In 2021, the Grohnde nuclear power plant in Lower Saxony on the Weser River was shut down. Now, immediately next to it, the Emmerthal energy cluster is growing with three very large battery storage systems, ground-mounted photovoltaic systems, and a new substation for several 380-kilovolt high-voltage lines.
This is plainly false. The plants where at a age where they had to be practically rebuild, with only components like the power connection or the cooling towers still usable with newly build reactor blocks. And the OP example shows that the power connection can be better reused for grid battery storage.
And the total amount of nuclear power in Germany was never enough to entirely replace coal burning. So at best the ongoing phase out of coal burning would have been slightly faster, but in reality the necessary reconstruction of nuclear power plants would have bound investments for at least a decade. All the while the coal buring would have also continued, but at a higher level because the urgently needed funds for grid extensions to serve renewable energy would have been wasted on building new nuclear power plants that produce no energy at all in the decade they need to be constructed.
You really need to stop riding a dead horse 🤷
Were German NPPs especially poorly built? Every other country is happily running plants from the 70s and 80s.
The fuck are you talking about? Before the phase-out started in 2009 Germany was producing about 20 GW from both nuclear and lignite. They produce basically no nuclear power and lignite only very recently dipped below that number. Quite plainly, those numbers could have been reversed.
Everything you posted after that is speculation based on wrong data.
You need to stop lying. This was a political move, made to appease like you who dislike nuclear and are unaware that lignite is significantly worse for the entire planet. It was a popular political move and you agree with it, which is quite visible in your username.
Neither of those points make it a smart move. Germany spent massive effort to eliminate by far the least bad fossil fuel, and kept by far the worst fossil fuel. It’s great that they’re moving the right way on production, but they started at the wrong end in the shut down.
No, this was a rational move based on economic factors and actually caring about reactor safty of half a century old and outdated designs.
You need to take your head out of your nuclear villiage bubble and rationally assess the situation.
I am not even against running existing nuclear power plants that are somewhat recently build and relatively safe. But building new ones makes absolutely no economic sense and is actively bad for the climate since much better alternatives exist.
The economic factors being the ones they specifically created to only apply to nuclear. Nobody is mandating lignite plants to store their CO2 till the end of time.
Right, except they also shut down all the ones that aren’t super old, outdated and unsafe.
But they’re not doing that. They shut them all down, and kept lignite running, constantly postponing their shutdown.
Sure, that’s fine. But it’s plainly stupid to shut down a good, safe and working NPP, and keep a lignite plant going, when you could have done the reverse. That’s my entire point.
Two of them, which just barely didn’t make the minimal threshold of not having been operated already beyond their original intended lifespan. They were just as unsafe and outdated as the others.