In germany, by law, a Wind wheel has to be at least 1000 Meters away from a Residential area while a Coal powerplant only has to bee 400m away. you might see a small problem here
best part is, we have a giant windpark in the north sea, not conectet to the grid, because we can't store electricety, so it makse "no" sense to conect it to the grid... Fucking politicians. to currupt to do anything right.
That's not actually true everywhere. There's an even funnier thing. The 10h rule. The height multiplied by ten is the minimum distance to a nearby resided area(one person in a house is technically enough)
A nuclear plant on a mountainous island with limited area for urban development, constant earthquakes, and freaking tsunami's is so insanely different from Germany's situation that I don't get how it was ever even under consideration to phase it out
Probably Russia worked very very hard on that nuclear reactor ban too, to be able to sell their gas to Germany... They helped the anti-nuke lobby, etc...
As a German I can only say: We also don‘t understand wtf our politicians are doing 🤷🏻♂️ Most are completely incompetent and don’t bring any experience or expertise to the table. You can be Minister for families and youth in the first year, become minister of defense the next. After that you get voted president of the European Commission even tho you’re not even one of the candidates… it‘s a sad joke.
They really should put Uschis' picture next to the phrase "Falling up the ladder" in the dictionary. I hope I'm not still be around when they make her Empress of Europe for accidentally flooding half of it or something equally "WHAAAT?!".
@@HauntedXXXPancake You missunderstand something. To a German politician any work related to the eu is more like you got taken out of german politics. If you look a bit back all politicians of bigger german partys who got "transfered" to eu dissappeard somewhat in our german political world.
I live like 10-20 kilometers away from it, and a friend of mine lived in a village right next to it, back then I was visiting him many times by bike, but the whole village, including his home was wiped out in 2016 or 2017, I remember the last months of the village, houses were literally boarded up after most residents left to prevent other people from going inside or stealing, they even tear off a historic church that was there since decades… it’s so strange when I drive by it and just see that big hole, everything is just gone except memory’s. People here say that the hole will be filled up with water at 2050 like all the other mining holes that closed here
The funny thing is that getting a wind park built in Germany requires you to jump through loads of bureacratic hoops, takes ages and there's a good chance it won't get built in the end because local residents will mobilise against it. But tearing down entire villages to mine brown coal is a-okay (partly thanks to corrupt politicians with ties to the coal industry). Brown coal was not the only alternative after we decided to abandon nuclear power. Sure, we wouldn't have been able to plug the entire hole in our energy mix with renewables right away but we could have a lot more renewable energy and a lot less coal in our mix today if our governments had chosen to properly subsidise and support renewable energy. They didn't and here we are.
Sounds weird how a democratic country that knows the pros and cons of nuclear and has no power against the coal lobby. German people can move against nuclear but not against coal. If they can win against nuclear they could move against coal. It is noticeable that they are clearly informed about the damage coal makes on people's health and the degradation of the environment. Hypocrites.
@@youxkio Well after the Fukushima Incident there was a big Movement against Nuclear, wich they were totally right about. So Mutti Merkel Changes her Politic when she felt the wind of change what she was always doing to stay popular. The thing ist like the Main comment said the coal Lobby used corrupt CDU politicians swing the favor to them to replace the nuclear power plants when the public interest wasnt that high on this topic anymore... Now it is again and we have the problem again... Danke Merkel
@@lonestarr1490 I see. Another aspect is how is the evolution of renewables in Germany. I read the news that Portugal, one of the PIGS of the crisis 2010, just deactivated its last coal power plant last month. Why Germany can't do the same?
@@kentonbenoit9629 is right, if you live in the Rhine Area, you definitely know the Holes. There are literally Kilometers of nothing between highways and dust blowing over it and stuff. So if the commenter isn't from the Moon than he's telling a cringe joke. (not that i don't like this Humour)
4:20 : Acid rain was a problem in Germany about 30 years ago ... but since a lot of years, the coal power plants have smoke filters which filter a lot of pollution, like e.g. sulfur oxides, out of the smoke. So, yes the coal contains a lot of sulfur, but the large majority of it isn't emitted.
I remember this well. We had the same problem in the Czech Republic. The communist governments in Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany and Poland cared little about environment, the air pollution from the lignite power plants was insane. The acid rain they caused completely destroyed large areas of forest within a really short time frame (1970s-90s). The whole Ore mountains (Erzgebirge) and Jizerské hory (Isergebirge) basically dried out. It was extremely sad and the recovery will take many more decades. In 1990s all the plants were desulphurated and fitted with particle filters and the air quality improved dramatically. The desulphurating process still uses large quantity of lime and produces gypsum as a byproduct (some of it is used as a building material). Mercury and other heavy metals are hard to tackle. It's far from ideal.
@@1214101 it's certainly better to put it with the fertilizer intentionally where it is needed, instead of letting it rain down everywhere where it is not needed and even causes a lot of damage (like the woods and forests)
Just a small correction: French nuclear power plants produce 70% of the electricity and not energy, electricity only represents about 25% of the total energy consumption. French nuclear power plants provide about 18% of the energy in 2019
@@rachelcookie321 In physics energy is the quantity characterizing a physical system and expressing its capacity to modify the state of other systems with which it enters in interaction. Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge (electron for example) If you say electricity and energy are the same thing than you neglected the chemical energy (fossil fuel or natural gas) who are the main form of energy used by ours society
@@rachelcookie321 Electricity in this context means just the electrical power consumed/produced in the country, while the total energy consumption/production also includes heating and cooling as well as the fuel consumed by vehicles.
@@Kal-Zakath I mean I know the difference in physics but I couldn’t think of another energy so I was wondering what the difference was. Doesn’t fossil fuels and natural gas energy just turn into electricity too?
@@rachelcookie321 Think about it, do cars turn gas into electricity for motion? Cars basically inject gas in their engines and ignite it, producing an explosion. With that energy, cars turn their wheels. (This explanation is oversimplified, but should give you the gist of it)
I mean, nuclear is technically non-renewable, but it has a vast amount of fuel with a low impact, and btw 1% of all nuclear waste is the 20k year isotope, whereas a vast majority aka 70% is level 1 waste and can safely be put in a landfill without issue in a non-populated area, basically Germany fell for the fear mongering rather than the numbers.
Insanely true, the nuclear waste produced by like 100 reactors in the USA since their first operations amounts to no more than a football field's worth of space if you stack it 10 feet high
Maybe the numbers say it's safe, but you gotta admit that your entire country being in the fallout zone of Chernobyl leaves a mark. There are large parts of Germany where eating game or mushrooms is really not advisable. Also, we have 7 times the population density of the US. By US standards, we don't have non-populated areas. By our standards, the small cities with 20.000 residents which are being destroyed for coal mines are in non-populated areas... Not saying nuclear might not be the way to go. But you're basically telling someone who was beaten up in his childhood in some dark alley, that noone is ever beaten up there and it's safe to go there.
@@revi.talose.8643 The other insane thing to is it can be recycled into reactors again but is illegal in the USA. France does recycle their waste and nuclear produces over 70% of the nations power and they produce less waste because of recycling. Germany is against nuclear but has no problems buying it from France.
@@BenJamin-en3jb but like, have you looked into nuclear power plants? they're rigged to bury themselves in the rubble should a mishap occur ever since chernobyl. If you look at the numbers Nuclear is by far one of the least deadly, Fukushima had (maybe) 1 death, Three Mile Island had none at all, and Chernobyl had at most a couple hundred. Meanwhile one Hydropower dam breaks in China (Banqiao) and two hundred thousand people succumb
So this is basically the difference between taking action and taking action. You can either do something, that is popular and on the surface, looks like something that makes a lot of sense in achieving your goal (in this case, becoming a green country), without second thought and make everything significantly worse, or you can maybe just think for a couple of minutes and conclude if an idea is rubbish. The irony is, that this whole coal mine, was nearly entirely caused by the greens themselves. Even if you want to remove nuclear (I can see quite a lot of logical arguments in that), maybe you should do it, when you've already phased out carbon completely and can be sure, that it will be replaced by renewables, and not lignite...
Interesting video. One thing you didn’t mention in your video and is important for their decisions imo is that Germany has a decades long hot potato game with their nuclear waste, because they can‘t find a good long term solution for its storage place. (That‘s is contested by way too many reasons that find in this comment.)
Did any country beside Finland find a long term storage for its nucelar waste? I dont think so. But it's correct that not having any proper final storage for the nuclear waste is one of the arguments many Germans have against nuclear energy.
@@jeanyluisa8483 I was going to say the same thing. Ironically, they are digging holes for coal when they could've dug holes for nuclear waste. Obviously, the coal holes aren't good enough as they are actively being dug and are too shallow for long term waste storage. Plus we don't know the geographical stability of the area to potentially use it as storage.
Regarding the acid rain, actually in Germany when they started cutting down the sulfur emissions into the atmosphere, they stopped having acid rain, but they realized that their agricultural lands were not producing as much yield as before. Turns out that the acid rain was contributing to the availability of S and other metal micronutrients in their soils, and from then on, farmers had to start using fertilizers with an increased proportion of S.
@@rastrisfrustreslosgomez544 It applies to some plants (specially sugarcane in cold climate of Germany) but difference is barely 10-15%. But major fall of yield is occurring in Europe and America due to excess automation, even when their farm size is getting larger. For example when you plow the field daily without harming the roots, yield is always 2-3 times more, there is no way to automate that so far and German labour is too expensive.
@@rastrisfrustreslosgomez544 It's good for plant maybe once it's in the ground, because on leaf it burn them... Lost of pin forest in west Germany was dying from it.
There is a highway right next to that giant hole in cologne and driving by it really gives me goosebumps everytime. Seeing this with your own eyes really gives it a whole new perspective. This hole is something that makes me seriously question our way too early exit from the nuclear industry. Stuff like this shouldnt exist in a first world country, we're literally ruining families lives when we break down their homes for something so irresponsible and its horrible.
Mining companies spend A LOT of money to compensate people for their property: They don't "throw" them out of their houses, as you mention. A strip mine like this is quite easy to rehabilitate as well: yes, the landscape is "completely destroyed" but returned to its previous state at the end of the mine's life. Afterwards you wont even know there was a mine.
From what I recall, it were the climate activists whom were against nuclear power in germany, and also the reason why the government there abandon it. Which seems ironic in my mind.
It wasn’t even the activists alone, there were a lot of concerned citizens which weren’t entirely informed about how the Fukushima incident came to be. But yes, the people pressured the government
look if Germany doesn't have natural disasters and people are scared, make them pay for a new nuclear reactor that needs 1 in a million chance of failing than a normal one,, tsunami volcano earthquake tornado-proof plant also, build a nuclear waste containment facility a few Km deep into the heart and have massive 100 250 m wide elevators that can easily transport 10k tons or whatever
@@NaughtyNovaroo69 as to be expected by the conservative nature of Germans, it involves spending money. That’s our peoples main flaw. We got taught about how safe those reactors were in Germany, they absolutely were, but in the past, our nuclear waste bin is also highly critical among the people, became yea, it just exists and media tells the people it’s bad.
@@silianfrische696 Which it was. The power produced by lignite has stayed constant at around 20 gigawats. In fact all fossile fuels have stayed about constant. What did increase was the renewables. They have increased by about 60 gigawats, and today provide half of our electricity.
Enter the realm of Game Theory: Setting a time limit on how long a certain ressource will be used gives the mine operators an incentive to get as much as possible as fast as possible out of the ground.
It does not work like this. A mine has capacity limits, capacity increase would be the works investment in this case, since its pretty hard to sell an excavator You can see in a video.
@@CraftyF0X Not necessarily, if it has a plan attached to it where for example they decrease with 2% units per year until they are at 0. I have no idea if that type of plan exists thought.
@@vonfersen The thing with plans is sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't. When the cost of electricity goes up the plant is heavily incentivised to "revise their plan".
It's even worse. In Germany if the government shuts down a business they are entitled to compensation. So the more they burn at the time they are shut down, the more they will get.
Just one point to mention, because it's always misleading. Nuclear power is not emitting CO², but it's not CO² neutral. Building a nuclear power plant as well as mining, transportung and refining the material is actually really CO² intense, not to mention the costs of storing the material after being used...
Much like wind or solar power which also has a high CO² cost in mining rare earth metals and transporting, despite not emitting any CO² in power production proper. The difference is nuclear power can provide a higher kilowatt per hour to ton of overall CO² emitted than wind or solar are able to offer, and is a far more feasible option to scale up to current energy grid needs. Especially if we want to start adding more load to the grid by switching current fossil fuel using systems to electric. Weather dependent power generation simply cannot compete. I'm not saying nuclear power is the end all, be all solution to the climate crisis. There's serious waste, and even more serious security concerns that make even ardent supporters like me balk. However the cost/benefit assessment still leans heavily in nuclear power's favor, in my mind.
@@utterlyuselesscommentbelow8101 I agree that using the existing nuclear power plants is better than continueing burning coal. In regards to CO² emissions, renewable energies are less CO² intensive than nuclear power per kwh. Renewable Energy sources consume much more space in regards to pure energy production, but less in regards to the whole material live cycle. Power plants for renewable power plants having a much higher recycling rate of it's used material than nuclear power plants. The costs/benefit only leans in favor for nuclear power in a short term perspective, not in an lang term perspective and without government funding it wouldn't be profitable...
The vast majority of nuclears carbon footprint is steel and concrete. A) Nuclear uses literally hundreds of times less steel and concrete then W&S B) Nuclear power plants have a 3-10x higher capacity dlfactor then W&S C) Nuclesr power plants have 2-4x longer lifespans then W&S D) Nuclear doesn’t require storage
As a German, you got one thing slightly wring at the start. German politicians, especially of the CDU mostly don't see carbon emissions asbthat big of a problem. We have a serious lobbying problem in this country and the coal industry loves throwing cash at conservative politicians, so they can keep their business going. They just pretend like they care a lot, which is why they had the 2038 goal set. This appeases the population that cares about climate change a little while also keeping the coal industry as their backer. The only reason why the goal is 2030 now, is that the CDU was voted out and we now have a new more liberal coalition taking power (which you also didn't mention).
Which will equate to more green wasteful spending. You think your energy cost are high now, wait when the real cost hit you for so called fake green energy. But China will love it, for they make billions and create thousands of job, meanwhile Germans have to live in the cold to afford it
And he forget to tell the fact that neighbour countries like france are buildong up new nuclear power plant and germany hasn't enough options to produce enough 'green'electricity by its own constantly. Ecspecially in the winter. And wind & water turbines are causing natural problems too. It's also difficult for the goverment to find a proper middleway for it's people and their economy while protecting the nature. Germany also closed their lignite mines near leipzig /dreseden years ago. It was a big step forward into the right way.
@@MarciWelli Not one country is able to sustain a large amount of energy with renewables. That's unfortunately the problem with renewables. That's why nuclear power, and especially the research to fusion power, is so big and important. It's the only way that can create large amounts of energy, can be kept in check by having extremely high safety standards when those plants are build. And when fusion power comes along, there won't be anymore waste either, but fusion is still a couple of years, if not decades away. I would agree with you that closing those mines is good, tho I highly doubt it would be because of "going green". But the reason I said "would agree", and don't fully agree, is because of the expansion of these rheinland mines. This shows they're not scaling down the mining, but - at least - maintaining the same amount of coal imput. And do you know what will happen when these coal patches run out? They'll try to find new coal, and tear down cities because of it. So I wouldn't say that they're improving anything.
