Yes, Europe did not have dark ages, it only had period of population decline, of less emissions, less building, less inventions, less records and severed trade networks.
The world is projected to hit population decline already sometime between 2060 and 2080, so I guess the younger ones of us will find out definitively whether it's a good or bad thing.
> Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.
I suggest you should have a look at malnutrition rates 100 years ago vs now. Without mass food production we would not be able to sustain even 50% of current population.
Levelized Cost of Energy for Germany's existing nuclear fleet was roughly 13ct/kwh.[1] The averaged costs (YTD) from the linked article currently stands at 9.71 ct/kwh. So nuclear in the mix would have increased the costs.
The average electricity price for German households is approximately 32.5 to 34 cents per kWh.
We are not doing an apple to apple comparison if we are not actually looking at what people are paying. The cost of energy is to have the a stable supply of energy delivered at the time that the consumer wants to buy it. The cost of energy production is thus not just the price of producing one unit of energy in isolation, but to have it transmitted in a stable grid at a date and time specified by the consumer. Nuclear energy and solar energy both produce units of energy, but consumers need for transmission, grid stability and time aspects are completely different depending if they buy nuclear energy or solar energy. They are not interchangeable on those aspects.
The 9.71 ct/kwh is the levelized cost of producing electricity from solar. It is not the same as the average cost of consuming energy. Adding nuclear to the mix would not necessary increase costs of consuming energy, even if the average cost of producing energy would go up.
To make a very simplified illustration of this. A energy broker would happily trade 10 units for energy for 1 unit of energy, assuming that they can dictate when and where each unit get transmitted.
The cost of energy is also full lifecycle cost including waste handling, deconstruction and security. I am not saying that everything is that equation for renewables. However, one truth at least in Germany is that we still have not solved the waste problem. Other countries have both better options and also a societal consensus. Here is a study of societal cost of nuclear energy:
The SCBOE score is a good idea. However, in the case of Germany, it is often overlooked that the power grid dating from the 1970s, which was built as a one-way system from large power plants (nuclear power plants) to consumers, would have needed to be rebuilt regardless. A large share of the grid costs would therefore have been passed on to consumers even without the transition to renewable energy. Additionally, Germany is located in the center of Europe and is thus a major transit country for electricity. Here too, corresponding capacities would have had to be expanded. The expansion of a European power grid also means that the disadvantages of renewable energy variability can be offset. As the SCBOE system also shows, the individual power plant still accounts for the largest share of costs. Many of the additional factors can actually go down in prices as renewables scale up (nuclear has still to prove that this could work there too). In that regard, LCOE remains relevant.
Those cost don't even include the full lifecycle societal cost of nuclear energy [0] (25-39 cent by some studies). Sure the renewables also have lifecycle cost we might not pay yet, but in Germany even more important we do not even have a societal and research concesus what to do with the waste (might be much better in other countries)
No. Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production. Sunsetting the old plants had no negative impact at all on electricity prices, to the contrary, insofar as it made space for more green energy.
Compare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute. Germany is frequently at the Polish levels of emissions and Poland is famous for huge emissions. Sunsetting would make sense if they could already generate enough green electricity even in bad conditions, which was not and is not the case. It was purely political decision - Germany wanted to be European hub for distributing gas from Russia (that's why tried to convince others than gas is somehow green energy).
Your question was how would the prices be without the nuclear shutdown, talking about emissions now is goalpost shifting. Speaking of politics and not making sense, Poland is still at these levels because they put road blocks into renewables deployment and spend their resources on nuclear plants. If those plans go well they will be at around 35% coal in 2040, which is more than Germany is now.
But 2011 was not the year the nuclear power plants were shut down. However, that is the year your previous commenter was referring to. So what exactly are you trying to say? Incidentally, the electricity that the nuclear power plants had supplied was not replaced by coal power plants, but by renewable energy.
Most definitely not true. Maybe enough area to cover current electric usage, but to truly decarbonize society a lot more renewable energy is needed - for transport, heating, iron industry, chemical industries, fetilizers etc. Massive amounts of electricity is needed unless you export your industries to china.
Heating with heat pumps is highly efficient and already the cheapest way of heating your home. The grids are ready for it - especially considering the amount of residential solar.
Yes but the major energy consumption of a household is heating than transport than utility.
Using ground heat (deep ones) reduces the electricity need sign.
Also if a heat pumpt creates 3-6 the energy from 1kwh, its even more efficient to burn oil and gas to make energy out of it and remote heat than just burning it locally in your burner.
