BTW where does the blue-eyed blond stereotype come from, it doesn’t seem to be the dominating type for most of Germany, and especially not south where reactionary and nazi stuff is most usual (not talking about former GDR now).

Nazis had a bit of boner for Nordic sagas, runes, black suns and such. The blonde blue-eyed ideal comes from that. But because they compulsively mixed shit up, they called those people “Aryans” which originally stood for people from … Iran.

Since there is a finite number of police officers, those officers will be missing elsewhere in the country. And iirc, the queues before border crossings were already longer due to border checks.

Thanks :)

Could you please spare the rhetoric about “fascists” for later, if and when these newly-in-office, certainly deeply misguided, bigoted, right-wing idiots have held the door open for actual fascists long enough?

Leading politicians have left the AfD because the party became too racist.

Those leading politicians were no longer leading when they left, they were forced out.

This means that there was a development.

There was. Right-wing extremism was more covert first, then conquered the Eastern part of the party before taking over the entire party.

The relative non-extremists (supposedly) leading the party, Lucke, Meuthen, Petry, and even Weidel now, are part of a strategy of Afd trying to make itself more palatable to moderate voters while the bulk of the party is free to find their crowd among radicalized Covid protesters and neonazis.

I read that Lucke calculated that he could use the extremists but keep them under control. A pact with the devil.

You don’t need to be particularly bright to realize that this couldn’t work. Especially if a large part of your financing also depends on pro-fascists.

Lucke’s new party and many other parties like Volt are ignored. Why did only the AfD receive the attention to become relevant?

To a large degree because Afd are polarizing, populist, and came first (unlike Werteunion, BD, etc.), and thus were interesting. Volt is a mixture of FDP and Greens that does not do enough to gain notoriety.

[What I find is worrying is that a belief in a massive worldwide conspiracy that appears to underlie many of your comments. I don’t believe in that and I don’t think that’s a sensible thing to believe in.]

Renewables correct prices downward from where a fossil-only system would price electricity …

They would, if they weren’t four times more expensive than nuclear, and 13 times more expensive than gas.

So you’re taking (probably skewed against renewables) numbers from the paper that is concerned with a pure solar/wind/battery grid and apply them to today’s mixed grid? That seems … wrong. Especially as operators can afford to price PV power at .04€/kWh.

It’s certainly one of the issues, but not the only issue. The gas price is close to historical averages now, yet UK electricity prices remain very high.

At least in Germany, gas used to be priced at .06€/kWh, now it’s somewhere above .10€/kWh… and that’s before it’s turned into .20+€/kWh electricity.

And does that make any sense at all, given Russia’s domination of nuclear supply chains? France’s nuclear program is mortally dependent on Russian cooperation in a lot of ways too.

Russia controls approximately 22% of the world’s uranium conversion capacity and 44% of its enrichment capacity. This is hardly insurmountable.

For one, Rosatom is fairly aggressive in taking over the industry and building the same kinds of lasting relationships as with gas/oil. For two, it is really helpful to European nuclear nations to have a proxy who extracts/buries stuff from/in remote places where environmental damage does not matter. If there was a European supply chain, mining like in Kazakhstan and landfilling like in Siberia is out, and that’s probably a major obstacle, even for France with its post-colonial ties to Africa.

It should spur investment from other nations. China accounts for approximately 70–90% of the global market across all stages of the lithium-ion battery value chain. Does that mean the world should give up on EVs and battery storage? Surely not.

A big part of the issue is that fission is a dead horse and people are still marketing concepts that failed in the 70s.

I don’t know what you mean by “stowed away,” but their policy shows they are still very much open to nuclear energy.

You linked to their election program. Anyone who cared a bit knew before the election that they definitely would not revive the old nuclear plants, i.e. this was a fairly transparent lie. Gonservatives cleverly waited until after the election to announce that however: They went silent on the topic, then shortly floated the idea of the state taking over nuclear plants and then buried the idea overall, leaving only a mention of fusion research in the final coalition treaty.