The NRW coal mine contracts with RWE that cause this disaster were made under the SPD/Green rule by former minister of the environment Johannes Remmel of the Green Party. Not the CDU.
Uhh conservatives bad havent seen in your country or any other country a soc dem or any politicly correct lef party or irganisation that is not corrupt or not hypocritic, if the soc dems and greens are so good and smart why havent they fixed the problem yet they are the new government now arent they yet they are all extremly backwards and anti-green, nucler energy is more clean, more productive and overall better than any orher source today, windmils and solar panals dont provide as much energy as needed and its not always windy or sunny and you cant build dams on every single river can you ? Nucler power should have been more than 70% of every countries energy source by now but we live in a world of corruption unfortunatly
Germany is not expanding its coal mining operation... almost all coal mines in Germany have closed since 2013. This one is one of the few still operating. The region in East Germany, where I am from, used to house hundreds of coal mines called "Tagebau" (mines where you dig a hole an expand it above ground). It was the backbone of our small industrie. Now there are almost no mines left. Btw the holes are later allowed to fill up with water and are turned into lakes and many are connected by canals so they can be used for tourism. The rest of the area is used for reforestation and a very smal amount of land is used for settlements.
you have sadly been brainwashed lol. Germany just re-started all their closed coal mines because they sanctioned themselves (by sanctioning russia) and now they haave 60% less gas coming from siberia through nordstream 1. All because siemens wont send gazprom a few turbines that they sent to canada for repairs lol, because of sanctions. So russia cant send as much gas as they should (eventho germany agreed to pay in rubles for russian war funding gas) , now germany´s "green party" solution: re-start burning coal lol. Germany is funny how it says one thing but does the complete opposite. For exaample people seem to believe germany is a "green" country but its the most pollutting country in europe lmao.
@@ImpGaming ok... so far. Germany has reopened zero coal mines. And plans on reopening zero... like wtf is your source? Germany reopened one coal powerplant and renewed licences for many more which where due to be closed. There is also a plan to open a new coal mine...which dates back to 2018 and was approved in 2020 and is now being executed on schedule. Also yes Germany is Europe's biggest CO2 producer. But only its eight or ninth biggest when looked at a per capita basis and if you include expert and import CO2 it is rank 3 behind France and the UK. Germany is also the biggest spender in Europe on renewables and pays the most into an EU found to help other members switch.
7:40 Well first of all, the familys that had to leave their homes were paid really, really well. The Government paid them nearly 3x the worth of their homes, and they were offered newly build homes just a couple km away. Yeah it probably sucks to leave your home and move, but you get a much newer and bigger home and still live in the same area. 2nd the "totally destroyed" landscapes are destroyed for now, but the coal companie has to rebuild the area they were digging in. You can see their plans for the "holes" on their internet platform: what they will build there is 20x better then what was there before. They are building a freaking sea inside of them and a big nature reserve around it. Yeah we can discuss the hole coal burning thing till 2030, i dont appreciate that either.... but you are ignoring a couple of very important facts in this matter.
An where are you getting this information? Are you getting anything from anyone who is an expert on the damages like heavy metal poisoning and such? A filter doesn't remove all of the damages, UNLIKE what you can do from Modern Nuclear.
I live right next to the biggest of the holes "Tagebau Hambach". It is an awfully ugly thing but the people in our region seem to be proud of it because it offers so many jobs. The worst thing is, we breathe in the particles that are being blown away by the wind each day. As a result: The statistics of Lung diseases skyrocket. Also everything is just dusty and you have to clean your house once a week or it'll end up looking like some homeless man's shelter...
Interesting thing about lignite is, that it contains someradioactive particles too. While nuclear plans are designed to keep everything radioactive inside, coal plans are designed to just spew it out wherever the winds happen to blow.
The difference between German and Russian coal mines is basically just: russia has unpopulated areas bigger than Germany, where coal is very common. Germany is just a relatively small nation (at least in comparison to russia).
And yet Russia uses less than half the amount of coal as Germany and has the good types like black coal and anthracite that are way more efficient. Also, Germany is small in size but is overall very densely populated.
@@AlexBeau9 yeah, I mean that's the strangest part. I mean after cheenobyl all of europe was hesitant about nuclear power, but in Germany this would 100% make sense, as its cheap reliable... AND clean/ environmentally friendly.
@@kirill6850 to be honest, nuclear power is only clean and cheap if you ignore the fact that A) nobody knows where the nuclear waste should go and B) nuclear powerplants are basicly uninsured (in germany, the maximum a company has to pay for damages by a nuclear powerplant is 2.5billion €, while expected damages for the worst case scenary would be a over 250-500billion €)
@@Gorbag100 Where do you think uranium and plutonium comes from? Nuclear reactors create such materials? We do know what to do with uranium rods and such. These materials are, were and will be part of Earth's life for millions of years, depending on the isotopes, even beyond millions, humanity is a blip in that history. You think Australians or Kazakh people check the map for uranium before a walk? These and other similar materials are present in loads of spaces, some of them makes sense to mine, some make less, presence is eternally abundant, their half life is huge. We can store them even better than nature does, if better means less exposure to complex life. Do we actually? Is the only question. The only real problem is less exposure may not better, how nature does it is might be the best, we can't do that with purified nuclear fuel, but we haven't even thought about it.
High level nuclear waste is melted down, mixed with glass and ceramics, and stored inside a cask that is considered _INDESTRUCTIBLE_ . They hit one with a full train as a test and outside of scratches on the surface, it was unscathed.
While I appreciate the video, there are some issues I'd like to critisize: 1) The use of industrial site stock footage not from Germany (4:41, 0:59 showing the Illich steel and iron works in Mariupol, Ukraine) 2) The use of footage that has nothing do do with brown coal such as a coke plant (1:44) and blast furnaces (4:41, 0:59) which both do not use brown coal (although there were brown coal coke plants in the GDR) 3) Saying that there is no alternative while Germany still has a lot of black coal and anthracite left north of the Ruhr area. Nevertheless, the last mine closed in 2018 due to cheap coal imports (not because there was nothing left). So in theory, black coal mining could be started again. Of course this has its own problems.
1, 2. It really doesn't matter, it's there to show how dirty the industry is. To show that, the location of the stock footage is not the most important factor. 3. Critizisng this is weird, the whole point of the video is to show the need to switch to renewable. That's why he also didn't focus on making a point to restart the nuclear plants. The point is to not have these types of industries anymore, not to pick the best bad option.
Nomenclature note: a city is a specific type of very large settlement, and should not be used to describe the small villages that the mine has engulfed.
@@fishinforfun8781 especially the point about france using less coal... im mean sure but they have hilarious amount of nuclear and idk of they have any good plans for getting rid of spent fuel...
@@fazeobama8872 Right, like France is some picture of ecological protection. Also of course Germany uses more power, they have a bigger economy. 2.28Bil vs 3.33Bil.
@@nealkandel4382 What's bad about nuclear you may ask? 1. Nuclear powerplant consumes a crap ton of water, like a crap ton. 2. Spent fuel needs to be dealt with somehow since those radioactivity isn't just going to go away for a long time. 3. Nuclear powerplant disasters are very difficult to control, though it is very rare compared to other powerplant disasters. 4. It's one of the least cost effective way of producing electricity which is the main reason why it's not being used in a larger scale. 5. Since it's basically the same technology as a nuclear bomb, countries can easily reverse engineer the technology to make nuclear bombs like Israel. But of course we can't overlook the good parts of nuclear with these downsides.
According to estimates from multiple different organisations, including the German institute for Economic Research, the lignite is not even necessary - Germany could easily go without it. There are enough alternative power plants using gas for instance - which Germany buys from Russia. It is all about money for the right people. The biggest mining companies literally own politicians. THAT is the reason for the mining.
Germany is in a bit of a desperate spot as far as natural resouces go. Why do you think they were so hesitant to upset Russia up until only recently? They needed those Russian pipelines to go ahead and so did Russia. Germany just needs to go full renewable energy or something. Their natural resources are limited so they gonna have to reinvent themselves or they gonna struggle in the future if they keep going in this direction.
Renewables are still too expensive due to battery storage infrastructure costs, and a fully renewable power mix likely isn't possible until well into 2040. Germany needs nuclear power.
My god... full renewable? what a joke. Germany should turn back to nuclear... end of story. There are solid long term solutions for depositing spent fuel cells.
@@amoeb81 calm down sugar teets, I said "or something", I don't f'in know - I am just saying what I see go throw your tantrums somewhere where ppl givafuk.
Germany is in this situation because of "renewables"... How many more tens of billions do they have to spend before everyone realize it's just a big waste of time (for country scale) ?
@@jonathanberisha183 Hi, its the A46 on the nothern end near the city of Jüchen and the A44 on the east end ot the heading to Jülich and later Aachen. Also the A4 leaving Cologne towards Aachen if you want to see the both big holes on the south of the brown coal area. I give the advice to check on a Map
I compared it to where I live and the hole is twice the size of central Birmingham (UK). If I could walk in a straight line across it, it would take 2-3 hours.
Good video, except it’s a bit misleading to say Germany is replacing nuclear with coal because, well, they aren’t. If you look at a graph of Germany emery production over time by type, you can see coal stays pretty constant, and it is the renewables, mainly solar and wind, that replace the nuclear as well as fill the increasing energy demand over time.
You have to look at the 2001 start of the nuclear exit. This is why the coal plants got a date of 2038, now an unrealistic 2030. Those decades of wasted time to build off nuclear instead of coal. That's a political decision of not acting for the climate. Yes wind and sun grew, but that is a parallel structure, blooming the nuclear exit.!
Germany's energy policy currently is either very selfish or very unrealistic: they don't want nuclear because of paranoia developed in last century and they think wind and solar can replace everything. That's unrealistic part. Eventually, they are aware wind and solar cannot be sufficient and reliable sources of energy and they will import electricity when needed, leaving other sources of energy (dirty sources, according to them) outside their borders. Clean Germany will have electricity as long as they can pay for it. That part is selfish. This selfish way is very risky and puts them in high dependency which, in today's world, may slow down their technological progress and they want to lead it.
@@ivanmihailovic421 yes you are absolutely right! but as I said in another comment i made on this video: gotta have to appease the activists i guess :S
As far as I know, Germany has closed all Nuclear power plants in 2010, because of natural disaster concerns, like a tsunami or major earthquake. Something that is impossible in Central Europe. Germany's politics rely on satisfying and convincing of the Public. There is not a single thing actually being done, just stuff adjusted so that less people complain.
1:36 You didn‘t mention the fact that people get paid a lot for it. Even more than 2x the value of their houses. Also, they get new houses not far from there from the government. Of course many people don't want to leave their home because it keeps memories and such. However, they are not just kicked out of their houses like you say. Furthermore, the government obliges the mining companies that the mined areas must be renatured and cultivated accordingly. This has also happened with success. Take a look at the “Cospunder See” for example, which is a former mining area.
Although I agree with you on most points I do want to start a discussion about CO2 emission in the EU. In absolute numbers Germany rules surpreme yes, but I calculated the emitted CO2 per resident and came to a complete different conclusion. The biggest CO2 emitter in the EU per resident is the Netherlands(1026 kg/person) followed by Czechia (794 kg/person) and Belgium (765 kg/person) with Germany (722 kg/person) being in the Middle of the 9 biggest CO2 producers. [Source: Statista and Worldometers] Shouldnt this be the more relevant figure to judge a country's ability to reduce its emissions?
no, it shouldn't, cause even though per capita those 3 have higher emittions of CO2, Germany still produces almost 4x more kg of CO2 than the Netherlands when all the numbers are combined, and roughly 2x more than the top 3 do.. also, Germany having a shit ecological rating includes the production and use of the energy produced, so acessing it with absolute numbers is correct..
@@tiagorafael169 Germany also is a country with a lot of industry, of course it has higher emissions than others who dont have any industry and are not a big producer of goods.
yes and no, it's an interesting metric but Germany has a lot more space and ways to deal with electricity production than smaller, denser countries like the Netherlands, Czech Rep and Belgium. And their responsibility remains the same. If a small country has a high polution / resident it doesn't really matter if they produce far less polution anyway. Sure it's not necessarily a good thing but their actions to reduce their emitions will have a lot less weight than if Germany decides to reduce their emitions. France is comparable in size and population to Germany so it's more interesting to compare these two then Germany and Belgium for example. So no it isn't really more relevant. oh and polution travels from one country to another so everyone benefits from having the biggest poluters in absolute numbers to reduce their emitions.
"It is cheap" - well it is made cheap by not holding those using it (large energy companies) responsible for the damage they do, and by offering special treatment by politicians. "There are no other options" - Germany is so far behind in building renewable energy sources, that this is just plain ridiculous. There are no other options with the CDU / CSU in charge of government would be more precise. The major driver behind these coal mines are greed and the fear of losing an industry that provides work for many people. But even the latter is misleading, because this industry has to be shut down anyways, so politicians and business people are just trying to delay that until after their career (it seems to me).
sad fakt germany is behind not just in renuweble energie also education goes down infrastrukte gets worse all cuz the politiks keep spending monney for evrything OUTSITE of germany sure helping others is good but not if u hurt ur own ppl in ur own country all cuz the ppl are to scared to say anything and the politicans are all corupt and i dont belive there is a true exeption to that cuz money rules the world
Welcome to German politics guys. Nothing much can be done that easy here. And curruption? Yes especially within the CDU, aswell as pure incompetence. They put lobbyists in too many important positions...
There were some calculations some year ago showing that paying every worker in coal related industry bis wages from tax money until retirement would be cheaper than the subsidies for this industry.
Energiewende be like…. Yes I remember they raced to shut down their nuclear power plants and go green. They now emit twice as much CO2 as before and their electricity cost also doubled. Noice.
That is not true. Renewables have grown fast enough to not having to emit more. The thing is Germany could have fased out coal instead. So Germanys emissions from the electricty sector did shrink even with nuclear shut down, but with electric cars, home heating and so forth. Germany needs 4 times as much electricty and obviously all th best sites for renewables have been build.
"Tear down cities" is somewhat overdramatized. 5 municipals were moved or are in prozess of being moved. One of it being one villa of a single family. Another almost completely destroyed during WWII shorty after bought by the company. The other 3 overall having about 3.500 inhabitants. What is being ment by "endangering the rights and freedom of the countries youth" is just the contribution to climate change - or the lack of contribution by keeping up the cole industry.
Also the tearing down already has been reduced contradicting the proclaimed "expansions" in the video. Furthermore lots of people in that are also employed by that company or are directly dependent and everyone who is relocated receives a chunk of money. Sure, not everyone is happy about that, obviously. But it's not like they are hated in that area either...