Why not? Germany's total energy consumption is estimated to be around 1-2 TWh/y. This could be generated by photovoltaics covering less than 5% of its land surface.
There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.
Wtf are your numbers from, but they are wrong. It's over 2200TWh per year. And it you truly want to be renewable, the numbers go up. Upcycling waste to plastics or using hydrogen to make steel is more energy intensive than using fossil fuels.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/indicator-final-energy-con...
Those are total energy numbers, which includes fossil fuels, but those are famously misleading because replacing those with electricity reduces the number of Wh needed. An electric car needs roughly 15kWh for 100 kilometers, a gas powered car typically at least 60kWh for the same distance.
Electrifying reduces energy consumption only in selected use cases. Such as EVs yes. However other usescases such as making steel with hydrogen, plastic fromwaste or fuel for planes require vastly more energy when electrified.
Unsurprisingly the use cases where energy consumption is going down lead on electrification (because it's a cost advantage), so it may seem like electrification reduces energy consumption.
But if you really want to leave fossil fuels behind, the electric consumption will go up, up and beyond.
Electricity consumption will go up* but energy consumption will go down. You will not need 2200TWh of energy in Germany when all is said and done. Heating is one of the top reasons we spend energy and heat pumps are just tremendously more efficient than something like gas heating. You can get the same amount of heating for 3-4 times less energy with a heat pump than gas. So obviously you will not need 2200TWh of electricity like you do now with fossil fuels for energy.
* It's also debatable how much electricity use will actually go up. Logic says this must happen, but logic is not science. We have millions of EVs now in the EU and electricity production is less than it was 20 years ago. Efficiency is a source of energy. If you look at the US for example, it uses almost twice as much electricity per capita than Germany, and I would say they both get the same high level if living. If you look at it that way, Americans can cut their use almost in half and live the same standard of living. This can power a lot of EVs and heat pumps without adding a single GW of new capacity.
Energy consumption in total in Germany will only go down if you decide to export your steel and chemical industries to china. The high temperatures needed by industrial processes can't be achieved with heat pumps.
The number Lxgr gave, 1-2 TWh/year, is simply completely wrong. Germany's annual electricity use alone is around 500 TWh/year. 1-2 THw/year would be the electricity use of 300-600k average German houses.
I have my doubts about short and medium term feasibility, and much more importantly storage and adapting carbon-based industrial processes.
But yes, if all it took was 5% of landmass (which also doesn’t get permanently unusable nor polluted), I’d say that would be a pretty good deal, yeah. This is significantly less than what’s used for livestock farming, to put it into perspective.
Realistically, I don’t think we’ll solve storage fast enough to be able to afford zero nuclear power in Europe.
And of course, you can combine those things sometimes - I've seen cattle munching on grass under solar panels in Baden-Württemberg (state just west of Bavaria).
Over 40% of the German landmass is currently used to produce food for farm animals. The space requirement for solar is far off from that. And you can use rooftops etc.
You can install solar panels over areas that are already developed — rooftops (lol), parking garages, highways, and so on. Some agricultural land even benefits from being covered by solar panels. This has great potential and was first researched in the United States. China is covering water reservoirs with solar panels, which has the additional positive effect of reducing evaporation. And then there is the incredibly large amount of energy that the North Sea, far from any beaches or islands, could provide in consistent wind energy.
Rooftop solar is prohibitively expensive in Germany. My installation would only cover its costs if electricity becomes so expensive that it would lead to complete economic collapse.
No. In Germany, rooftop solar is usually economically attractive, not prohibitively expensive. Especially on a decent roof and if you use a fair share of the power yourself. Verbraucherzentrale(1) says PV systems for private homes are “usually worthwhile” economically, and that self-consumption is the key driver of profitability.
Although nuclear energy produces no carbon emissions, it is simply not price competitive with solar and wind in the western world. A culture of safety above all else made nuclear not price competitive. And it would be political suicide for regulators to relax safety given how accidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island are etched into the public mind.
We're still using lots of coal power, and it's going to take a long time to get near 90% renewable power. So I'd still like to see a lot of nuclear buildout (with a standardized design for many plants, and streamlined permitting for that design).
Building nuclear power plants still takes the longest. Especially if you want to produce the same amount of energy that will be needed in the coming years. Currently, nuclear power plants supply about 9% of the electrical energy used worldwide — and it has taken us from 1950 until today to get there. Why should it suddenly be faster and more elegant now? We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel.
