Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him

A country can commit to 300 years of wind energy, temporarily harming a bit of nature.

Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again.

We have no issues with stealing a couple of square miles of nature in order to pave it for our cities or to use it for farming.

Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal: production of the turbines, used area and generated noise, minimal pollution of the area, the troubles of recycling them. That's mostly it.

You don't have this with oil, nor with current-age nuclear.

Also, we've already accepted the noise of cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes.

So I really don't get what they are protesting about, specially in Germany.

Isn't the idea of npp decommissioning to leave the area as it was before npp? Environmental impact of different techs was described in UNECE report I think

Germany is famously abhorrent of change. "We've always done it this way" isn't used ironically.

Uneconomical. The best way to dispose of things like the weakly radioactive reactor hulls is often to simply leave them when they are.

They aren't particularly dangerous, and they don't leach contaminants. So you just bury them so no one can access them too easily. But it does require leaving the sealed reactor buildings in place - even if you can reuse the rest of the land and the exclusion area.

I think it's still done as full dismantling (but maybe not all countries?). French superphenix will be basically erased. Something similar is happening to german plants like Isar 2

Some countries may have postponed decommissioning because it's cheaper to wait a bit Some countries allow recycling of some stuff, even concrete, like Italy

Unless the change is shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants[1]. The energy transition in Germany has been handled horribly for reasons I can't understand.

[1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out...

> Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal

You probably don't even need to remove the turbines if you don't want to? I imagine nature would take over just fine with them left there.

Germany and piss poor energy policy - name a more iconic duo.

The way I understand it, Germany had a horrid mix of anti-nuclear eco-activists, local coal lobbyists and Gazprom's natural gas lobbyists. The politicians not included in any of the above were too toothless, and couldn't fight through this bullshit and secure good outcomes regardless.

I assume most protests are driven by a Not In My Backyard attitude.

Giant metal towers make a dead tall tree look harmless by comparison. If that topples - and eventually it will - it will kill everybody in its path. So, we're probably not going to just leave on-shore wind turbines to rot.

Off-shore definitely. The UK already had a bunch of decaying archaic man-made structures off shore because of World War II, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts which I went to look at a few weeks back. Pieces of the forts clearly break off and disappear into the sea without incident.

And yet, despite multiple attempts by those on the political right to slow it down, they've powered ahead with reducing coal and gas usage.

Some of those critics focus on nuclear (Like AfD: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/populist-afd-sand-gears...) and some of those pretend to be angry about the slowness of Germanys transition but it doesn't really add up to anyone who pays attention to the local facts. It's just a meme to get people angry at the left and/or environmentalists, while the right openly and continually sabotage progress.

They were scared after Fukushima, a nuclear disaster that if anything showed how resilient nukes can be compared to coal, which just gets away with killing thousands of people quietly. Perhaps they’re better at vibes than they are at maths.

Why all the asinine “atomkraft? Nein danke!” Signs? The policy seems designed by 70 year old hippies.

The problem was "compromise" - essentially as part of forming government the Greens and the CDU (Angela Merkel's party) agreed to an energy policy where they would phase out nuclear and replace it with a fuckton of renewables. But the actual govt did only the former without the latter (despite the previous agreement and the Greens' protest of Where Are The Fucking Renewables), thus leaving only coal and gas.

Leaving nuclear in place would be good, going heavily into renewables would also be good, but doing neither would be idiotic, and somehow that's what they did.

It's wild how much shit Germany got for turning off gas, coal and nuclear power plants (which comprised about ~8% of their power) while Poland running on ~80-90% coal for decades without changing anything was nbd.

It's almost as if the outrage was astroturfed into existence by the nuclear lobby using similar tactics to the oil lobby.

> The energy transition in Germany has been handled horribly for reasons I can't understand.

Former East German political agents still working for Russia.

It's worse than that, its culture war driven in a lot of cases. Doesn't matter if it's anywhere close to their back yard.

Yeah, but those people still have roads, large buildings and factories in their backyard.

Poland was much poorer and less significant economically.

The nuclear exit was started 10 years before that - mostly also because of vibes: the Green Party became junior coalition partner in the government for the first time, and the greens had a longstanding anti-nuclear stance from their roots in the 1970s anti-nuclear weapons movement… They pushed for the nuclear exit.