@@XGD5layer Should be much less. Just look up the different Towns on the German Wiki Page about Garzweiler (which is more complete than english one). Most towns are less than 1000 people. The 12 Towns "in progress" had 7600 in total, but the ones which are already gone, dont include any big towns either.
@@Kordanor The majority of this seems to have happened during the 1900s, so I doubt any current villager numbers will help. I bet the majority of those affected have moved out of the area. Why stay when all that tied you there is gone?
5:50 "renewable energy sources can't be installed overnight" - and continues by promoting nuclear power, which takes even longer to install. If Germany decided today to build new nuclear power plants, it would certainly take *at least* until 2030 to finish the first one of them - that's the year when the last coal power plant is supposed to shut down. Just look at the construction time and cost of the new nuclear power plant in England - that's neither cheap nor "installed overnight".
The problem is that Germany closed those plants prematurely. And burns dirty coal instead. Renewables are currently not yet ready to power the whole country (if they ever will be). You are basically destroying steam locomotives at the time when electric locomotive exists in few prototypes and infrastructure for them is not in place. Nothing to pull trains with.
The best time to start building a nuclear power plant was 10 years ago. The second best time is right now. Aside from that, building renewables means not only building windmills and solar panels, but also energy storage and upgrades to the transmission network. Those are long term projects as well. What is more disturbing, closing perfectly well functioning nuclear plants is about as stupid as it gets. If Germany had not done that, they could have been practically carbon neutral by now.
@@rickbude3866 Well right now nuclear energy is generating only 3% of our primary energy. And if the current consumption stays constant, it will only last for around 50 years. So if you want to generate 30% with nuclear Power, our resources will only Last vor 5 years. GG And btw. nuclear power is so so expansive.
@@nichtentgratet3605 there are enormous amounts of uranium dissolved in ocean water, enough to supply the world with 100% nuclear energy for thousands of years. Not to mention that with breeder reactors, depleted uranium (and even spent nuclear fuel / "waste" ) can be turned into fuel. The expensive nuclear projects you are referring to are first-of-a-kind hyper-modern ultrasafe generation III+ reactors. Prototypes if you will. They WILL become cheaper when built on a larger scale.
That is what is most likely going to happen. We are not building nearly enough renewable energy sources and energy storage to have 50% of out entire energy supply cut in 10 years.
For those who call out activists for pressuring the government to abandon nuclear power: you cannot abandon nuclear and coal power if you also block renewables. That's why Germany has the highest price for electricity and is failing horribly when it comes to sustainable power. Obviously there are some reasons to keep nuclear power plants, but the movement to abandon it has been a movement through the entire society.
I drove by here. I had no idea what it was! I mean I knew it was a coal mine but didn’t know any of this! Oh yeah shutting down their nuclear power plants not a great idea was it!
Yeah. People are quite reluctant with nuclear energy after all the incidents that have occurred, but it really isn’t that dangerous, and something quite necessary for change.
Germany has no place to store nuclear waste. This stuff has to be sealed up for over a million years until it is no longer harmful. So even if the power plants themselves are safe, how are you supposed to not entirely ruin your country with atomic waste?
@@Skilan506 I guess no but I think you could also just send it somewhere into space, theres a lot of void and no reason for us to dump that stuff into sun. And also currently it costs $10000 to ship one pound of load into space I doubt you find someone in their right mind who invests that much money just for disposal. And if ne now also consider the fact that space travel right now is only possible by using fossil fuel you would probably mess up the entire carbon footprint again sadly...
And one more thing to add that currently depending on the site you start the rocket from there is a 4-10% failure rate. Now imagine what happens when a Plutonium loaded roccket explodes while starting, I think I dnt have to add more. Technology will have to advance a bit before sending that stuff to space will be a viable option
I live practically next to this hole and its a pretty popular spot here (theres some nice viewpoints) :D. They actually plan to turn it into the largest bathing lake in Europe by 2050 and people really like that idea here.
They'll need decades just to flood it, This mine is 400m deep (Thats the same depth as lake superior, the deepest lake in the US) And according to Wikipedia this lake won't be filled before the year 2100. Most people dont realise the size of this hole
@@thorbenii565 idk if its even a good idea, filling a random hole like that which is full of toxic shit probably too wouldnt be nice, also a lake need self cleaning properties and unless they make a river flow in it, it wont work, there is a lot to think about there, but i guess it is a magnificent site to see, such a large hole
You really don't want acid rain. I grew up in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in New York State. The amount and thickness of trees that cover the range were adversely affected by acid rain that was a result of pollution from factories in the mid east. We used to have thick foliage in this area when I climbed my first mountain. Today most of these trees look terrible compared to what they were in my childhood. Most of these factories ate now closed but the degradation continues.
@@vomm they did back in the 70s and 90s, mainly czech and east german ones, modern day ones filter out a large amount of the sulfur and therefor no acid rain altho the farmers had to start fertilizing their fields with sulfur since the acid rain did that before, funnily enough
I am surprised I've never heard of this. According to Google Earth, one of those holes is over 10km wide. They show up more visibly from a distance than most cities in the region. That's ridiculous.
We learn that in the school. In 5th grade. The holes are temporary and it is denatured after the removal of the coal. In Saxony there are 2 regions littered with lakes for recreational use. Leipzig and Lausitz.
I saw the thumbnail and I was like let's find id on the map. I literally went over Germany and I zoomed on a spot that was silver-like color and it's the exact mine that's in the thumbnail.
yes, rain is acidic, not basic, but what they call acid rain is much more acidic than average and is pouted with other elements that affect the local environment
In Fukushima at 1000-10000 more people died because of non radioactive causes, like the tsunami, or simply because of evacuation. It was a very very bad decision from Germany to chose cole, and russian carbohidrates instead of nuclear.
I Heard, that the Company, who owns the Mine, RWE, does'nt even make Profit, but gets its Money from the Government, and i think you should have talked about the Protests in the Hambach Forest nearby
Its also a health desaster lul. Lung deseases like asthma aso are at peak levels around cologne and on windy days the highway through one of the mines (yes they built a highwayy there) has to be clsed due to litteral sandstorms and dusty cloudscoming out of the mine.
Interestingly, since the 19th of November this year, the Pego thermoelectric power plant, the last coal-fired power plant in operation in Portugal, has been deactivated. Therefore, Portugal starts to use only renewable energy.
You simply cannot compare Portugal to Germany. One German Company alone (BASF) has the power consumption of half of Portugal. Not because they work inefficiently, but because BASF is the biggest chemical processing company in the world and chemical processing is just very energy intensive.
@@Skyfighter94 there was no comaprison to germany, that implication was an assumption by you based on the context of the video. BASF are not a company with high moral standards, and are a terrible example of morally sound energy usage; they may be the biggest producer, but they also hold the record for largest ciminal fines of all time. edit : spelling
You can't just "turn back on" a decommissioned nuclear power plant. We have two, maybe three, nuclear power plants in Germany that could be reactivated within a couple of years (i.e. before renewables make them obsolete). This would be a very expensive process. Add to this that nuclear power is amazingly unprofitable to begin with, and you'll see why nobody is keen on this option unless it becomes unavoidable. Reactivating and running these plants would require vast state subsidies -- private industry won't touch 'em otherwise -- or else nationalization.
So living here in Germany I can tell you that your view on it is pretty shortsighted. We decided against nuclear power plants for a simple reason - like everyone else we have no secure containmend for the waste and the danger shown in the desasters before were alarming. Overall nuclear energy is a great way to reduce your CO2 emissions fast but the longterm problems occuring (waste, contamination of watersources) are not unaccounted for in your video. However there is another problem for politics regarding the removal of coal. Germany has had a huge inpact on the whole region of the so called "Ruhrgebiet" that was determined for coal mining and steel production after cheaper countries like China showed up on the world market. If you would shut down the coal plants and mining sites you would further weaken the region and that would cause social problems and hit the poor people in the region extremly hard. Also the companies running the plants have longterm contracts with the "Grundversorger" which are the goverment institutions poviding heat and electricity for their citizens at a base level. To cancel those contracts prematurely wouild cost the state a lot of money that they are not willing to pay. Overall it is a very complicated process and even if it seems to be pretty unambicious to reach the goal at 2030, it is pretty ambicious if you consider these points. One last info regarding the "poor people" that loose their home. Other as it would be handled in dictatorships all people in this region get new homes and financial repairements. The process of "removing" people for econmomical intrests isnt new and regarding the small size of the villages is pretty much just a sidenote here. I as a german citizen would prefer a faster transition to green energy too, however this has to go hand in hand with job securement and economical stability. Sorry if I upset anyone with my english skills ;-)
I would like to add to your comment that wind energy is needing around 40.000 workers, while stopping coal-industry in "Ruhrgebiet" would mean 20.000 people need to find new jobs. A transition would be possible, retraining would be an investment that would pay off in the future. And also a reason for the coal-hole to not expand, besides that people and towns need to moved, is that the ground in placed like "lützerath" is one of the most fertile soils possible in that latitude, so it would make sense for it to stay for farming to make that region less depended on importing food.
To be completely fair, Germany did extend the contracts with the coal power plants after the Paris climate accord and building renewables would generate more jobs than the ones currently active in coal power. In fact the government actively hindered the expansion of renewable energy for minor, irrelevant reasons which dumped about 60.000 jobs. Because they didn't want to lose 25.000? The Ruhrgebiet has shifted from steel production to chemical plants and car factories about two decades ago. Let's be real. The only reason the coal powerplants are still active is that the CDU is a corruption filled shit party that doesn't care about climate change. Because most of their voters will be gone by the time it hits with full force, or have enough money to soften the impact on their life.
@@carstekoch Renewables is a joke and will only make a small contribution to energy and jobs. And most jobs will be in the construction phase, not in the long term with maintanence and upgrades. Nuclear and natural gas will be the better solution.
@@AgentSmith911 If we are talking about gen 4 nuclear reactors I'm all for that. Gen 1 or 2, which are most that are in service today, are only slightly better than coal short term and create more problems further down the line. I don't agree with the sentiment of all renewables being bad though. Some are better than others, but that's about it. Regarding jobs If you were to replace all coal power with renewables like wind turbines hydroelectric plants and solar panels you'd have about the same amount of people working in the industry. Each plant requires less maintenance but there'd be more which just about cancels each other out.
You don't need nuclear power to go carbon neutral. But you don't need to shut the nuclear power plants. When you build new ones, renewables are better and cheaper, so that's where Germany is heading. I think the big mistake wasn't to cut the nuclear power, but to not build enough renewables and phase out coal.
Yes it makes no sense to destroy perfectly well functioning nuclear reactors, instead of maintaining and upgrading them where necessary. Also the costs of nuclear power plants are greatly exaggerated. If my sources are right, about 124TWh of electricity came from fossil fuels in Germany in 2021. That amounts to an average continuous draw of 14GW. Even at an EXTREMELY pessimistic 8 billion Euro per GW, Germany would be looking at a bill of 112 billion Euros, to replace ALL fossil-based electricity production with the most modern type of nuclear reactors on the market. Considering that the Energiewende cost 160 billion Euros in the last 5 years alone....
@@rickbude3866 I would really like to know your sources, but as far as I know, with all costs of waste and stuff like that put together, nuclear power is more expensive. Also, Germany is pretty perfect for renewables as they can be placed in cities on buildings and there are some windy parts onshore and offshore. You can't really change the decision to leave nuclear energy behind anymore, so I'd just go with Renewables. There are some advantages with renewables as power grids and energy production can be done more locally and independent. The sun is still the best energy source we have.
@@NutellaToastOW solar panels are nice, except in the winter. I have some solar panels as well (in the Netherlands), and from oktober to February I might as well keep them disconnected: they do nothing because the sun impacts at such a low angle. Most figures came from Wikipedia. Here some additional figures: Hinkley Point C in England: costs ~23 billion pounds for a 3, 260GW plant (about 27 billion euro, so about 9 billion euro / GW). 3rd unit at Olkiluoto nuclear power plant in Finland: 8.5 billion euro for a 1,6GW unit (about 5,3 billion euro / GW). These are both hyper modern, first of a kind, ultra safe designs. So about as expensive as it gets. Russia, China and Korea can build them even cheaper by using standardised designs. About the "waste": a nuclear power plant produces only tiny amounts of high-level waste, about 27 tonnes per year for a 1GW power plant (source: IAEA). That is equal to roughly 2 m^3 (uranium is really dense, denser than lead). This makes it entirely feasible to just store it above ground in a bunker until technology advances. It's not waste, it is fuel for more advanced nuclear reactors..
@@rickbude3866 I have not found studies on the reactors you quoted as they are probably too new, but my findings show that there are hidden costs financially, ecologically and politically. To add to that, apparently nuclear power and renewables can hardly be used together as the grid needs to be set up very differently and the technologies compete in an unhealthy way. One of the downsides of renewables mentioned most often is the lack of reliability, but in the digital age we are in there are many options to set up a smart grid to regulate the flow of electricity in the most efficient way. Also I think it is easier to switch the world's energy supply in total to renewables than to build expensive nuclear reactors in every country, so choosing renewables as a technology will probably accelerate the decline of carbon emissions. Sure, France can keep their nuclear reactors, but I don't think countries in Africa for example should build those as localized grids may be more common and more reliable in these regions. I see were the hype around nuclear energy is coming from and maybe it's just because I live in Germany where the mindset is very critical of the technology, but renewables are just easier and most of the time even cheaper. You are right, the technology will develop and get better, but so will renewables. Their price has come down so quickly the last 10 years that this trend may continue the next years, too.
@@NutellaToastOW sure, anything is possible if you throw enough money at the problem. Unfortunately renewables rarely produce energy where and when you need it, smart grid or not. This means that renewables have (gigantic) hidden costs as well: you need energy storage of some sort and the electricity grid needs to be adapted (higher capacities in general). These costs are rarely taken into account when talking about the costs of renewables. Also, while nuclear plant costs a lot of money to build: after that it starts generating money, for 60 years or even longer (some modern designs can even run up to 100 years). This is all not to say I am against renewables, not at all, it is just that I would rather see a nuclear power plant than a coal/gas power plant. It is sad to see that many road maps to carbon neutrality include renewables + gas power plants + CCS, while similar or better results could be achieved with renewables + nuclear.
I think that video makes some things look more weird than they are. Its not like Germany ever decided to shut down its nuclear powerplants and replace them by coal powerplants. Coal powerplants were there much earlier. Nuclear engery has always been very unpopular by wide parts of the German population. Germany has a very dense population so every nuclear accident with a powerplant, but also with the nucelar wasted transportes thorugh the country or temporary stored etc. would impact very many people. Tschernobyl 1986 and Fikushima proofed that accidents in nuclear powerplants do happen. So after Fukushima the Germany goverment decided to step out of nuclear engergy, mainly due to pressure of the population. Steping out off course never meant to switch the nuclear powerplants off immediatlely, there are still some nuclear powerplans running. It was also never planned to replace nuclear energy by coal, it was always planned to replace it by renewables. The german goverment of course also did not decide to dig those big hols you see in that video. The german energy sector is private and it's private companies that mine the coal. Doing so over many decades those holes of course get bigger. The goverment and politics of course gets involved whenever the growth of those holes conflicts with people living in that area. So yes, those holes exist and are part of the german energy policy. But they have surely not been planned as a replacement for nucelar power. Germany also planned to close all coal powerplants, but you cant stop all fossile powerplants at once.