France definitely doesn’t need 2-3 times that based on current implementation of renewables.

Ah well, renewables save the day, I guess; despite Macron’s wishes to the contrary. :)

Since EPRs don’t store heat like Terrapower’s SMR designs did, i.e. they are unable to properly modulate output, they still won’t work particularly well in conjunction with renewables though …

You won’t catch me defending the speed of large reactor roll-outs. Despite this, and the high costs, it’s still much cheaper than renewables. SMRs will be much faster to deploy, much more flexible, much cheaper, and require much less planning.

That seems like a big [citation needed] because mass-produced SMRs still appear to be a pipe dream.

China is also building two “mega” coal lignite power plants per week. I don’t think we should use them as a role model.

I am not using China as a role model. I am saying that they probably did some calculations before they came up with the strategy of building a lot of renewables (+ coal), rather than building a lot of nuclear plants. Their actual coal use is going down which indicates that the new coal plants are more or less peaker plants (inasmuch as that’s possible with coal).

CO2 production is expected to continue to climb for 50-100 years, and we won’t reach CO2 neutrality for hundreds of years, if ever. A 7-10 year timespan is very little compared to the enormous environmental benefits.

Besides you calculating build times that don’t line up with any of the recent nuclear builds in the EU–you do realize that we don’t have that time, right? Given the current rate of climate change and biodiversity loss, if we don’t get a handle on emissions and destruction of nature, we likely only have 15 to 30 years before humanity sinks into complete chaos. There are reasons Zuck and Spez and others bought bunkers. There are reasons why Peter Thiel and ilk really want to tear down organized society and kill most of us right now.

If CO2 emissions are still increasing in 50 years, that won’t be from direct human actions but rather from knock-on effects like unfreezing tundra and dying rainforests. Because humans are likely dead at that point.

Despite renewables being far from ready to replace Germany’s nuclear generation,

Not sure in what sense this is supposed to be true…

• The generation from the remaining 3 nuclear reactors was more than replaced by renewables within the same calendar year that they went out of service
• Nuclear power generation never delivered as much energy in Germany annually as solar/wind do right now (i.e. 30% nuclear in the 90s v/ 60% wind/solar today)
• German gas use has been trending down since 2022 and German coal use is the lowest since the 60s

In 2000, when the EEG (i.e. the German renewables law) was enacted, it’s true, solar and wind power were indeed much less competitive. But this was a calculated bet: PV was space-station technology and prices could be brought down through mass production and automation; wind power had been pioneered by Denmark and was already on a good path. At the same time, it would allow building new industries. And that did work, at least until China made a much larger bet on the same tech and gonservatives helped the German renewables industries die, in favor of coal and gas. This was designed as a multi-decade process, not as a turnkey solution.

the public voted to

It’s rarely the public that votes on any particular issue in a representative democracy. Not sure why you’re phrasing it that way, twice even–perhaps to suggest irrationality?

switch to much more environmentally damaging gas generation.

“Switch to” is a weird phrasing for what actually happened, namely the German government agreeing to phase-out of nuclear and, independently, deepening its gas-import dependence on Russia. Notably, most of that gas is used for heating or in the chemical industry anyway, not to generate electricity. The relationship with Russia is a long-standing one, even West Germany imported gas from the Soviet Union in the 80s.

That gas was primarily coming from a hostile, authoritarian nation.

Russia was not perceived as all that hostile toward Europe in the early 2000s. Around 2010 was the time that some people started to feel more uneasy. The mainstream didn’t notice much until 2022, however.

place the economic prosperity of Germany in the hands of Russia. It was one of the most tragic examples of democratic self immolation in all of history.

That seems like an exaggeration. Especially given that fact that you don’t seem to care about nuclear ties to Russia at all. Yeah, it was stupid and preventable but ultimately not back-breaking, at least not to Germany.