When the conservatives regained power, they vowed to cancel and stop the exit timeline, but then came Fukushima and an irrational media panic - and Merkel did what she does best.

That denial of change, results in a build up of "change-debt", which then unloads in uncontrolled, dangerous events in leaps and bounds. All that autistic attempt to control reality to run on a rail, results on reality lashing ut to the systems opposed to it.

No, Germany drew negative attention precisely because it was turning off coal plants - without nuclear power.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy - they listen to propaganda saying that the value of houses near wind farms drops, that itself causes the price to drop.

Vibes, chernobyl and also the absurd cost of nuclear power.

Poland is building nuclear power now though, after decades of burning epic amounts of coal (~85% of their electricity output).

This is most likely coz it provides a route to creating a nuclear weapon in a hurry "just in case". It isnt cost effective for them for any other purpose.

Opposition to nuclear is 90% a "left" wing problem. Blaming the boogeyman "right" is silly in general, as left-right is a thought-terminating scale, but really silly in this case where it actually is pretty clear-cut.

Greenpeace did great work on the peace front, but wrecked 50 years of carbon progress on the nuclear power front.

This is very much wrong. The Greens were never in a coalition with CDU/Merkel. (Merkel was in coalitions with the SPD/Social Democrats and FDP/Liberals.)

Greens were in a coalition with the Social Democrats led by Chancellor Schroeder; Schroeder agreed to the Greens’ demands for nuclear exit and negotiated a board role at Gazprom for himself after his political career.

Merkel initially wanted to reverse or freeze the exit timeline but bowed to public opinion to continue it once the tsunami hit Japan.

You can't have civilization without roads, so people naturally accept them. Large buildings and factories are not common in the countryside, and people do protest when you try building them in their backyards. No different than wind farms.

> and Merkel did what she does best.

You mean f_ck up safety and security of whole Old continent for decades to come, for some ego polishing, personal weaknesses or similar noble reasons?

She still admits no failures nor missteps during her reign in many topics where she clearly failed badly, despite journalists asking very direct questions about this. I wonder when will German population realize how much long term damage she has done, if ever.

Well they saw what happened to a nuclear free Ukraine

We’re talking about a place that can make you wait five months just to change a job.

> Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again.

Deconstructing a wind turbine is far from simple and cheap.

Hey, it was West Germany's idea to bring all these people. Now they cannot complain about this obvious and natural result. It is irrational to think that everyone there has the obligation to hate Russia just as the West does.

Yep, this is what I meant by "anti-nuclear eco-activists", "Gazprom oil lobbyists" and "toothless politicians" respectively.

The opposition to the construction of wind farms are mostly silly except in a very specific situation. We should not construct those in nature reservation. If a place is worth designating as a nature reserve then we have decided that such place is worth protecting even if the area could be later freed (common reason is keeping certain species from going extinct, which makes the threat nontemporarily). Ocean based wind farms has a tendency to want to be built in the shallows, which happens to correlate where we tend to designate as nature reservations.

Wind power is however not comparable to fossil fuels or nuclear power. Denmark is a prime example of a country that did commit fully to wind power in a very strong and consistent way, and do produce more total energy through wind that they consume. That energy however is not produced when people want to consume it, so as a practical matter, they import around 50% of their energy that they do consume, energy which is not wind since when the wind blow they export the excess energy. They could produce 500% or even 1000% more wind energy, and they would still need to import a large portion of their consumption from non-wind power. Producing that much excess power would mostly just effect exports and not in a good way for the producers since overproduction mostly just lead to lower prices. 50% consumption seems to be around the maximum of what you can do with wind (for now), and when the wind do not blow you still need 100% of the capacity from other sources in order to fill in the gap. Overproduction of nuclear or thermal energy does not have this issue, but rather carries completely different problems.

Landed gentry complaining that their country estate is not as picturesque as it once was.

> Poland generated 54% of electricity from coal in 2024, down from 70% just 2 years ago

https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/poland/

They keep putting their nuclear switch on date backwards (2040 now I think?) but renewables have been taking big chunks out of the problem and will continue to do so.