The "It was also never planned to replace nuclear energy by coal, it was always planned to replace it by renewables." is not exactly true. If you have both fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, and you build in additional 1GW of renewables to phase out 1 GW of nuclear, this means you have to keep 1GW fossil that you could have gotten rid of if you kept nuclear. If we total the Energiewende costs, Germany could have had fully decarbonized electricity by now, if it invested into nuclear instead of renewables. Instead it will in a decade or two.
@@TheBlobik Getting out of coal and nuclear power are processes that take a long time. Germany plans to do both. Replacing nuclear energy by renewables was decided in 2000, then revoked by Merkel and decided by Merkel again in 2010 after Fukushima. That's been much earlier than the decision to stop using coal powerplants. Of course we could get rid of coal much faster, if Germany had continued building new nuclear powerplants in 2010. But we are living in a democracy and at that time most Germans were against it. Building a nuclear powerplant takes about 10 years. So it's quite naive to think you can quickly change those decisions because at the moment C02 is the bigger problem.
To be fair, Chernobyl happened because of incompetence and Fukushima happened because of an earthquake/tsunami sprinkled with shitty backup sytem design. Im 100% sure that the germans (who live in a way more stable region) could build something safe.
The German government does actually support the coal industry with billions of Euros, so it's not just the market and private companies doing their thing. Renewables are actually much cheaper than any other type of energy production here in Germany, so the only reason why the coal industry is still so relevant is the support from the German government.
I live quite close to these lignite mines, and have driven past them many times! Interesting to learn more about these mines! Thank you for this video :)
Lignite is also produced in Russia, China, USA and Turkey in large quantities. In Europe you have Poland and Czechia as well. World Wide also Australia is producing it. But Australia is a mining nation anyways.
A nicely detailed video about the 'downsides' of coal. No mention of how coal burning plants have becoming cleaner and cleaner in the last few decades or how the mine companies are required to reclaim the land again for future use including creating wildlife landscapes and residential use.
Its sad to see that the person who made this video seems like they intentionally left out that the contract for this "giant hole" was made a lot of years ago and that all the people that lived there knew this would happen. Also all of them got a new house by the company "RWE" (also im weirded out that he didnt say their name once since this is basically all their doing. I dont know if he didnt research enough or anything like that bc the rest of the video seems very well researched actually but this is like the first thing that comes up when you google it. Not saying i googled this and have say this because of that . I live in germany and study geography and also live a few miles next to the "big hole" . (btw its rly cool to look at it in real life maybe check it out if you life in the Köln/Essen area)
I would like to point out that when politicians say they "must" use coal to meet energy demands, they are ignoring the option of letting prices rise to the point of supporting renewable alternatives. What they mean is that they must use coal to keep energy (unsustainably) cheap.
It's sustainable for long enough to ensure that more advanced reliable and cheaper alternatives will be utilized as they come about instead of having a catastrophic gap in between.
Not trying to argue for coal at all but I think it is relevant to take into account that the argument of large mines is only partially „solved“ by nuclear energy…uranium does not come out of nowhere and has giant surface mines in Africa which are dangerous for workers and polluting the environment due to the dirty mining process. It just shifts that problem to a different continent
Thats why you should use Thorium, wich is mined in Norway (wich has labour standarts) or you could even open mines in Germany, wich tho more expensive than african labour could be made significantly safer
Slightly misleading when you talk about lignite containing mercury and sulfur and that then causing acid rain. Mercury doesn't produce an acid and all coal releases sulfur and mercury, just in varying amounts. Sulfur does produce acid rain though.
and that is filtered out of the smokes in germany to prevent acid rain like it happened in between 70s and 90s in east germany and czech republic altho the farmers were kinda grumpy that they now had to use sulfur to fertilize their plots of lands since the acid rain did that before xd more work for em basically
I remember the uncritical hysteria that led some nations to abandon nuclear, with the foolish result that CO2 emissions and pollution increased. Renewables are too unreliable, so we need to build plants using newer, safer nuclear modalities.
But their will happen a nuclear disaster, also is it a bad solution when you remind yourself of the waste and germany has no place to store that waste.
The difference is that when Germany says "We're really going to try our best to do this by 2030", they actually WILL stand a good chance of achieving it by 2030. The Italians claim that they can do the same in the next 20 months? Utter bullshit. They're not even going to try.
Nuclear energy was forbidden here in the panic after tschernobyl, if you try to argue with someone who is against it you'd rather talk to a wall instead, the wall would definitely have better arguments that's the reason why we can't get back to it
Let’s face it, to be a carbon neutral industrial country like Germany you definitely need nuclear power. They are basically cutting their two most reliable power sources within the next 10 years without a proper plan to compensate it. Plus the government wants 15 million electric cars by 2030 which leads to even more electricity needed. So in the long run we will have to import costly nuclear power from France, that’s probably why they are building new plants right now. But what do I know as a normal citizen..
You hit the nail on the head. Having millions of electric cars because its gOoD fOr ThE eNvIrOnMeNt and having to charge them with windmills and solar panels is a fucking lie. Ask Norway how their powergrid is boiling from everyone charging at night. 'Only' around 4 out of 10 in Norway own a EV and most of their energy is hydropower. And dont even get me started on the resource issues to build EV's for everyone in the first place ;)
@@thatdude1435 I totally agree with you plus there are some reasons why norway can invest in such infrastructure for the electro mobility. It’s basically all because it’s a freaking rich country because of well the oil money from their countless oil rigs in the North Sea and the whole countries population is like two times Berlin. Bit of a double standard if you ask me, living green and by selling oil. So yeah bit easier on that part. And idk someone has to break it to some politician’s, that you can’t really charge up at night with solar. I am really interested what the new German government have in stock for the not so rich suburb citizens.
We have the most expensive power costs in the whole world by the way because we have countless taxes on the electronic power and heating, such as co2 tax, renewable energy tax, oil tax, normal tax and I highly doubt that the prices will fall by cutting the two main power sources
France is (finally) building new plants because the oldest ones should already be closed according to their expected lifespan. Fessenheim was stopped in 2020 and more are expected to follow and we need new plants to replace them. But we have lost the know-how to build new power plants, and our only new generation plant is years behind schedule and billions of euros in excess.
@@despaney i think it's honestly so sad that this knowledge was lost bc this could've been exported and used to make money and also help the environment.
I have visited the mine several times. Even the ghost towns before they were demolished. What is never really said is that many of the power plants are only running because they have not yet become profitable. In fact, the share of renewable energies could be much higher. It is just easier to turn a solar cell out of the sun or a wind turbine out of the wind than to turn an entire coal-fired power station down and back up again. In addition, there is an argument that German industry likes to use: jobs. A wind turbine is maintained and kept running by a small group of technicians and engineers along with dozens of others. However, a power plant usually offers jobs to hundreds of people. Of course, a certain proportion would have to remain on the network at the moment, but that would be much less than is currently active
Solar and wind is the most unreliable source. Plus the batteries for all this is even more environmentally hazards, not to mention all the pollution to make it. Nuclear is Germany's only ability to create energy at a lower price. Since they already dug up all this, great place to put the nuclear plant. Going green is a fallacy of the elite to make money off suckers
@@StephanTrube Those 10 times more jobs were mostly fake jobs of appeasement to generate free government money and produce fast negative results for all those who invested in that garbage. The real jobs were just made in China. All your green energy is made by your so called dirty energy, just not in your country but in China. So while you pay high fee's for it, China made billions
Not sure what this narrative is about, or what a "fake job" should be. People spent time on work, earned money, payed taxes, produced and installed renewable things. There was a time we had more of those jobs in Germany than we currently have in coal. Now it's all done in China, yeah.
Decades ago when I told my classmates at uni that carbon pollution will kill far more people than nuclear power plant accidents they thought I was totally mad.
13 years of school and you have to watch an English video on a channel from denmark to learn about things 80km away from you. Thank you for this video!
I totally agree that brown coal is a huge issue for Germany's climate goals but nuclear energy is no real option. In Germany we have an on going discussion about how to store the nuclear waste for more than ten years and we still don't have a long-term solution. So producing more nuclear waste would make the problem worse.
Nuclear waste is a non issue. Used nuclear fuel rods can be recycled and the really small amount of waste can be stored away underground. Because of the recycling the long-term radioactivity in high-level wastes is reduced massively. In comparison to the burning of coal nuclear energy is 100% clean and way more efficient. I don't get how German policy makers can't find a spot for some small containers that are completely radiation proof. Instead they place wind turbines everywhere and continue to burn coal.
One of the big problems in Germany regarding nuclear power was also that we had no good place to store the nuclear waste. So germans were not only scared of the affects of a nuclear desaster but also were to put the waste and keep it safe there for thousands of years
Still, nuclear waste are far less dangerous when compared to the waste that coal plants create. Countless people die each year from air pollution and the effects of climate change, while almost nobody dies from nuclear waste.
@@antonygikas8817 yeah, we can just store it until we find a good way to dispose of it or reuse it. Most of the waste still has plenty of power left in it which can be extracted with modern reactors And I'm sure in the future we'll find an extremely safe and reliable way to get it into either the earth's mantle or shoot it into the sun. I just don't see the issue
@@trygveevensen171 Ikr, I think that in the future, every country shall have a rocket pod for a giant rocket carrying toxic waste and dumping it somewhere else
@@mattynek2 agreed, although I wouldn't necessarily trust every country to do that. If it explodes in the atmosphere, the consequences could be pretty huge, depending on how much it was carrying
In germany, by law, a Wind wheel has to be at least 1000 Meters away from a Residential area while a Coal powerplant only has to bee 400m away. you might see a small problem here
best part is, we have a giant windpark in the north sea, not conectet to the grid, because we can't store electricety, so it makse "no" sense to conect it to the grid...
Fucking politicians. to currupt to do anything right.
That's not actually true everywhere. There's an even funnier thing. The 10h rule. The height multiplied by ten is the minimum distance to a nearby resided area(one person in a house is technically enough)
Because residents like the birds
@@chrisdernovich7044 im sure they like the forests more then the huge coal pits
@@chrisdernovich7044 and you can also paint the rotors wich drastically decreases bird deaths that are rare anyways
A nuclear plant on a mountainous island with limited area for urban development, constant earthquakes, and freaking tsunami's is so insanely different from Germany's situation that I don't get how it was ever even under consideration to phase it out
This^
The germans are some of the very few people i would trust to build something like this.
@@thatdude1435 I actually wouldn't, they aren't that good at making buildings. Most other things, yes.
@@alfrredd hell, call the norwegians then, they build stuff that last forever hehe
Probably Russia worked very very hard on that nuclear reactor ban too, to be able to sell their gas to Germany... They helped the anti-nuke lobby, etc...
@@kashmirha Yes, they don't want countries to be energy independent.
As a German I can only say:
We also don‘t understand wtf our politicians are doing 🤷🏻♂️ Most are completely incompetent and don’t bring any experience or expertise to the table. You can be Minister for families and youth in the first year, become minister of defense the next. After that you get voted president of the European Commission even tho you’re not even one of the candidates… it‘s a sad joke.
@Ludwigvan Definitely not worth any money.
They really should put Uschis' picture next to the phrase "Falling up the ladder" in the dictionary.
I hope I'm not still be around when they make her Empress of Europe for
accidentally flooding half of it or something equally "WHAAAT?!".
@@HauntedXXXPancake You missunderstand something. To a German politician any work related to the eu is more like you got taken out of german politics. If you look a bit back all politicians of bigger german partys who got "transfered" to eu dissappeard somewhat in our german political world.
Well I’m glad clueless politicians isn’t just an American problem.
as a german i can confirm this is 100% true
I live like 10-20 kilometers away from it, and a friend of mine lived in a village right next to it, back then I was visiting him many times by bike, but the whole village, including his home was wiped out in 2016 or 2017, I remember the last months of the village, houses were literally boarded up after most residents left to prevent other people from going inside or stealing, they even tear off a historic church that was there since decades… it’s so strange when I drive by it and just see that big hole, everything is just gone except memory’s. People here say that the hole will be filled up with water at 2050 like all the other mining holes that closed here
Immerath? Or which one? I‘m also living 10-15 km away from it. It has a nice view but that‘s the only positive thing about it.
Ich wohne auch nur ein paar Kilometer davon entfernt lol
I find it very interesting that you both talk in English instead of German ?
Ja können auch deutsch reden aber glaube nicht dass die Mehrheit hier deutsch sprechen kann…
@@YKM77754 also sobald germany im titel steht sind eh 90% deutsch XD
The funny thing is that getting a wind park built in Germany requires you to jump through loads of bureacratic hoops, takes ages and there's a good chance it won't get built in the end because local residents will mobilise against it. But tearing down entire villages to mine brown coal is a-okay (partly thanks to corrupt politicians with ties to the coal industry). Brown coal was not the only alternative after we decided to abandon nuclear power. Sure, we wouldn't have been able to plug the entire hole in our energy mix with renewables right away but we could have a lot more renewable energy and a lot less coal in our mix today if our governments had chosen to properly subsidise and support renewable energy. They didn't and here we are.
Sounds weird how a democratic country that knows the pros and cons of nuclear and has no power against the coal lobby. German people can move against nuclear but not against coal. If they can win against nuclear they could move against coal. It is noticeable that they are clearly informed about the damage coal makes on people's health and the degradation of the environment. Hypocrites.
@@youxkio Well after the Fukushima Incident there was a big Movement against Nuclear, wich they were totally right about. So Mutti Merkel Changes her Politic when she felt the wind of change what she was always doing to stay popular. The thing ist like the Main comment said the coal Lobby used corrupt CDU politicians swing the favor to them to replace the nuclear power plants when the public interest wasnt that high on this topic anymore... Now it is again and we have the problem again... Danke Merkel
"corrupt politicians"
Italians and Romanians are rolling in their corruption laughing at you.
@@youxkio People _do_ move against coal.
@@lonestarr1490 I see. Another aspect is how is the evolution of renewables in Germany. I read the news that Portugal, one of the PIGS of the crisis 2010, just deactivated its last coal power plant last month. Why Germany can't do the same?
Wow! I live in this area of Germany and found this giant hole on the map recently. I had no clue, now I know, thanks to you.
Your so cringe right now
@@kentonbenoit9629 huh?
@@kentonbenoit9629 you a 10 yo or something?
@@kentonbenoit9629 is right, if you live in the Rhine Area, you definitely know the Holes. There are literally Kilometers of nothing between highways and dust blowing over it and stuff.
So if the commenter isn't from the Moon than he's telling a cringe joke. (not that i don't like this Humour)
All cool. Better informed later than never. :)
Just remember to vote Grüne or Linke so those get replaced quicker with renewable energy.
The first english youtuber, who doesnt completely fail in pronouncing german words
He's Danish.
In the magical fantasyland of Germany, lignite coal and biomass are cleaner then nuclear.