Yes, I know China and to some extent South Korea build nuclear power plants faster. But even there, some plants have taken up to eleven years to build, and others that were built quickly only achieve a capacity factor of 60%. At least in China’s case, many of the conditions cannot be directly transferred to Western countries. Space, social and political circumstances, and other factors are simply not the same everywhere as in China. Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.
> We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel.
According to what?
We're not spending that much money overall. In particular the US government is putting very little into energy infrastructure considering its spite for renewables.
> Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.
The cost of renewables starts to grow when they get over 50% of the power mix.
I'm not opposed to enabling 95+% renewable power by having an army of natural gas peaker plants on standby, but I think nuclear could be cheaper if we gave it an honest try.
They weren't even acting as a power plant when they did that.
Buy yes I'll take a 1% chance of another 30x30 mile exclusion zone for 100k fewer coal deaths. Even if I have to personally live near it.
> Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.
We could have a lot more of them making power for half the price and still hold them to very safe standards.
And if we focused on what was important while keeping costs under control, we'd get extra safety benefits by affordably rebuilding or replacing plants that were built in the 70s and 80s.
chernobyl affected a lot more then the exclusion zone, most of eastern europe... cancer rates spiked because of it... and it could have been a lot worse.
Effects are long term, hence question if you would live there now?, what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?, would you still live there?, would you live in Chernobyl city now?
When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.
In spite of this, there are reactors built with plans to extend (Romania with Cernavoda for example), but they cost a lot and take a long time to build, plus areas where they can be built are likely limited.
Nuclear power plants produce CO₂ emissions. The only point at which they do not emit CO₂ is the electricity generation itself. Everything that happens before and after produces CO₂. The amount of CO₂ is debatable, even the major meta-studies (UNECE 2022) point out that across all collected studies, parts of the lifecycle emissions are consistently missing because, drumroll, the nuclear power industry is so non-transparent.
Important factors include the mining of uranium ore. If the concentration of uranium ore in the rock is low and the more nuclear power plants are built and the more ore is needed, the sooner such deposits will have to be tapped, mining becomes increasingly CO₂-intensive. The same applies to enrichment. Both processes would greatly benefit if renewable energy were expanded to the point where uranium mining and enrichment could be operated with lower CO₂ emissions.
It's widely accepted that sunsetting nuclear energy had a positive impact on the deployment of renewables, and consequently on the longer term energy prices. It was one of the better energy policy (and environmental, and security) decisions Germany has made in the recent past.
Do you mean the nuclear power that the free market companies very explicitly said wasn't worth doing? That one? Why are we pleading the government to use a horrendously expensive technology that even the free market hates?
Nuclear in 2006 was 160TWh. Coal in 2025 was 93TWh. So a big portion of nuclear would have been replaced by renewables by now anyways (natural gas has a different role in the grid and cannot be replaced bu nuclear).
Also a lot of coal plants have been / are used in district heating in addition to electricity. Replacing them is much harder and takes longer than nuclear which is electricity only. Shutting those down was never a short term option.
Calling it the worst decision ever is really funny, when it really is just a question of the order of the transition to renewables. And much of that order was dictated by technical needs.
Merit order pricing and the fact that you need fossil peakers will make the price effect completely negligible to consumers. You are comparing the MWh price of slightly more efficient fossil power plants to slightly less efficient fossil power plants.
You know that nuclear energy was heavily subsidized?
And they still don’t have a long term storage but therefore rotting barrels with nuclear waste in the interim storage facility Asse which have to be retrieved. Cost estimate around 14 billion Euros.
CO2 doesn't stay forever in the atmosphere and what's does that have to do with nuclear energy? Building massive power plants also sets CO2 free, same with mining uranium.
Nuclear energy still has a waste problem, is expensive, creates massive single points of failure and given the current situation with the latest advances in drone
warfare is a huge security risk while construction and operation.
It's not like people do not make this kind of websites because it's challenging technically (it's trivial) or because they did not think of it. They don't because it's shitty idea.
> This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about.
Getting money is 100% what it is about and Claude Code is great product.
> Yes, just get hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to build a leading product, and then use your massive legal team to force the usage of your highly subsidised and marketed subscription plan through your vibe coded software.
What? Your comment makes absolutely zero sense. Legal team forces people to use Claude Code?
Claude Code is the only coding harness you're allowed to use with fixed-price subscriptions as opposed to PAYGO API access. There's also rumors that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized compared to API, or at least cross-subsidized to the effect that the heaviest users of Claude Code (controlling for subscription level) end up paying vastly lower unit prices for their token use. These restrictions are enforced legally.