German gas consumption has gone down dramatically since 2022, despite there only being a light recession (i.e. production is similar while gas use is down a third or so). The size of the dependency built up is no wonder either: German consumers were needlessly incentivized financially to buy new gas boilers until August 2022; industry was told to go with gas for all their processes. Not only did people buy into the hype but they were fairly inefficient in their gas use too. (And now that gonservatives are back in the saddle, of course, they’re eyeing Russian gas imports again. Whodathunk.)

Now France is in the same boat there, given its reliance on Rosatom (and even on Russian gas deliveries)–and they’re not even doing anything to stop that. Germany’s switch to predominantly Norwegian and Dutch gas and some LNG was costly in the short term but appears to have been comparatively easier than e.g. France unbundling Framatome from its Russian dependencies. (Russian gas is not completely gone in Germany but it’s now somewhere around 10% rather than hovering around 50%.)

And I fully agree with the author. In 30-50 years when battery technology becomes cost effective at grid scale, we’ll be having a very different discussion.

The author talks about a 2030 timeframe but ok …

Apparently though, the economics are very much in favor of battery storage already. The connection requests for large battery storage in Germany last year already beat Bloomberg’s worldwide prediction for 2030.

storage requests Germany

Rolls Royce isn’t due to deliver commercial SMRs until the early 2030s. Until then designs are either bespoke (and expensive, and untested), or using the GE Hitachi BWRX-300, which is also very expensive because it’s only licensed, and built on site to spec. It has many of the same issues as traditional large reactors. GE began licensing that design in 2020, and the most advanced project is I think in Canada, due to be completed in 2028. Once RR figures out their production lines, I think we see huge efficiencies of scale and much easier planning.

Why can’t there be real frustration with the established parties

Real frustration exists.

and the media motivated enough racists to join.

That is bogus. The Afd was founded around the time the proceedings against Npd were under way. A lot of people jumped from Npd to Afd very early on. Early financing for Afd similarly came from outright fascists.

Sure, but at best it would be a temporary reprieve while new figureheads are being searched. But even as a non-USian non-Russian, I know that Vance and Medvedev are already household names and would be more than capable of taking over.

Oh no. :*(

Given the high pricing volatility induced by renewables and

Renewables correct prices downward from where a fossil-only system would price electricity …

the gas supply shock after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

… so that’s the heart of the matter: Russia’s actions increasing the price of fossil fuels.

after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nine European countries are now intending to build new reactors

And does that make any sense at all, given Russia’s domination of nuclear supply chains? France’s nuclear program is mortally dependent on Russian cooperation in a lot of ways too.

with the entire right wing bloc proposing lifting the ban

Any time right wingers are this adamant at something, someone is probably getting rich on an increase in overall system cost that is then socialized on the backs of genpop.

Meanwhile over here in Germany, the designated chancellor and his “Christian Democrat” party quickly stowed away their pre-election rhetoric about building new nuclear plants/reviving existing plants, after an informal paper from their own party made the rounds, outlining that reviving nuclear in Germany would necessitate massive state aid or even having the state itself run the plants.

France intends to build 14 new reactors by 2050.

But realistically, I think they’d need 2 or 3 times that, right? Afaik, France is currently building just a single domestic plant and they’re not exactly executing there. Neither are they executing on the Hinkley Point project. And Olkiluoto was a massive shitshow where French taxpayers financed the 3/4 of the costs that constituted the cost overrun. There are basically two countries that still know how to build nuclear reactors, those are Russia and China, everyone else just incurs perverse cost and build-time overruns. And it does make sense: A centralized, dangerous, expensive technology that works best for centralized, authoritarian regimes that can afford to put all their state power behind these projects. (And yet, China is building out solar/wind much more aggressively than nuclear.)

New nuclear plants are also completely useless against climate change, given their decade/multi-decade build times, especially compared to renewables where plants can be rolled out in a matter of months. Meanwhile, existing French reactors need to be taken offline in summer because their water consumption is woefully ill-adjusted to climate change and they turn France’s rivers into bouillabaisse.