4:20 : Acid rain was a problem in Germany about 30 years ago ... but since a lot of years, the coal power plants have smoke filters which filter a lot of pollution, like e.g. sulfur oxides, out of the smoke. So, yes the coal contains a lot of sulfur, but the large majority of it isn't emitted.
I remember this well. We had the same problem in the Czech Republic. The communist governments in Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany and Poland cared little about environment, the air pollution from the lignite power plants was insane. The acid rain they caused completely destroyed large areas of forest within a really short time frame (1970s-90s). The whole Ore mountains (Erzgebirge) and Jizerské hory (Isergebirge) basically dried out. It was extremely sad and the recovery will take many more decades.
In 1990s all the plants were desulphurated and fitted with particle filters and the air quality improved dramatically.
The desulphurating process still uses large quantity of lime and produces gypsum as a byproduct (some of it is used as a building material). Mercury and other heavy metals are hard to tackle. It's far from ideal.
That number lol
It is the same in the US, actually now we are having to put sulfur on our fields because we don’t get it anymore like we did
@@1214101 it's certainly better to put it with the fertilizer intentionally where it is needed, instead of letting it rain down everywhere where it is not needed and even causes a lot of damage (like the woods and forests)
@@1214101 That's... not really comparable as sulfate acid isn't the same as sulfate in fertiliser
Just a small correction: French nuclear power plants produce 70% of the electricity and not energy, electricity only represents about 25% of the total energy consumption. French nuclear power plants provide about 18% of the energy in 2019
What’s the difference between electricity and energy?
@@rachelcookie321 In physics energy is the quantity characterizing a physical system and expressing its capacity to modify the state of other systems with which it enters in interaction.
Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge (electron for example)
If you say electricity and energy are the same thing than you neglected the chemical energy (fossil fuel or natural gas) who are the main form of energy used by ours society
@@rachelcookie321 Electricity in this context means just the electrical power consumed/produced in the country, while the total energy consumption/production also includes heating and cooling as well as the fuel consumed by vehicles.
@@Kal-Zakath I mean I know the difference in physics but I couldn’t think of another energy so I was wondering what the difference was. Doesn’t fossil fuels and natural gas energy just turn into electricity too?
@@rachelcookie321 Think about it, do cars turn gas into electricity for motion? Cars basically inject gas in their engines and ignite it, producing an explosion. With that energy, cars turn their wheels. (This explanation is oversimplified, but should give you the gist of it)
I mean, nuclear is technically non-renewable, but it has a vast amount of fuel with a low impact, and btw 1% of all nuclear waste is the 20k year isotope, whereas a vast majority aka 70% is level 1 waste and can safely be put in a landfill without issue in a non-populated area, basically Germany fell for the fear mongering rather than the numbers.
Insanely true, the nuclear waste produced by like 100 reactors in the USA since their first operations amounts to no more than a football field's worth of space if you stack it 10 feet high
Maybe the numbers say it's safe, but you gotta admit that your entire country being in the fallout zone of Chernobyl leaves a mark. There are large parts of Germany where eating game or mushrooms is really not advisable. Also, we have 7 times the population density of the US. By US standards, we don't have non-populated areas. By our standards, the small cities with 20.000 residents which are being destroyed for coal mines are in non-populated areas...
Not saying nuclear might not be the way to go. But you're basically telling someone who was beaten up in his childhood in some dark alley, that noone is ever beaten up there and it's safe to go there.
We don’t really do landfill in Germany anymore.
@@revi.talose.8643 The other insane thing to is it can be recycled into reactors again but is illegal in the USA. France does recycle their waste and nuclear produces over 70% of the nations power and they produce less waste because of recycling. Germany is against nuclear but has no problems buying it from France.
@@BenJamin-en3jb but like, have you looked into nuclear power plants? they're rigged to bury themselves in the rubble should a mishap occur ever since chernobyl. If you look at the numbers Nuclear is by far one of the least deadly, Fukushima had (maybe) 1 death, Three Mile Island had none at all, and Chernobyl had at most a couple hundred.
Meanwhile one Hydropower dam breaks in China (Banqiao) and two hundred thousand people succumb
So this is basically the difference between taking action and taking action. You can either do something, that is popular and on the surface, looks like something that makes a lot of sense in achieving your goal (in this case, becoming a green country), without second thought and make everything significantly worse, or you can maybe just think for a couple of minutes and conclude if an idea is rubbish. The irony is, that this whole coal mine, was nearly entirely caused by the greens themselves. Even if you want to remove nuclear (I can see quite a lot of logical arguments in that), maybe you should do it, when you've already phased out carbon completely and can be sure, that it will be replaced by renewables, and not lignite...
facts
Also Germany has a large steel production which needs carbon. And can’t really get more carbon in iron by just electricity
Interesting video. One thing you didn’t mention in your video and is important for their decisions imo is that Germany has a decades long hot potato game with their nuclear waste, because they can‘t find a good long term solution for its storage place. (That‘s is contested by way too many reasons that find in this comment.)
Did any country beside Finland find a long term storage for its nucelar waste? I dont think so. But it's correct that not having any proper final storage for the nuclear waste is one of the arguments many Germans have against nuclear energy.
@@jeanyluisa8483 I was going to say the same thing. Ironically, they are digging holes for coal when they could've dug holes for nuclear waste. Obviously, the coal holes aren't good enough as they are actively being dug and are too shallow for long term waste storage. Plus we don't know the geographical stability of the area to potentially use it as storage.
@@ketsuekikumori9145 Yeah, nuclear just isn't a solution...
They can use the dug out hole and build a large storage container for the waste. It's not going to be easy, but it's better than polluting the air.
How does the French able to solve their nuclear waste problem?
Regarding the acid rain, actually in Germany when they started cutting down the sulfur emissions into the atmosphere, they stopped having acid rain, but they realized that their agricultural lands were not producing as much yield as before. Turns out that the acid rain was contributing to the availability of S and other metal micronutrients in their soils, and from then on, farmers had to start using fertilizers with an increased proportion of S.
How is it "from then on, they had to use fertilizer" ? To maintain similar crop yield ?
Have you a source ? I'm interested about this.
@@hackarma2072 exactly! Sadly, I dont have a source, I was told about this during a uni class, I studied Environmental Sciences
That makes a lot of sense. Acid rain is good for plant, bad for you
@@rastrisfrustreslosgomez544 It applies to some plants (specially sugarcane in cold climate of Germany) but difference is barely 10-15%.
But major fall of yield is occurring in Europe and America due to excess automation, even when their farm size is getting larger.
For example when you plow the field daily without harming the roots, yield is always 2-3 times more, there is no way to automate that so far and German labour is too expensive.
@@rastrisfrustreslosgomez544 It's good for plant maybe once it's in the ground, because on leaf it burn them... Lost of pin forest in west Germany was dying from it.
There is a highway right next to that giant hole in cologne and driving by it really gives me goosebumps everytime. Seeing this with your own eyes really gives it a whole new perspective. This hole is something that makes me seriously question our way too early exit from the nuclear industry. Stuff like this shouldnt exist in a first world country, we're literally ruining families lives when we break down their homes for something so irresponsible and its horrible.
Mining companies spend A LOT of money to compensate people for their property: They don't "throw" them out of their houses, as you mention. A strip mine like this is quite easy to rehabilitate as well: yes, the landscape is "completely destroyed" but returned to its previous state at the end of the mine's life. Afterwards you wont even know there was a mine.
They Are still thrown out.
From what I recall, it were the climate activists whom were against nuclear power in germany, and also the reason why the government there abandon it. Which seems ironic in my mind.
It wasn’t even the activists alone, there were a lot of concerned citizens which weren’t entirely informed about how the Fukushima incident came to be. But yes, the people pressured the government
look if Germany doesn't have natural disasters and people are scared, make them pay for a new nuclear reactor that needs 1 in a million chance of failing than a normal one,, tsunami volcano earthquake tornado-proof plant
also, build a nuclear waste containment facility a few Km deep into the heart and have massive 100 250 m wide elevators that can easily transport 10k tons or whatever
@@NaughtyNovaroo69 as to be expected by the conservative nature of Germans, it involves spending money. That’s our peoples main flaw.
We got taught about how safe those reactors were in Germany, they absolutely were, but in the past, our nuclear waste bin is also highly critical among the people, became yea, it just exists and media tells the people it’s bad.
Yes but no. They never wanted iz bo be replaced by coal, but by renewables.
@@silianfrische696 Which it was. The power produced by lignite has stayed constant at around 20 gigawats. In fact all fossile fuels have stayed about constant. What did increase was the renewables. They have increased by about 60 gigawats, and today provide half of our electricity.
Enter the realm of Game Theory:
Setting a time limit on how long a certain ressource will be used gives the mine operators an incentive to get as much as possible as fast as possible out of the ground.
It does not work like this. A mine has capacity limits, capacity increase would be the works investment in this case, since its pretty hard to sell an excavator You can see in a video.
@@kashmirha Nonetheless, when it is about the whole business, a time limit will incentivize a ramp up instead of a wind down in production.
@@CraftyF0X Not necessarily, if it has a plan attached to it where for example they decrease with 2% units per year until they are at 0. I have no idea if that type of plan exists thought.
@@vonfersen The thing with plans is sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't. When the cost of electricity goes up the plant is heavily incentivised to "revise their plan".
It's even worse. In Germany if the government shuts down a business they are entitled to compensation. So the more they burn at the time they are shut down, the more they will get.
Just one point to mention, because it's always misleading. Nuclear power is not emitting CO², but it's not CO² neutral. Building a nuclear power plant as well as mining, transportung and refining the material is actually really CO² intense, not to mention the costs of storing the material after being used...
have you got a link to a comparison?
Much like wind or solar power which also has a high CO² cost in mining rare earth metals and transporting, despite not emitting any CO² in power production proper. The difference is nuclear power can provide a higher kilowatt per hour to ton of overall CO² emitted than wind or solar are able to offer, and is a far more feasible option to scale up to current energy grid needs. Especially if we want to start adding more load to the grid by switching current fossil fuel using systems to electric. Weather dependent power generation simply cannot compete.
I'm not saying nuclear power is the end all, be all solution to the climate crisis. There's serious waste, and even more serious security concerns that make even ardent supporters like me balk. However the cost/benefit assessment still leans heavily in nuclear power's favor, in my mind.
Let's not talk about wind turbines and solar panels
@@utterlyuselesscommentbelow8101 I agree that using the existing nuclear power plants is better than continueing burning coal. In regards to CO² emissions, renewable energies are less CO² intensive than nuclear power per kwh. Renewable Energy sources consume much more space in regards to pure energy production, but less in regards to the whole material live cycle. Power plants for renewable power plants having a much higher recycling rate of it's used material than nuclear power plants.
The costs/benefit only leans in favor for nuclear power in a short term perspective, not in an lang term perspective and without government funding it wouldn't be profitable...
The vast majority of nuclears carbon footprint is steel and concrete. A) Nuclear uses literally hundreds of times less steel and concrete then W&S B) Nuclear power plants have a 3-10x higher capacity dlfactor then W&S C) Nuclesr power plants have 2-4x longer lifespans then W&S D) Nuclear doesn’t require storage
i lived right next to it! the air is so dirty that wet towels will emit brown soup over time. (i put them over my radiator to humidify my room).
As a German, you got one thing slightly wring at the start.
German politicians, especially of the CDU mostly don't see carbon emissions asbthat big of a problem. We have a serious lobbying problem in this country and the coal industry loves throwing cash at conservative politicians, so they can keep their business going. They just pretend like they care a lot, which is why they had the 2038 goal set. This appeases the population that cares about climate change a little while also keeping the coal industry as their backer. The only reason why the goal is 2030 now, is that the CDU was voted out and we now have a new more liberal coalition taking power (which you also didn't mention).
Which will equate to more green wasteful spending. You think your energy cost are high now, wait when the real cost hit you for so called fake green energy. But China will love it, for they make billions and create thousands of job, meanwhile Germans have to live in the cold to afford it
And he forget to tell the fact that neighbour countries like france are buildong up new nuclear power plant and germany hasn't enough options to produce enough 'green'electricity by its own constantly. Ecspecially in the winter. And wind & water turbines are causing natural problems too. It's also difficult for the goverment to find a proper middleway for it's people and their economy while protecting the nature. Germany also closed their lignite mines near leipzig /dreseden years ago. It was a big step forward into the right way.
@@MarciWelli Not one country is able to sustain a large amount of energy with renewables. That's unfortunately the problem with renewables. That's why nuclear power, and especially the research to fusion power, is so big and important. It's the only way that can create large amounts of energy, can be kept in check by having extremely high safety standards when those plants are build. And when fusion power comes along, there won't be anymore waste either, but fusion is still a couple of years, if not decades away.
I would agree with you that closing those mines is good, tho I highly doubt it would be because of "going green". But the reason I said "would agree", and don't fully agree, is because of the expansion of these rheinland mines. This shows they're not scaling down the mining, but - at least - maintaining the same amount of coal imput. And do you know what will happen when these coal patches run out? They'll try to find new coal, and tear down cities because of it. So I wouldn't say that they're improving anything.
The NRW coal mine contracts with RWE that cause this disaster were made under the SPD/Green rule by former minister of the environment Johannes Remmel of the Green Party. Not the CDU.
Uhh conservatives bad havent seen in your country or any other country a soc dem or any politicly correct lef party or irganisation that is not corrupt or not hypocritic, if the soc dems and greens are so good and smart why havent they fixed the problem yet they are the new government now arent they yet they are all extremly backwards and anti-green, nucler energy is more clean, more productive and overall better than any orher source today, windmils and solar panals dont provide as much energy as needed and its not always windy or sunny and you cant build dams on every single river can you ? Nucler power should have been more than 70% of every countries energy source by now but we live in a world of corruption unfortunatly
Me: "What's Lignite?"
Germany: "Lignite Balls."
Germany is not expanding its coal mining operation... almost all coal mines in Germany have closed since 2013.
This one is one of the few still operating.
The region in East Germany, where I am from, used to house hundreds of coal mines called "Tagebau" (mines where you dig a hole an expand it above ground). It was the backbone of our small industrie. Now there are almost no mines left.
Btw the holes are later allowed to fill up with water and are turned into lakes and many are connected by canals so they can be used for tourism. The rest of the area is used for reforestation and a very smal amount of land is used for settlements.
you have sadly been brainwashed lol. Germany just re-started all their closed coal mines because they sanctioned themselves (by sanctioning russia) and now they haave 60% less gas coming from siberia through nordstream 1. All because siemens wont send gazprom a few turbines that they sent to canada for repairs lol, because of sanctions.
So russia cant send as much gas as they should (eventho germany agreed to pay in rubles for russian war funding gas) , now germany´s "green party" solution: re-start burning coal lol.
Germany is funny how it says one thing but does the complete opposite. For exaample people seem to believe germany is a "green" country but its the most pollutting country in europe lmao.
@@ImpGaming ok... so far. Germany has reopened zero coal mines. And plans on reopening zero... like wtf is your source?
Germany reopened one coal powerplant and renewed licences for many more which where due to be closed.
There is also a plan to open a new coal mine...which dates back to 2018 and was approved in 2020 and is now being executed on schedule.