People with high socioeconomic status work much more and have less free time. It’s absurd to claim otherwise.
EDIT: please before being outraged at my comment have a look at actual evidence, e.g. Time and income poverty by Tania Burchardt; bottom decile compared with top decile has 12 hours more free time a week!
> People with high socioeconomic status work much more and have less free time
I think you are misrepresenting (or perhaps, misunderstanding) the conclusion of these studies. The increased "free time" is most entirely due to high unemployment at the lower end of income.
If you control for unemployment and under-employment, the graphs pretty much flatten out (as you can observe in the later graphs of the publication you linked below)
Because the vast majority of underemployed folks aren't underemployed by choice. The wealthy folks who decide to work 100-hour weeks on their startup, on the other hand, are making an explicit choice to spend their time that way, instead of lounging by the pool.
If the argument is "bored rich folks like to play-act working in their free time", that's a very different argument than "poor people have more free time"
There's also the confounding factor of the type of work folks are doing by socioeconomic status. The person packing heavy crates part time in an amazon warehouse may be working fewer hours than the software engineer at AWS, but they also may need higher recovery time due to the toll the physical nature of the work takes on their bodies.
In this subject matter - the health benefits of a sauna - it doesn't matter why somebody has enough free time to take a sauna.
Is eating healthy more healthy for somebody who is rich and can hire a private chef, than it is for somebody who is unemployed and has a lot of time to cook healthy food.
Is exercise more healthy for a rich person than for a poor person?
> If the argument is "bored rich folks like to play-act working in their free time", that's a very different argument than "poor people have more free time"
I'm sorry but are you seriously considering "bored rich folks like to play-act working in their free time" to be real and widespread - among rich - phenomenon?
Having worked in a couple of FAANGs, for/alongside a whole raft of IPO-winning folks who had no real need to ever work again, my experience is that it absolutely is a widespread phenomenon (though I'm sure they view it more as "finding meaning through work" than "play-acting")
> Because the rich are by definition a tiny group of outliers?
Not in the context of this discussion. Here both rich and poor have to be group large enough to actually introduce significant bias to the sauna study. Top 1% is unlikely to do that.
No, I think considering only employed people is dishonest, there’s zero reason to do so. And if graph becomes flat then obviously assumption that high income people have more time is not true
If you want to make that argument, then we have to discuss whether those people choose to be underemployed, or are in that state due to fiscal policy that explicitly aims to prevent 100% employment
In the context of this discussion not at all - the comment I was replying to hinted that perhaps benefits from 30 min in sauna might be due to confounding stemming from time availability. Also all I'm saying is that poorest people (bottom 10%) generally have more free time than richest people (top 10%). I'm not discussing why, if it's system failure, their choice or anything else and I don't know why should I? Would this discussion somehow change how much free time each decile has? Of course not.
I don't get how you have considered all these details yet didn't try to steelman the "hint" better, e.g. 30 minutes of relaxed meditation compared to 30 minutes of sauna usage, as opposed to some vague definition of "do nothing" and whether different social classes effectively have very different baselines of doing nothing, such as their stress levels, does playing golf count as free time, or sunning on the deck of a cruise ship is that "doing nothing", etc. at which point the discussion about confounders really gets in the weeds. Unlike CPUs human in/activity is not like a no-op instruction
You can read the reports and then you will know what counts as a free time, it's clearly defined. Note that I'm not saying that socioeconomic status might not confound results - I'm just saying that available free time most likely does not and that poorest decile generally has much more free time than richest decile. I don't get why is it so hard to accept?
Your point is even more graphically illustrated if you compare the extremes... Say trust fund babies to homeless people. The trust fund people spend at least ten hours a week reviewing investment and disciplining their entourage, whereas homeless people's time is completely their own.
It's funny that you make this flippant remark, while people completely seriously use as absurd reverse scenario (for some reason asking to restrict analysis just to people working 2 minimum wage jobs and exclude people that are unemployed). I already know that people do not update their beliefs even when they are shown evidence that clearly shows they are wrong, but it's frustrating to experience every time nonetheless.
What you are describing is not evidence, it is a willful misuse (charitably perhaps, a misunderstanding) of statistics. It is exactly analogous to using a mean in a distribution with extreme outliers. The only reason is to hurl numbers around in an attempt to shore up a purely political position.
> What you are describing is not evidence, it is a willful misuse (charitably perhaps, a misunderstanding) of statistics.