Nuclear capacity has been flatlining (at best) for two decades, while renewables have exploded. Even if you assume just 10% utilization for the renewable plants, yesteryear’s addition of 6GW nuclear capacity pales in comparison to the 600GWp PV/wind capacity.

While conventional reactors are expensive, they’re four times cheaper than solar and wind with all costs imputed.

Even the author of that study admits to (latently pro-fashy shitrag) NZZ that cheaper batteries would solve the issue. Incidentally, what we’ve been seeing over the past decade is steadily decreasing battery prices, as scale goes up and cheaper materials substitute more expensive ones.

I don’t really want to know what else is wrong with that study of his, given that the largest part of it is concerned with the near-pointless thought experiment of using 100%/95% exclusively solar+batteries. It seems massively more pertinent to worry about the final 10% renewables when the time has come. One major bit that I don’t see reflected in the study is flexibilization of demand e.g., which is a thing already. I recently saw a documentary that e.g. included a cold warehouse that could scale up/down its cooling in response to renewables availability. I visited a company producing electric componentry which is doing its electronic component testing on sunny days where they have a lot of solar. I know similar concepts exist for aluminum smelters.

Further, we are about to enter a new age of SMRs, and all preliminary data suggesting a per unit capex cost of almost half

Are there even SMR projects that haven’t been cancelled?

Iirc Portugal is giving out a lot of temporary work visa to e.g. Nepalese fruit pickers who must then dutifully serve their masters picking raspberries for multiple years to get a chance at a citizenship. Those would seem to be the kind of people ejected first/most easily.

A fun bit that I learned yesterday: In 2012, Dobrindt actually advocated outlawing Die Linke as a party. It’s so weird how the strategy shifts in the face of actual fascists trying to take over compared to there being a leftist democratic party that is not actually doing all that well.

There is an entire support system behind these figureheads. You can’t just kill them and expect the system to be gone.

There is also a system behind Trump: The guy is not (just) Putin’s puppet; domestically, he has an uneasy coalition of the Christian right, the oil/gas industry, and tech libertarians behind him.

The Kremlin money and the racial politics were a poisoned gift because they will prevent them from ever gaining the absolute majority.

Uhm what? I don’t see the ~40% Afd voters in my area give a hoot about Kremlin money and many are absolutely against all foreigners. And while many people in Western Germany would rather not see that, the reason that so many people still vote CxU despite everything is that they are copying Afd language on immigration.

This seems like a really bad take.

You realize though that Afd moved on from that discussion about the Euro, right? Social issues, including those resulting from the introduction of the Euro are important, of course. But there were quite a number of social cuts and austerity measures that were fairly independent from the introduction of the Euro.

The thing that really propelled Afd was that foreign people look different though and thus work splendidly as bogeymen.

Or perhaps not. Farage has been distancing from Trump/Musk in various ways. E.g. on Ukraine, on the Tommy Robinson thing, etc. “I am not a populist”

Oh well. PV installations up to 99kWp in Germany also gets fixed rates for 20 years (e.g. most home installations get ~8c/kWh).

Beyond that, you do have the same licensing/backward auction/strike price thing you mention. It didn’t use to be that way though - the auction/licensing scheme was introduced as part of the “breathing cover” regulation by the conservative coalition around 2015. It was introduced specifically to slow down renewable growth, or in less kind terms: to keep Good German Lignite and Cheap Russian Gas energy in the grid longer. While it wasn’t nearly as effective as intended, that is only because prices for PV and wind installs came down very quickly.

And indeed, since 2022, operators also need to forego 90% of the strike-price/bid-price difference, as an outcome of the gas price crisis.

By, for example, relying more on France’s nuclear power generation

On a related note, France’s reliance on aging nuclear reactors that it isn’t competent enough to replace, despite a significant ideological investment in nuclear technology has a decent chance of biting its neighbor countries in the bum too. :)

Thanks! Tbh, it all looks very much like the German system, i.e. Merit Order and all that.

Europe has a highly interconnected grid. Usually that works in everyone’s favor by providing much better stability than smaller grids. It appears there are ways to take down the entire grid too though.