Also yes Germany is Europe's biggest CO2 producer. But only its eight or ninth biggest when looked at a per capita basis and if you include expert and import CO2 it is rank 3 behind France and the UK.
Germany is also the biggest spender in Europe on renewables and pays the most into an EU found to help other members switch.
7:40
Well first of all, the familys that had to leave their homes were paid really, really well. The Government paid them nearly 3x the worth of their homes, and they were offered newly build homes just a couple km away. Yeah it probably sucks to leave your home and move, but you get a much newer and bigger home and still live in the same area.
2nd the "totally destroyed" landscapes are destroyed for now, but the coal companie has to rebuild the area they were digging in. You can see their plans for the "holes" on their internet platform: what they will build there is 20x better then what was there before. They are building a freaking sea inside of them and a big nature reserve around it.
Yeah we can discuss the hole coal burning thing till 2030, i dont appreciate that either.... but you are ignoring a couple of very important facts in this matter.
Building a sea there is not a really good idea
But... what about the cultural and historical value once held by the settlements that have been torn down? Like St. Lambertus Immerath?
An where are you getting this information? Are you getting anything from anyone who is an expert on the damages like heavy metal poisoning and such? A filter doesn't remove all of the damages, UNLIKE what you can do from Modern Nuclear.
Cope
I live right next to the biggest of the holes "Tagebau Hambach". It is an awfully ugly thing but the people in our region seem to be proud of it because it offers so many jobs. The worst thing is, we breathe in the particles that are being blown away by the wind each day. As a result: The statistics of Lung diseases skyrocket. Also everything is just dusty and you have to clean your house once a week or it'll end up looking like some homeless man's shelter...
That's funny, we have the exact same situation here with a steel factory in the Netherlands.
Interesting thing about lignite is, that it contains someradioactive particles too. While nuclear plans are designed to keep everything radioactive inside, coal plans are designed to just spew it out wherever the winds happen to blow.
Hambach... the ancient forest.. no more?
@@MartinKyral According to German logic, it's better to have radioactivity in the air than contained in a power-plant.
Thank to your politicians and their "Energiewende". Get rid of clean and stable nuclear and use dirty coal instead. 🙈
The difference between German and Russian coal mines is basically just: russia has unpopulated areas bigger than Germany, where coal is very common. Germany is just a relatively small nation (at least in comparison to russia).
And yet Russia uses less than half the amount of coal as Germany and has the good types like black coal and anthracite that are way more efficient. Also, Germany is small in size but is overall very densely populated.
@@AlexBeau9 yeah, I mean that's the strangest part. I mean after cheenobyl all of europe was hesitant about nuclear power, but in Germany this would 100% make sense, as its cheap reliable... AND clean/ environmentally friendly.
@@kirill6850 Many germans know that, but more germans think nuclear=bad
@@kirill6850 to be honest, nuclear power is only clean and cheap if you ignore the fact that A) nobody knows where the nuclear waste should go and B) nuclear powerplants are basicly uninsured (in germany, the maximum a company has to pay for damages by a nuclear powerplant is 2.5billion €, while expected damages for the worst case scenary would be a over 250-500billion €)
@@Gorbag100 Where do you think uranium and plutonium comes from? Nuclear reactors create such materials? We do know what to do with uranium rods and such. These materials are, were and will be part of Earth's life for millions of years, depending on the isotopes, even beyond millions, humanity is a blip in that history.
You think Australians or Kazakh people check the map for uranium before a walk?
These and other similar materials are present in loads of spaces, some of them makes sense to mine, some make less, presence is eternally abundant, their half life is huge.
We can store them even better than nature does, if better means less exposure to complex life. Do we actually? Is the only question. The only real problem is less exposure may not better, how nature does it is might be the best, we can't do that with purified nuclear fuel, but we haven't even thought about it.
High level nuclear waste is melted down, mixed with glass and ceramics, and stored inside a cask that is considered _INDESTRUCTIBLE_ . They hit one with a full train as a test and outside of scratches on the surface, it was unscathed.
While I appreciate the video, there are some issues I'd like to critisize:
1) The use of industrial site stock footage not from Germany (4:41, 0:59 showing the Illich steel and iron works in Mariupol, Ukraine)
2) The use of footage that has nothing do do with brown coal such as a coke plant (1:44) and blast furnaces (4:41, 0:59) which both do not use brown coal (although there were brown coal coke plants in the GDR)
3) Saying that there is no alternative while Germany still has a lot of black coal and anthracite left north of the Ruhr area. Nevertheless, the last mine closed in 2018 due to cheap coal imports (not because there was nothing left). So in theory, black coal mining could be started again. Of course this has its own problems.
1, 2. It really doesn't matter, it's there to show how dirty the industry is. To show that, the location of the stock footage is not the most important factor.
3. Critizisng this is weird, the whole point of the video is to show the need to switch to renewable. That's why he also didn't focus on making a point to restart the nuclear plants. The point is to not have these types of industries anymore, not to pick the best bad option.
Cry
@@waterfelon Beautiful example of someone who disagrees but has zero arguments of his own.
@@theodornortvedt3786 absolutely gorgeous example of someone who has zero sense of sarcasm
Nomenclature note: a city is a specific type of very large settlement, and should not be used to describe the small villages that the mine has engulfed.
So much bias here.
@@fishinforfun8781 especially the point about france using less coal... im mean sure but they have hilarious amount of nuclear and idk of they have any good plans for getting rid of spent fuel...
@@fazeobama8872 Right, like France is some picture of ecological protection. Also of course Germany uses more power, they
have a bigger economy. 2.28Bil vs 3.33Bil.
@@fazeobama8872 Whats bad about nuclear?
@@nealkandel4382 What's bad about nuclear you may ask?
1. Nuclear powerplant consumes a crap ton of water, like a crap ton.
2. Spent fuel needs to be dealt with somehow since those radioactivity isn't just going to go away for a long time.
3. Nuclear powerplant disasters are very difficult to control, though it is very rare compared to other powerplant disasters.
4. It's one of the least cost effective way of producing electricity which is the main reason why it's not being used in a larger scale.
5. Since it's basically the same technology as a nuclear bomb, countries can easily reverse engineer the technology to make nuclear bombs like Israel.
But of course we can't overlook the good parts of nuclear with these downsides.
According to estimates from multiple different organisations, including the German institute for Economic Research, the lignite is not even necessary - Germany could easily go without it. There are enough alternative power plants using gas for instance - which Germany buys from Russia. It is all about money for the right people. The biggest mining companies literally own politicians. THAT is the reason for the mining.
The mines probably produce lots of revenue for Germany so if it makes lots of money why not keep it
@@danial1603 funfakt it came out later that the destruktion of those citys where wrongfuly done but there keept it down under wraps -.-
Must be why electricity is so cheap in Germany these days.
@@danial1603 Mining is highly subsidised in Germany, so I don't think they make much money.
@@MalawisLilleKanal it sadly is absolutely not
Balanced, entertaining presentation, what else could be said but, "Well done and thanks".
Germany is in a bit of a desperate spot as far as natural resouces go. Why do you think they were so hesitant to upset Russia up until only recently? They needed those Russian pipelines to go ahead and so did Russia.
Germany just needs to go full renewable energy or something. Their natural resources are limited so they gonna have to reinvent themselves or they gonna struggle in the future if they keep going in this direction.
We need tomutch Energie, we cant actually Support ourself without nuclear or coal power right now, and are basicaly praying for nuclear fusion
Renewables are still too expensive due to battery storage infrastructure costs, and a fully renewable power mix likely isn't possible until well into 2040. Germany needs nuclear power.
My god... full renewable? what a joke.
Germany should turn back to nuclear... end of story. There are solid long term solutions for depositing spent fuel cells.
@@amoeb81 calm down sugar teets, I said "or something", I don't f'in know - I am just saying what I see go throw your tantrums somewhere where ppl givafuk.
Germany is in this situation because of "renewables"... How many more tens of billions do they have to spend before everyone realize it's just a big waste of time (for country scale) ?
I drove on the motorway few times past this mine. It’s mind boggling how big it is.
i want to see it what is the motorway name/number
@@jonathanberisha183 Hi, its the A46 on the nothern end near the city of Jüchen and the A44 on the east end ot the heading to Jülich and later Aachen.
Also the A4 leaving Cologne towards Aachen if you want to see the both big holes on the south of the brown coal area. I give the advice to check on a Map
@@jonathanberisha183 there is even a view point where you can see it much better, called Tagebau Hambach.
It’s mine boggling
I compared it to where I live and the hole is twice the size of central Birmingham (UK). If I could walk in a straight line across it, it would take 2-3 hours.
Good video, except it’s a bit misleading to say Germany is replacing nuclear with coal because, well, they aren’t. If you look at a graph of Germany emery production over time by type, you can see coal stays pretty constant, and it is the renewables, mainly solar and wind, that replace the nuclear as well as fill the increasing energy demand over time.
They increased energy imports from Poland, iirc
You have to look at the 2001 start of the nuclear exit.
This is why the coal plants got a date of 2038, now an unrealistic 2030.
Those decades of wasted time to build off nuclear instead of coal.
That's a political decision of not acting for the climate.
Yes wind and sun grew, but that is a parallel structure, blooming the nuclear exit.!
Yeah and It'll stay this way because of the volitility of the power consumption - unless you want to throw away massive amounts of green energy
Germany's energy policy currently is either very selfish or very unrealistic: they don't want nuclear because of paranoia developed in last century and they think wind and solar can replace everything. That's unrealistic part. Eventually, they are aware wind and solar cannot be sufficient and reliable sources of energy and they will import electricity when needed, leaving other sources of energy (dirty sources, according to them) outside their borders. Clean Germany will have electricity as long as they can pay for it. That part is selfish. This selfish way is very risky and puts them in high dependency which, in today's world, may slow down their technological progress and they want to lead it.
@@ivanmihailovic421 yes you are absolutely right! but as I said in another comment i made on this video: gotta have to appease the activists i guess :S
As far as I know, Germany has closed all Nuclear power plants in 2010, because of natural disaster concerns, like a tsunami or major earthquake. Something that is impossible in Central Europe.
Germany's politics rely on satisfying and convincing of the Public. There is not a single thing actually being done, just stuff adjusted so that less people complain.
Accurate
1:36 You didn‘t mention the fact that people get paid a lot for it. Even more than 2x the value of their houses. Also, they get new houses not far from there from the government. Of course many people don't want to leave their home because it keeps memories and such. However, they are not just kicked out of their houses like you say. Furthermore, the government obliges the mining companies that the mined areas must be renatured and cultivated accordingly. This has also happened with success. Take a look at the “Cospunder See” for example, which is a former mining area.
Fun fact: Several autobahn sections (A61/A44) were changed over the years to get the coal.
Although I agree with you on most points I do want to start a discussion about CO2 emission in the EU. In absolute numbers Germany rules surpreme yes, but I calculated the emitted CO2 per resident and came to a complete different conclusion.
The biggest CO2 emitter in the EU per resident is the Netherlands(1026 kg/person) followed by Czechia (794 kg/person) and Belgium (765 kg/person) with Germany (722 kg/person) being in the Middle of the 9 biggest CO2 producers. [Source: Statista and Worldometers]
Shouldnt this be the more relevant figure to judge a country's ability to reduce its emissions?
facts
It is much more about the total and the misguided message Germany is taking this route.
It's not the climate leadership that they could have been.
no, it shouldn't, cause even though per capita those 3 have higher emittions of CO2, Germany still produces almost 4x more kg of CO2 than the Netherlands when all the numbers are combined, and roughly 2x more than the top 3 do.. also, Germany having a shit ecological rating includes the production and use of the energy produced, so acessing it with absolute numbers is correct..
@@tiagorafael169 Germany also is a country with a lot of industry, of course it has higher emissions than others who dont have any industry and are not a big producer of goods.
yes and no, it's an interesting metric but Germany has a lot more space and ways to deal with electricity production than smaller, denser countries like the Netherlands, Czech Rep and Belgium. And their responsibility remains the same. If a small country has a high polution / resident it doesn't really matter if they produce far less polution anyway. Sure it's not necessarily a good thing but their actions to reduce their emitions will have a lot less weight than if Germany decides to reduce their emitions.
France is comparable in size and population to Germany so it's more interesting to compare these two then Germany and Belgium for example.
So no it isn't really more relevant. oh and polution travels from one country to another so everyone benefits from having the biggest poluters in absolute numbers to reduce their emitions.
lets hope they make the holes so big they grow together and eventually go down to the center of the planet so we can dump the politicians down there
Damn I just found this video, this is exactly where I live. I could go visit this hole by foot yet I had no idea what big of an issue it represents.
"It is cheap" - well it is made cheap by not holding those using it (large energy companies) responsible for the damage they do, and by offering special treatment by politicians.
"There are no other options" - Germany is so far behind in building renewable energy sources, that this is just plain ridiculous. There are no other options with the CDU / CSU in charge of government would be more precise.
The major driver behind these coal mines are greed and the fear of losing an industry that provides work for many people. But even the latter is misleading, because this industry has to be shut down anyways, so politicians and business people are just trying to delay that until after their career (it seems to me).
sad fakt germany is behind not just in renuweble energie also education goes down infrastrukte gets worse all cuz the politiks keep spending monney for evrything OUTSITE of germany sure helping others is good but not if u hurt ur own ppl in ur own country all cuz the ppl are to scared to say anything and the politicans are all corupt and i dont belive there is a true exeption to that cuz money rules the world
Welcome to German politics guys. Nothing much can be done that easy here. And curruption? Yes especially within the CDU, aswell as pure incompetence. They put lobbyists in too many important positions...
CDU is not in charge anymore
There were some calculations some year ago showing that paying every worker in coal related industry bis wages from tax money until retirement would be cheaper than the subsidies for this industry.
@@xxXLonewolf87Xxx It really is not gonna change even when the cdu is no longer in charge.
Energiewende be like….
Yes I remember they raced to shut down their nuclear power plants and go green. They now emit twice as much CO2 as before and their electricity cost also doubled. Noice.
And when they cant produce enough electricity during the winter, they buy some nuclear electricity from the french
@@baptiste4438 Germany actually exports alot more elictricity than it imports, with this effect growing more than shrinking.
That is not true. Renewables have grown fast enough to not having to emit more. The thing is Germany could have fased out coal instead.
So Germanys emissions from the electricty sector did shrink even with nuclear shut down, but with electric cars, home heating and so forth. Germany needs 4 times as much electricty and obviously all th best sites for renewables have been build.
@@baptiste4438 And mess up the Nordic electricity market.
@@baptiste4438 Germany didn’t consume more energy than they produced since 2002 so wdym?
Lignite and brown coal are two separate types of coal, lignite being the one with lowest caloric content
0:48 No. As a German i can say: The german legislative and the executive is *not* keen on becoming carbon neutral.
"Tear down cities" is somewhat overdramatized. 5 municipals were moved or are in prozess of being moved. One of it being one villa of a single family. Another almost completely destroyed during WWII shorty after bought by the company. The other 3 overall having about 3.500 inhabitants.