It is evidence that you don't want to accept because it's not compatible with your world view. And what do you offer instead - assumption that poor people are hard working folks and that rich people are slackers? And that's somehow not an attempt to shore up a purely political position? Please show ANY evidence supporting your thesis. Also it's not misuse of statistics at all! Mean is perfectly appropriate statistic here. Again - you make some assumption providing no support for it whatsoever.
That claim doesn't stand a chance? It's obviously non-linear; once you're really up there in the higher echelons of wealth, I'm sure you get a lot of time back.
Sure - https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cr/CASEreport57.pdf
The difference between bottom and top decile is huge - bottom has approximately 12 hours more of free time a week! It’s consistent result that’s replicated multiple times in literature.
It's astounding how easily people here swallowed the ~opposite claim -- that low income people can't find 30 minutes of leisure time, versus how they howl and object to yours. Even after you provide evidence, something never demanded or provided of the first claim.
Imagine two kids get the weekend off from school. One kid gets money to order pizza, ride a fast taxi to the movies, and pay someone else to clean their room. They get to spend the whole weekend just playing and having fun. The other kid has no extra money. They have to spend their weekend cleaning the house, cooking meals from scratch, walking a long way just to get anywhere, and babysitting their little sibling.
On a piece of paper, both kids had the exact same amount of "free time" away from school. But in real life, the second kid was actually working the whole time.
Wealthy people can buy back their time by paying for things like daycare, grocery delivery, takeout, and house cleaning. People with less money can't afford to buy these shortcuts, so they have to do all this unpaid work themselves. This eats up their free hours.
Jobs that pay less often change workers' schedules at the last minute, so they can never plan their days or get enough sleep. They also might have to ride slow public buses for a long time to get to work. This means their free time is broken into stressful little pieces, like waiting at a bus stop or waiting for an unexpected shift to start.
Even when they do get an hour to sit down, they are usually very stressed about paying bills. When your brain is constantly worrying about survival, taking a break doesn't feel relaxing, and can even make you feel more anxious.
So, while wealthy people might officially work more hours at their jobs, the money they make lets them buy real, relaxing rest. People with less money might have fewer official job hours, but their "free time" is entirely stolen by unpaid chores, unpredictable schedules, and the stressful work of just trying to survive.
The long and short of it is that poor people work longer hours; they simply receive less formal recognition for it.
Your attempts to hide these facts and paint poverty as enviable in this dimension are disgustingly inhumane.
> Your attempts to hide these facts and paint poverty as enviable in this dimension are disgustingly inhumane.
The report I'm citing is using residuals after paid work, unpaid work and personal care. I suggest you should actually look at evidence instead of using some made up stories. Do poor people like one in your scenario exist? Of course. Are they large group? There's absolutely no reason to believe that (unless your world view depends on that) because evidence shows something completely opposite.
It's surprising how gullible people here are - how can you actually believe that poor people do not have free 30 minutes a day? Please look at stats of time watching TV/day vs income. And if you want to have ACTUAL discussion I suggest you should focus on facts, not inventing tearjerker stories.
I’m afraid it’s you that’s disconnected from reality. I know it’s unfashionable to actually consider evidence, but please have a look at eg Time and income poverty
by Tania Burchardt. Low income people have MUCH more free time.
Don’t know. But I am in the top 1% of this country regarding income as an engineer (staff/fellow level). I don’t work more than 32h-35h per week - actually I never have and was never expected to. Living and working in a sane society and country. I fanatically turn off work email or work msgs when not working. I am not available for no one. Not even the C-levels or any clients. I concentrate on me and my family. No need to be a slave to “commitments” that don’t mean a thing in the long run.
And everyone has the same 24h. And it is just their choice and will to either dedicate 30min to their well being or not. It is not about having less time. Just prioritizing the same 24h that everyone has differently. Everything else is just finding excuses which of course is much easier than changing your life.
You are correct. OP is ridiculously short on both common sense and a healthy sense of perspective. The fact is, simply, that while the poor actually work more hours, they're just not compensated commensurate with their labors.
That's not what evidence shows. Surely you must realise that actual evidence is worth more than "common sense" and "healthy sense of perspective"? You just made up some assumption with nothing to back it up.
I did, and I found out for example that TV consumption is much higher in low income deciles compared with high income deciles. The claim that they do not have free 30 minutes a day is impossible to defend. Also under-compensation is completely tangent to this discussion, I don't know why would you bring it up. Do you think I'm talking that it's great to be poor? Because I'm not saying that.
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