> Opposition to nuclear is 90% a "left" wing problem. Blaming the boogeyman "right" is silly in general

The "left" (by your definition) also opposes fossil fuels but we're nowhere near eliminating those. Why haven't they succeeded?

Surely mere "opposition" isn't enough.

It's the fossil lobby directly.

You never hear someone complain about Germany's nuclear exit and then pivot into "but at least they're doing well with renewables and they should do better and go faster on EVs and electrification of heat" which would make sense for someone who had a strange affection for nuclear tech, particularly those last two which work great with nuclear.

What you do see is people absolutely seething about leftists and environmentalists and renewables who only have one just barely socially acceptable outlet to attack Germany on.

But they attack them not because their decarbonisation is slow but because they were clear leaders in the tech that threatens fossil fuels around the globe.

Making it seem like a failure is a good way to slow down that transition in other countries too.

There is mostly nobody in the path of the tower, and once you remove the blades and the turbine (there is a lot of valuable metal there) the physical load will be so low the tower itself can stand there for a very, very long time. But of course it does not have to.

Maybe some, when its within sight. Otherwise it tends to make good money, which is always much welcome.

But they’re doing badly with ev’s and have pushed the EU to water down rules against ICE cars. Never mind that Germany has been pretty bad for people who want to bike instead of needing a car.

True, but there is also its own brand of politicization of wind power going on, driven mostly by conservatives and the Bavarian CSU.

Not many whales around here unfortunately, but I'm amazed what kind of extinction-level dangers they apparently pose for birds, forests and generally wildlife.

And then there is the lasting psychological damage caused by the sounds and moving shadows of the rotor blades...

> Germany and piss poor energy policy - name a more iconic duo.

I mean not always, they put feed in tarifs for solar in law at the end of the 90s. This led to a huge boom in solar production and it made the Germans very big in solar panel production. Unfortunately, like all other countries they were eventually outproduced by china.

This model has been copied in a lot of places afterwards and only when a mature market for solar exists does it stop working (it becomes a subsidy for people that produce paid for by people that don't).

No, antinuclear sentiment in Germany runs much deeper - but if anything, we were scared after Chernobyl.

The German antinuclear movement started as a local aspect of the 68s civil rights and environmental movements. Then, when Chernobyl hit, West Germany enacted restrictions in daily life to cope with the risk of radioactive fallout and contamination. The daily experience of many Germans was probably not too dissimilar from the Covid time. (The restrictions were less severe but the mood was similarly apocalyptic)

This experience made a nuclear-free Germany an absolute core part of the progressive movement here. It's part of the founding story of the Greens.

Other flashpoints were plans for "eternal storage" facilities for nuclear waste. The conflict around the Gorleben facility was going on between government and local population for several decades and had given rise to entire protest communities.

It's a partisan topic like maybe abortion in the US.

The only aspect of Merkel's decision that was surprising was that she did it. She seemingly switched political sides and enacted several parts of the progressive agenda (also gay marriage and "wir schaffen das" - the famously liberal stance on refugees) - as head of the conservative party. Her party and voting base were not happy with that...

It's because it was done by politicians who work for Russia, which makes a lot of money supplying Germany with natural gas. Corruption in Germany is usually quite obvious.

Price of houses dropping is a good thing, anyway, makes it easier to get one.

What happens if you chop it down like a tree, assuming there's nothing underneath?

Yes, that's my point. But it's not leftists and environmentalists to blame for delays on those, so apparently the nuclear bros don't care.

Which would be weird if they weren't misrepresenting their concerns. Or at least trying to. It's all very transparent.

The lack of de-Stastification after reunification was at least as big a mistake as a lack of de-Nazification after '45 would've been.

One thing to keep in mind with the Danish figure is that they to be correct import 37.6% but have enough thermal capacity to run the entire country at peak demand without renewables or imports.

What they do is essentially being the energy trading market for Northern Europe. Buying the cheapest available from UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Norway.

As storage gets built out they will be able to arbitrage this positions and their better, likely allowing them to start phasing out thermal capacity as long as the stability of the grid is ensured through empirical evidence.

Attempting to fit nuclear power with its extremely high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX in our zero marginal cost renewable and near zero marginal cost storage future is a near impossible task.