What is being ment by "endangering the rights and freedom of the countries youth" is just the contribution to climate change - or the lack of contribution by keeping up the cole industry.
👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Also the tearing down already has been reduced contradicting the proclaimed "expansions" in the video. Furthermore lots of people in that are also employed by that company or are directly dependent and everyone who is relocated receives a chunk of money. Sure, not everyone is happy about that, obviously. But it's not like they are hated in that area either...
Over 50k people seem to have been displaced due to the Garzweiler mines alone, so your numbers seem to make it smaller than it is.
@@XGD5layer Should be much less. Just look up the different Towns on the German Wiki Page about Garzweiler (which is more complete than english one). Most towns are less than 1000 people. The 12 Towns "in progress" had 7600 in total, but the ones which are already gone, dont include any big towns either.
@@Kordanor The majority of this seems to have happened during the 1900s, so I doubt any current villager numbers will help. I bet the majority of those affected have moved out of the area. Why stay when all that tied you there is gone?
5:50 "renewable energy sources can't be installed overnight" - and continues by promoting nuclear power, which takes even longer to install. If Germany decided today to build new nuclear power plants, it would certainly take *at least* until 2030 to finish the first one of them - that's the year when the last coal power plant is supposed to shut down.
Just look at the construction time and cost of the new nuclear power plant in England - that's neither cheap nor "installed overnight".
The problem is that Germany closed those plants prematurely. And burns dirty coal instead. Renewables are currently not yet ready to power the whole country (if they ever will be).
You are basically destroying steam locomotives at the time when electric locomotive exists in few prototypes and infrastructure for them is not in place. Nothing to pull trains with.
The best time to start building a nuclear power plant was 10 years ago. The second best time is right now.
Aside from that, building renewables means not only building windmills and solar panels, but also energy storage and upgrades to the transmission network. Those are long term projects as well.
What is more disturbing, closing perfectly well functioning nuclear plants is about as stupid as it gets. If Germany had not done that, they could have been practically carbon neutral by now.
@@rickbude3866 Well right now nuclear energy is generating only 3% of our primary energy. And if the current consumption stays constant, it will only last for around 50 years. So if you want to generate 30% with nuclear Power, our resources will only Last vor 5 years. GG And btw. nuclear power is so so expansive.
@@nichtentgratet3605 there are enormous amounts of uranium dissolved in ocean water, enough to supply the world with 100% nuclear energy for thousands of years.
Not to mention that with breeder reactors, depleted uranium (and even spent nuclear fuel / "waste" ) can be turned into fuel.
The expensive nuclear projects you are referring to are first-of-a-kind hyper-modern ultrasafe generation III+ reactors. Prototypes if you will. They WILL become cheaper when built on a larger scale.
@@nichtentgratet3605 it’s only expensive during its construction, not so much for O&M
In comparison to France the German government even decided to leave atomic energy. That’s why there is a lot more time needed.
To everyone wondering: The mining company's name is RWE
Germany's way out might be France building more nuclear plants and buying electricity from France.
France gonna love all that sweet money
Apparently Germany's neighbours have done exactly this.
To my knowledge, France is currently building *one* new nuclear plant (Flamanville 3) and it's behind schedule.
That is what is most likely going to happen. We are not building nearly enough renewable energy sources and energy storage to have 50% of out entire energy supply cut in 10 years.
That's the same thing we are doing in Italy
For those who call out activists for pressuring the government to abandon nuclear power: you cannot abandon nuclear and coal power if you also block renewables. That's why Germany has the highest price for electricity and is failing horribly when it comes to sustainable power.
Obviously there are some reasons to keep nuclear power plants, but the movement to abandon it has been a movement through the entire society.
Also if you promise to energy farmers to pay any price the prices scyrocket.
Meh, the hole someone on Call of Duty claimed to have dug into my mom was deeper.
They did something simular event, when gernany dug holes during 1933-1945
I drove by here. I had no idea what it was! I mean I knew it was a coal mine but didn’t know any of this! Oh yeah shutting down their nuclear power plants not a great idea was it!
Yeah. People are quite reluctant with nuclear energy after all the incidents that have occurred, but it really isn’t that dangerous, and something quite necessary for change.
Germany has no place to store nuclear waste. This stuff has to be sealed up for over a million years until it is no longer harmful. So even if the power plants themselves are safe, how are you supposed to not entirely ruin your country with atomic waste?
@@mansupa6362 put it in rockets and send it straight into the sun. I mean would a bit of atomic waste harm the sun?
@@Skilan506 I guess no but I think you could also just send it somewhere into space, theres a lot of void and no reason for us to dump that stuff into sun. And also currently it costs $10000 to ship one pound of load into space I doubt you find someone in their right mind who invests that much money just for disposal. And if ne now also consider the fact that space travel right now is only possible by using fossil fuel you would probably mess up the entire carbon footprint again sadly...
And one more thing to add that currently depending on the site you start the rocket from there is a 4-10% failure rate. Now imagine what happens when a Plutonium loaded roccket explodes while starting, I think I dnt have to add more. Technology will have to advance a bit before sending that stuff to space will be a viable option
I live practically next to this hole and its a pretty popular spot here (theres some nice viewpoints) :D. They actually plan to turn it into the largest bathing lake in Europe by 2050 and people really like that idea here.
They'll need decades just to flood it, This mine is 400m deep (Thats the same depth as lake superior, the deepest lake in the US) And according to Wikipedia this lake won't be filled before the year 2100. Most people dont realise the size of this hole
and dont forget the mercury! :)
@@thorbenii565 idk if its even a good idea, filling a random hole like that which is full of toxic shit probably too wouldnt be nice, also a lake need self cleaning properties and unless they make a river flow in it, it wont work, there is a lot to think about there, but i guess it is a magnificent site to see, such a large hole
Think about the Geiseltalsee- Same coal type as this - filled - and now nature protection zone- and very famous for its rare species of birds
@@timonbubnic322 flooding is basically the only thing we can do. Otherwise we had to pump out the water till the end of all days.
Now that they closed down their last Nuclear reactors, this pit will just grow larger
Actually standing on a platform at this hole is something else.
It is hard to comprehend just HOW friggin huge this mine is.
It dwarfes everything.
You really don't want acid rain. I grew up in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in New York State. The amount and thickness of trees that cover the range were adversely affected by acid rain that was a result of pollution from factories in the mid east. We used to have thick foliage in this area when I climbed my first mountain. Today most of these trees look terrible compared to what they were in my childhood. Most of these factories ate now closed but the degradation continues.
There is no acid rain produced by German coal plants because they all use advanced filters.
@@vomm they did back in the 70s and 90s, mainly czech and east german ones, modern day ones filter out a large amount of the sulfur and therefor no acid rain
altho the farmers had to start fertilizing their fields with sulfur since the acid rain did that before, funnily enough
I am surprised I've never heard of this. According to Google Earth, one of those holes is over 10km wide. They show up more visibly from a distance than most cities in the region. That's ridiculous.
We learn that in the school. In 5th grade. The holes are temporary and it is denatured after the removal of the coal. In Saxony there are 2 regions littered with lakes for recreational use. Leipzig and Lausitz.
I saw the thumbnail and I was like let's find id on the map. I literally went over Germany and I zoomed on a spot that was silver-like color and it's the exact mine that's in the thumbnail.
acid rain is a scaremongering buzz word for any kind of water vapor with acidic content (spoiler alert, pretty much all rain)
yes, rain is acidic, not basic, but what they call acid rain is much more acidic than average and is pouted with other elements that affect the local environment
In Fukushima at 1000-10000 more people died because of non radioactive causes, like the tsunami, or simply because of evacuation. It was a very very bad decision from Germany to chose cole, and russian carbohidrates instead of nuclear.
Damn now go within 40km of fukushima and live there. Oh wait you cant
@@JJT3001 hiroshima and nagasaki was nuked and no one lives there anymore, oh wait they do
I Heard, that the Company, who owns the Mine, RWE, does'nt even make Profit, but gets its Money from the Government, and i think you should have talked about the Protests in the Hambach Forest nearby
This isn't the first time German leadership doomed their country to stand in solidarity with Japan
Its also a health desaster lul. Lung deseases like asthma aso are at peak levels around cologne and on windy days the highway through one of the mines (yes they built a highwayy there) has to be clsed due to litteral sandstorms and dusty cloudscoming out of the mine.
The scale of those "holes" is mind blowing from those aerial shots O_O
*Valleys
Astronauts on the ISS be like: look there's a weird whole, oh wait, it's Germany.
Interestingly, since the 19th of November this year, the Pego thermoelectric power plant, the last coal-fired power plant in operation in Portugal, has been deactivated. Therefore, Portugal starts to use only renewable energy.
You simply cannot compare Portugal to Germany. One German Company alone (BASF) has the power consumption of half of Portugal. Not because they work inefficiently, but because BASF is the biggest chemical processing company in the world and chemical processing is just very energy intensive.
@@Skyfighter94 there was no comaprison to germany, that implication was an assumption by you based on the context of the video. BASF are not a company with high moral standards, and are a terrible example of morally sound energy usage; they may be the biggest producer, but they also hold the record for largest ciminal fines of all time.
edit : spelling
@@Skyfighter94 BASF is an internationally operating concern. They consume energy in more countries than Germany.
" It's because they don't really have any other options" Yes, they do. Turn back on the nuclear plants. Use that hole to store the waste.
You can't just "turn back on" a decommissioned nuclear power plant. We have two, maybe three, nuclear power plants in Germany that could be reactivated within a couple of years (i.e. before renewables make them obsolete). This would be a very expensive process. Add to this that nuclear power is amazingly unprofitable to begin with, and you'll see why nobody is keen on this option unless it becomes unavoidable. Reactivating and running these plants would require vast state subsidies -- private industry won't touch 'em otherwise -- or else nationalization.
So Germany blame Poland for using coal while doing this... hipocrisy
So living here in Germany I can tell you that your view on it is pretty shortsighted.
We decided against nuclear power plants for a simple reason - like everyone else we have no secure containmend for the waste and the danger shown in the desasters before were alarming.
Overall nuclear energy is a great way to reduce your CO2 emissions fast but the longterm problems occuring (waste, contamination of watersources) are not unaccounted for in your video.
However there is another problem for politics regarding the removal of coal.
Germany has had a huge inpact on the whole region of the so called "Ruhrgebiet" that was determined for coal mining and steel production after cheaper countries like China showed up on the world market.
If you would shut down the coal plants and mining sites you would further weaken the region and that would cause social problems and hit the poor people in the region extremly hard.
Also the companies running the plants have longterm contracts with the "Grundversorger" which are the goverment institutions poviding heat and electricity for their citizens at a base level.
To cancel those contracts prematurely wouild cost the state a lot of money that they are not willing to pay.
Overall it is a very complicated process and even if it seems to be pretty unambicious to reach the goal at 2030, it is pretty ambicious if you consider these points.
One last info regarding the "poor people" that loose their home.
Other as it would be handled in dictatorships all people in this region get new homes and financial repairements.
The process of "removing" people for econmomical intrests isnt new and regarding the small size of the villages is pretty much just a sidenote here.
I as a german citizen would prefer a faster transition to green energy too, however this has to go hand in hand with job securement and economical stability.
Sorry if I upset anyone with my english skills ;-)
I would like to add to your comment that wind energy is needing around 40.000 workers, while stopping coal-industry in "Ruhrgebiet" would mean 20.000 people need to find new jobs. A transition would be possible, retraining would be an investment that would pay off in the future.
And also a reason for the coal-hole to not expand, besides that people and towns need to moved, is that the ground in placed like "lützerath" is one of the most fertile soils possible in that latitude, so it would make sense for it to stay for farming to make that region less depended on importing food.
To be completely fair, Germany did extend the contracts with the coal power plants after the Paris climate accord and building renewables would generate more jobs than the ones currently active in coal power.
In fact the government actively hindered the expansion of renewable energy for minor, irrelevant reasons which dumped about 60.000 jobs. Because they didn't want to lose 25.000?
The Ruhrgebiet has shifted from steel production to chemical plants and car factories about two decades ago.
Let's be real. The only reason the coal powerplants are still active is that the CDU is a corruption filled shit party that doesn't care about climate change. Because most of their voters will be gone by the time it hits with full force, or have enough money to soften the impact on their life.
You forgot to mention that we german burn a part of our waste in coal power plants
@@carstekoch Renewables is a joke and will only make a small contribution to energy and jobs. And most jobs will be in the construction phase, not in the long term with maintanence and upgrades. Nuclear and natural gas will be the better solution.
@@AgentSmith911
If we are talking about gen 4 nuclear reactors I'm all for that.
Gen 1 or 2, which are most that are in service today, are only slightly better than coal short term and create more problems further down the line.
I don't agree with the sentiment of all renewables being bad though.
Some are better than others, but that's about it.
Regarding jobs
If you were to replace all coal power with renewables like wind turbines hydroelectric plants and solar panels you'd have about the same amount of people working in the industry.
Each plant requires less maintenance but there'd be more which just about cancels each other out.
You don't need nuclear power to go carbon neutral. But you don't need to shut the nuclear power plants. When you build new ones, renewables are better and cheaper, so that's where Germany is heading. I think the big mistake wasn't to cut the nuclear power, but to not build enough renewables and phase out coal.
Yes it makes no sense to destroy perfectly well functioning nuclear reactors, instead of maintaining and upgrading them where necessary.
Also the costs of nuclear power plants are greatly exaggerated. If my sources are right, about 124TWh of electricity came from fossil fuels in Germany in 2021. That amounts to an average continuous draw of 14GW.
Even at an EXTREMELY pessimistic 8 billion Euro per GW, Germany would be looking at a bill of 112 billion Euros, to replace ALL fossil-based electricity production with the most modern type of nuclear reactors on the market. Considering that the Energiewende cost 160 billion Euros in the last 5 years alone....
@@rickbude3866 I would really like to know your sources, but as far as I know, with all costs of waste and stuff like that put together, nuclear power is more expensive. Also, Germany is pretty perfect for renewables as they can be placed in cities on buildings and there are some windy parts onshore and offshore. You can't really change the decision to leave nuclear energy behind anymore, so I'd just go with Renewables. There are some advantages with renewables as power grids and energy production can be done more locally and independent. The sun is still the best energy source we have.
@@NutellaToastOW solar panels are nice, except in the winter. I have some solar panels as well (in the Netherlands), and from oktober to February I might as well keep them disconnected: they do nothing because the sun impacts at such a low angle.
Most figures came from Wikipedia.
Here some additional figures: Hinkley Point C in England: costs ~23 billion pounds for a 3, 260GW plant (about 27 billion euro, so about 9 billion euro / GW).
3rd unit at Olkiluoto nuclear power plant in Finland: 8.5 billion euro for a 1,6GW unit (about 5,3 billion euro / GW). These are both hyper modern, first of a kind, ultra safe designs. So about as expensive as it gets. Russia, China and Korea can build them even cheaper by using standardised designs.
About the "waste": a nuclear power plant produces only tiny amounts of high-level waste, about 27 tonnes per year for a 1GW power plant (source: IAEA). That is equal to roughly 2 m^3 (uranium is really dense, denser than lead). This makes it entirely feasible to just store it above ground in a bunker until technology advances. It's not waste, it is fuel for more advanced nuclear reactors..
