any time), bushfires etc, etc occurring naturally contribute nothing? Really? If there was ever -300pm there would be no life on this planet, CO2 and Oxygen are the building blocks of life.