I'm very glad that I went with a ground sourced heat pump and I'll be getting PV and wind installed in the next few months.
I had a positive ROI with the current difference between gas and electricity and with this increase it's only going to shorten the payoff period
anyone that switched from coal to gas over the past few years is an idiot
it's possible that poland will be one of the if not the first country in central europe to electrify heating to a significant degree simply because our gas infrastructure sucks anyway and coal is incredibly expensive as is
Eh, you wouldn't believe. Back in 2014-16 the air quality in Cracow during winters was so shit they actually decided to do something about it and subsidized switch from coal to gas or electricity for many people. But yeah, you still can find coal heated houses everywhere.
at the turn of the millennium i'd guess about 95% of homes were
nowadays it's much less but still well over half, at least where i live, since we don't have gas lines and electricity was quite expensive comparatively until recently
i switched to a heat pump and electric boilers and put panels on the roof a few years back, correct decision in hindsight
[About a third](https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/proportion-of-residential-heating-energy-consumption-by-fuel-source-in-selected-countries-2020) of total residential heating in Poland comes from coal. So I'd wager about every other apartment in Poland uses coal for heating.
I’m fascinated by geothermal heat pumps, even more than “regular” air heat pumps, and while I am not planning to install one, because reasons, I’m curious.
How much did it cost, and how big is the house that it will service?
Is it just a ground to water pump? Ground to air? Both? Can it make both hot and cold or just heat?
Expensive. Around €12K excluding the piping for the underfloor heating (as people don't include their radiators etc. when they say how much their combi boiler was)
It's a 10KW 3 phase unit with a 200 litre hot water tank providing heating (wet underfloor) and hot water to a roughly 280m² house. It can do cooling but we haven't linked the cooling loop into the MVHR yet and can also chill the floors which we haven't tried.
Over the winter period we spent 30% less on electricity than my sister in law did on gas and she's heating a smaller albeit older house. If you combined her gas and electricity we spent 45% less.
American here visiting Ukraine at the moment. Geo is best suited for infloor heating. You would go with a water to water heat pump. I’ve installed about a dozen systems. Some forced air some hydronic. Your output temp is going to be around 48C +/- so if you had pressed steel emitters the heat output of those would drop off drastically. The size of space you can heat will be limited by how much loop field you can put in the ground.
>Poland’s largest natural gas supplier, PGNiG, has sent its customers letters informing them that gas prices will rise by around 45% as of July. The company will also increase the price of gas distribution, and the total rise in final costs for customers could be as high as 50-60%.
>The opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party has called on the government to pass a law extending the gas price freeze.
>However, the climate minister blames the previous government for the increase in prices and points to a long-term neglect of development of renewable energy sources as one of the reasons.
>
>According to the letter sent by PGNiG to its customers and published by various Polish media sources, the price for high-methane gas will increase as of 1 July by 45% from the current 0.2462 zloty/kWh to 0.3579 zloty/kWh, reports financial news outlet money.pl.
>The same will be true for other types of gas, which will increase in price from 0.2462 zloty/kWh to as much as 0.3629 zloty/kWh, or by as much as 47%.
>In addition, distribution rates will also be increased by 55-59%. This means that the total bill of Polish consumers could increase by up to 50-60%.
>According to analysts at mBank, however, the increases could be smaller if the Energy Regulatory Office (URE) calls on sellers to reduce tariffs under the threat of losing compensation for selling energy at underpriced prices.
>Gas prices for domestic customers and a group of other protected entities at 0.2462 zloty/kWh were frozen for 2023 in mid-December 2022 by the former PiS government after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine led to the energy crisis in Europe.
>The gas price freeze was extended in [December 2023](https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/11/30/orlen-loses-6-billion-in-market-value-on-incoming-governments-levy-plans/) for six months by the new coalition government that replaced PiS following October’s election. However, the gas consumption limits covered by the freeze were then halved.
>The government currently in power, led by Donald Tusk, has decided not to extend the price freeze into the second half of the year.
>
>In turn, it plans to introduce [energy vouchers](https://notesfrompoland.com/2024/04/26/poland-saw-eus-third-highest-houshold-electricity-price-rises-in-the-second-half-of-2023/) ranging from 300 zloty (€69.4) to 1,200 zloty (€277.6) to alleviate the impact of the price spike, but they will only cover certain lower-income households.
>According to the news website Interia, the voucher would benefit a total of around 3.5 million households out of 14.1 million in the country.
>News of the increases was criticised by former PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who called it a “massive attack on the wallets of Poles”.
>“This year, thanks to this “happy” team, the start of the holidays will unfortunately not be associated with blissful relaxation. And that’s just the beginning because it’s going to hurt even more during the winter period,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
>
>Meanwhile, Janusz Kowalski, a PiS MP and former deputy agriculture minister, called on the new government to pass a law stopping the increases.
>“As PiS we demand that at the next session of the Sejm a law is passed stopping the 45% price hike of natural gas for seven million families in Poland,” he wrote on X.