@@rickbude3866 I have not found studies on the reactors you quoted as they are probably too new, but my findings show that there are hidden costs financially, ecologically and politically. To add to that, apparently nuclear power and renewables can hardly be used together as the grid needs to be set up very differently and the technologies compete in an unhealthy way. One of the downsides of renewables mentioned most often is the lack of reliability, but in the digital age we are in there are many options to set up a smart grid to regulate the flow of electricity in the most efficient way.
Also I think it is easier to switch the world's energy supply in total to renewables than to build expensive nuclear reactors in every country, so choosing renewables as a technology will probably accelerate the decline of carbon emissions. Sure, France can keep their nuclear reactors, but I don't think countries in Africa for example should build those as localized grids may be more common and more reliable in these regions. I see were the hype around nuclear energy is coming from and maybe it's just because I live in Germany where the mindset is very critical of the technology, but renewables are just easier and most of the time even cheaper.
You are right, the technology will develop and get better, but so will renewables. Their price has come down so quickly the last 10 years that this trend may continue the next years, too.
@@NutellaToastOW sure, anything is possible if you throw enough money at the problem. Unfortunately renewables rarely produce energy where and when you need it, smart grid or not. This means that renewables have (gigantic) hidden costs as well: you need energy storage of some sort and the electricity grid needs to be adapted (higher capacities in general). These costs are rarely taken into account when talking about the costs of renewables.
Also, while nuclear plant costs a lot of money to build: after that it starts generating money, for 60 years or even longer (some modern designs can even run up to 100 years).
This is all not to say I am against renewables, not at all, it is just that I would rather see a nuclear power plant than a coal/gas power plant. It is sad to see that many road maps to carbon neutrality include renewables + gas power plants + CCS, while similar or better results could be achieved with renewables + nuclear.
I want to build an underwater hotel there (usually these mines get filled with water to create a lake)
"Shady Pit of Germany" sounds like a dark souls location.
I think that video makes some things look more weird than they are. Its not like Germany ever decided to shut down its nuclear powerplants and replace them by coal powerplants. Coal powerplants were there much earlier. Nuclear engery has always been very unpopular by wide parts of the German population. Germany has a very dense population so every nuclear accident with a powerplant, but also with the nucelar wasted transportes thorugh the country or temporary stored etc. would impact very many people. Tschernobyl 1986 and Fikushima proofed that accidents in nuclear powerplants do happen. So after Fukushima the Germany goverment decided to step out of nuclear engergy, mainly due to pressure of the population.
Steping out off course never meant to switch the nuclear powerplants off immediatlely, there are still some nuclear powerplans running. It was also never planned to replace nuclear energy by coal, it was always planned to replace it by renewables.
The german goverment of course also did not decide to dig those big hols you see in that video. The german energy sector is private and it's private companies that mine the coal. Doing so over many decades those holes of course get bigger. The goverment and politics of course gets involved whenever the growth of those holes conflicts with people living in that area.
So yes, those holes exist and are part of the german energy policy. But they have surely not been planned as a replacement for nucelar power. Germany also planned to close all coal powerplants, but you cant stop all fossile powerplants at once.
The "It was also never planned to replace nuclear energy by coal, it was always planned to replace it by renewables." is not exactly true.
If you have both fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, and you build in additional 1GW of renewables to phase out 1 GW of nuclear, this means you have to keep 1GW fossil that you could have gotten rid of if you kept nuclear.
If we total the Energiewende costs, Germany could have had fully decarbonized electricity by now, if it invested into nuclear instead of renewables. Instead it will in a decade or two.
@@TheBlobik Getting out of coal and nuclear power are processes that take a long time. Germany plans to do both.
Replacing nuclear energy by renewables was decided in 2000, then revoked by Merkel and decided by Merkel again in 2010 after Fukushima. That's been much earlier than the decision to stop using coal powerplants.
Of course we could get rid of coal much faster, if Germany had continued building new nuclear powerplants in 2010. But we are living in a democracy and at that time most Germans were against it.
Building a nuclear powerplant takes about 10 years. So it's quite naive to think you can quickly change those decisions because at the moment C02 is the bigger problem.
To be fair, Chernobyl happened because of incompetence and Fukushima happened because of an earthquake/tsunami sprinkled with shitty backup sytem design. Im 100% sure that the germans (who live in a way more stable region) could build something safe.
Phasing out nuclear energy will be something Germany will regret if they want the back-up for renewables.
The German government does actually support the coal industry with billions of Euros, so it's not just the market and private companies doing their thing. Renewables are actually much cheaper than any other type of energy production here in Germany, so the only reason why the coal industry is still so relevant is the support from the German government.
I live quite close to these lignite mines, and have driven past them many times! Interesting to learn more about these mines! Thank you for this video :)
Lignite is also produced in Russia, China, USA and Turkey in large quantities. In Europe you have Poland and Czechia as well. World Wide also Australia is producing it. But Australia is a mining nation anyways.
7% of coal produced in the US is lignite, not sure that should be considered a 'large quantity.'
A nicely detailed video about the 'downsides' of coal. No mention of how coal burning plants have becoming cleaner and cleaner in the last few decades or how the mine companies are required to reclaim the land again for future use including creating wildlife landscapes and residential use.
Eyy, this is a good topic. Can't wait to watch it all.
Its sad to see that the person who made this video seems like they intentionally left out that the contract for this "giant hole" was made a lot of years ago and that all the people that lived there knew this would happen. Also all of them got a new house by the company "RWE" (also im weirded out that he didnt say their name once since this is basically all their doing. I dont know if he didnt research enough or anything like that bc the rest of the video seems very well researched actually but this is like the first thing that comes up when you google it. Not saying i googled this and have say this because of that . I live in germany and study geography and also live a few miles next to the "big hole" . (btw its rly cool to look at it in real life maybe check it out if you life in the Köln/Essen area)
maybe fear of litigation?
Will check it out! Only 2 hours from frankfurt
I would like to point out that when politicians say they "must" use coal to meet energy demands, they are ignoring the option of letting prices rise to the point of supporting renewable alternatives. What they mean is that they must use coal to keep energy (unsustainably) cheap.
It's sustainable for long enough to ensure that more advanced reliable and cheaper alternatives will be utilized as they come about instead of having a catastrophic gap in between.
"Was it the right decision?"
Short answer: No
Long answer: Nooooooooooooooo
"They're gonna turn their country into a giant hole" 💀😂
Not trying to argue for coal at all but I think it is relevant to take into account that the argument of large mines is only partially „solved“ by nuclear energy…uranium does not come out of nowhere and has giant surface mines in Africa which are dangerous for workers and polluting the environment due to the dirty mining process. It just shifts that problem to a different continent
Thats why you should use Thorium, wich is mined in Norway (wich has labour standarts) or you could even open mines in Germany, wich tho more expensive than african labour could be made significantly safer
@@LuLu-ip4zb there is no thorium in germany btw. We would have to import it from either norway, russia or turkey
If people are Ok with digging cobalt in Africa they wouldn't be bothered with uranium mining.
Two words - energy density. A single pellet of uranium 235 the size of pill gives an equivalent energy output of 1 tonne of coal.
@@LuLu-ip4zb thorium reactors use uranium too, the fuel (usually) is 95% thorium 232 and 5% uranium 235.
Good information delivered with so much bias and opinion it is easy to throw it all away.
Yeah it's pretty silly how he made it seem like these coal companies were just plowing peoples homes over and the government was ignoring it.
I by myself never understand, why we shut down nuclear energy, and replace it with Cole, it ist completely senseless!
Slightly misleading when you talk about lignite containing mercury and sulfur and that then causing acid rain. Mercury doesn't produce an acid and all coal releases sulfur and mercury, just in varying amounts. Sulfur does produce acid rain though.
and that is filtered out of the smokes in germany to prevent acid rain like it happened in between 70s and 90s in east germany and czech republic
altho the farmers were kinda grumpy that they now had to use sulfur to fertilize their plots of lands since the acid rain did that before xd more work for em basically
I remember the uncritical hysteria that led some nations to abandon nuclear, with the foolish result that CO2 emissions and pollution increased. Renewables are too unreliable, so we need to build plants using newer, safer nuclear modalities.
Wait until you realize that CO2 emissions is an uncritical hysteria as well.
France is the most comparable country in Europe in Germany.
@@tophan5146 I recommend the video on climate change by upisnot down. Tells you about c02 hysteria. Is hilarious.
But their will happen a nuclear disaster, also is it a bad solution when you remind yourself of the waste and germany has no place to store that waste.
@@roz2551 Germany could start buying storage for the waste in Finland, as they found a permanent solution.
The difference is that when Germany says "We're really going to try our best to do this by 2030", they actually WILL stand a good chance of achieving it by 2030. The Italians claim that they can do the same in the next 20 months? Utter bullshit. They're not even going to try.
Nuclear energy was forbidden here in the panic after tschernobyl, if you try to argue with someone who is against it you'd rather talk to a wall instead, the wall would definitely have better arguments that's the reason why we can't get back to it
Let’s face it, to be a carbon neutral industrial country like Germany you definitely need nuclear power. They are basically cutting their two most reliable power sources within the next 10 years without a proper plan to compensate it. Plus the government wants 15 million electric cars by 2030 which leads to even more electricity needed. So in the long run we will have to import costly nuclear power from France, that’s probably why they are building new plants right now. But what do I know as a normal citizen..
You hit the nail on the head.
Having millions of electric cars because its gOoD fOr ThE eNvIrOnMeNt and having to charge them with windmills and solar panels is a fucking lie.
Ask Norway how their powergrid is boiling from everyone charging at night. 'Only' around 4 out of 10 in Norway own a EV and most of their energy is hydropower.
And dont even get me started on the resource issues to build EV's for everyone in the first place ;)
@@thatdude1435 I totally agree with you plus there are some reasons why norway can invest in such infrastructure for the electro mobility. It’s basically all because it’s a freaking rich country because of well the oil money from their countless oil rigs in the North Sea and the whole countries population is like two times Berlin. Bit of a double standard if you ask me, living green and by selling oil. So yeah bit easier on that part. And idk someone has to break it to some politician’s, that you can’t really charge up at night with solar. I am really interested what the new German government have in stock for the not so rich suburb citizens.
We have the most expensive power costs in the whole world by the way because we have countless taxes on the electronic power and heating, such as co2 tax, renewable energy tax, oil tax, normal tax and I highly doubt that the prices will fall by cutting the two main power sources
France is (finally) building new plants because the oldest ones should already be closed according to their expected lifespan. Fessenheim was stopped in 2020 and more are expected to follow and we need new plants to replace them. But we have lost the know-how to build new power plants, and our only new generation plant is years behind schedule and billions of euros in excess.
@@despaney i think it's honestly so sad that this knowledge was lost bc this could've been exported and used to make money and also help the environment.
I have visited the mine several times. Even the ghost towns before they were demolished.
What is never really said is that many of the power plants are only running because they have not yet become profitable.
In fact, the share of renewable energies could be much higher. It is just easier to turn a solar cell out of the sun or a wind turbine out of the wind than to turn an entire coal-fired power station down and back up again.
In addition, there is an argument that German industry likes to use: jobs.
A wind turbine is maintained and kept running by a small group of technicians and engineers along with dozens of others. However, a power plant usually offers jobs to hundreds of people.
Of course, a certain proportion would have to remain on the network at the moment, but that would be much less than is currently active
Solar and wind is the most unreliable source. Plus the batteries for all this is even more environmentally hazards, not to mention all the pollution to make it. Nuclear is Germany's only ability to create energy at a lower price. Since they already dug up all this, great place to put the nuclear plant. Going green is a fallacy of the elite to make money off suckers
We had like 10 times more jobs in renewables than we have in coal, before politics decided to crash the renewable industry and to keep coal.
@@StephanTrube Those 10 times more jobs were mostly fake jobs of appeasement to generate free government money and produce fast negative results for all those who invested in that garbage. The real jobs were just made in China. All your green energy is made by your so called dirty energy, just not in your country but in China. So while you pay high fee's for it, China made billions
Not sure what this narrative is about, or what a "fake job" should be. People spent time on work, earned money, payed taxes, produced and installed renewable things. There was a time we had more of those jobs in Germany than we currently have in coal. Now it's all done in China, yeah.
Decades ago when I told my classmates at uni that carbon pollution will kill far more people than nuclear power plant accidents they thought I was totally mad.
13 years of school and you have to watch an English video on a channel from denmark to learn about things 80km away from you. Thank you for this video!
I totally agree that brown coal is a huge issue for Germany's climate goals but nuclear energy is no real option. In Germany we have an on going discussion about how to store the nuclear waste for more than ten years and we still don't have a long-term solution. So producing more nuclear waste would make the problem worse.
Has nobody ever heard of fuel reprocessing and fast reactors? The solution to nuclear waste was discovered in the 50's for gods sake.
Nuclear waste is a non issue. Used nuclear fuel rods can be recycled and the really small amount of waste can be stored away underground. Because of the recycling the long-term radioactivity in high-level wastes is reduced massively. In comparison to the burning of coal nuclear energy is 100% clean and way more efficient.
I don't get how German policy makers can't find a spot for some small containers that are completely radiation proof. Instead they place wind turbines everywhere and continue to burn coal.
As a young German who protested a lot against these coal pits I thank you for the clear standpoint you have taken against this ridiculous practice!
Maybe you should keep your lights on and trains going with the use of just fantasy.
The fact you can see it on Google Maps when zoomed to include almost all of Europe is insane.
What surprises me as a german is that my fellow people dont resist getting kicked out of their homes and their towns demolished .
Nuclear is the second safest form of power generation per Wh with only solar beating it.
Until the tsunami hits. Or the famine comes. Or the worker shortage hits, or the money runs dry. Then you've got MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR PROBLEMS
@@TheAnnoyingBoss literally no idea how any of those are correlated, but k
One of the big problems in Germany regarding nuclear power was also that we had no good place to store the nuclear waste. So germans were not only scared of the affects of a nuclear desaster but also were to put the waste and keep it safe there for thousands of years
Still, nuclear waste are far less dangerous when compared to the waste that coal plants create. Countless people die each year from air pollution and the effects of climate change, while almost nobody dies from nuclear waste.
@@antonygikas8817 yeah, we can just store it until we find a good way to dispose of it or reuse it. Most of the waste still has plenty of power left in it which can be extracted with modern reactors
And I'm sure in the future we'll find an extremely safe and reliable way to get it into either the earth's mantle or shoot it into the sun. I just don't see the issue
@@trygveevensen171 Ikr, I think that in the future, every country shall have a rocket pod for a giant rocket carrying toxic waste and dumping it somewhere else
@@mattynek2 agreed, although I wouldn't necessarily trust every country to do that. If it explodes in the atmosphere, the consequences could be pretty huge, depending on how much it was carrying
@@trygveevensen171 dumping trash in outer space was never a good idea. And dumping radioactive shit is probably even worse.
"a green country like Germany" 😂😂😂
1:06
*I gotta say what concerns me more-*
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