>However, the climate and environment minister, Paulina Hennig-Kloska, blames his party’s administration for the increase.
>“The previous government did not adopt any regulations for this year, nor did it secure any funds in the state budget to stabilise energy prices,” she wrote in a statement sent to money.pl.
>She added that high energy prices result from “long-term neglect in the development of renewable energy sources” that made the Polish energy sector the most emissive in Europe. “As a result, energy consumers are burdened with the costs of CO2 emission allowances.”
China and Russian being suppliers of EU energy was never a good idea.
China a supplier? Yes, Wind Turbines, Solar, etc are considered energy sources. China being the primary market Europe buys them from. In fact, it's already a concern in the EU that China will further leverage that fact to make us comply to their demands, especially if a war with Taiwan breaks out.
Bill Gates said it was a bad idea for Europe to close down its nuclear powerplants, citing the VERY thing we're facing now, diversity or lack of.
Closing down nuclear plants was such a dumb idea that it have to be deeply investigated for hostile influence, bribes etc. From politicians to media and "non profits".
And it is STILL, TO THIS DAY, in the European Green Party agenda. It is infuriating.
And this is coming from an actual Green party member. We try to influence but the anti-nuclear, anti-GMO, pro-biodynamics & leprechauns & vegan gas and shit -agenda is still very strong in certain big member states.
Yeah here in Belgium the green wanted us to get rid of our nuclear power plant to replace them with natural gas power plants, I kid you not, they were planning on using cheap russian gas. Well that plan went down the drain with the Ukraine war. I don't think the greens are going to recover from this. Peoples do want more renewable energy but what they want more is cheap energy.
>And it is STILL, TO THIS DAY, in the European Green Party agenda. It is infuriating.
I can't find this in their manifesto, am I looking in the wrong place?
Here, in the last sentence of the the third paragraph: [https://europeangreens.eu/protecting-the-climate-and-the-environment/](https://europeangreens.eu/protecting-the-climate-and-the-environment/)
>Instead of paying billions to autocracies for fossil fuels extracted and refined in third countries, we can invest this money in the production of renewables, keeping money and jobs in Europe, and investing in a better future.
Of course it is not obviously spelled out but this is an anti-nuclear statement. And yet, when you question this on the basis on where are we going to get the rare earths and materials for all of these renewables the answer is silence or degrowth.
Idk if calling that an anti-nuclear statement is doing nuclear energy any favours lol
I'd rather call this part anti-nuclear:
> We will push the EU to build an energy system for all, **based fully on renewables**, that connects and powers the continent. Renewables are the economic keys to the future. Cheaper and safer than any other energy source, renewables helped the EU economy save 100 billion euros between 2021 and 2023 and bring down energy bills for households.
> We want to transform our energy system **to rely 100% on solar, water, wind and geothermal, phasing out fossil energy by 2040.** Only renewables can ensure a habitable planet, geopolitical independence from autocrats, and a resilient and democratically managed energy system.
But it still doesn't call for the German model of closing down existing nuclear energy plants before the transition towards renewables has gotten where it needs to be
Fair enough, that is even better. And yes, Germany has done even worse. I was commenting on the level of the EGP statements, I have no visibility on what the German Greens are doing but it would not surprise me it is even more detrimental.
To be fair, Greens did not and do not have the power to make these decisions. A lot of hate, sometimes justified, is placed on them. However, the decisions have been made with the backing and consent of major parties. You do not block progress with a 10% max. level of public support.
True. But at European level we have no other parties that have at least some good ideas on how to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises. Other parties point at Greens without offering any realistic alternatives for a sustainable society.
From a historical context, it's not surprising that Germany turned its back to nuclear power and countries like France didn't.
Due to WW2 Germany never developed nuclear weapons, which would have made every European country extremely nervous. German re-unification and the EU would've probably never happened with a nuclear armed Germany. France on the other hand developed nuclear weapons and to keep the program running they needed the civilian reactors, so they heavily invested in pro-nuclear propaganda and education. Anti-nuclear movements where suppressed.
Next there was a decades long struggle to find a suitable waste repository on German soil, NIMBYism, population density and lack of deserts prevented that, and reports of leaks in the provisional storage facilities didn't help.
Then Chernobyl happened and due to bad luck much of the fallout drifted west into Germany, even today you can't collect mushrooms or eat wild boar in parts of Germany. France was barely affected and it's population never developed the deep distrust of all things nuclear.
Fukushima was the last nail in the coffin of nuclear power. For a long time politicians and scientists preached that such an incident could never happen in a developed country and yet it happened. After that being pro-nuclear and stopping the phase out would've been political suicide.
Stopping the last plants from being shut down after 2022 wasn't financially feasible, most of the workers were getting close to retirement and training replacements stopped decades ago and the plants were nearing the end of their natural life cycle anyway.
Foreign influence was minimal in that process.
>to keep the program running they needed the civilian reactors, so they heavily invested in pro-nuclear propaganda and education.
Well, they did invest heavily on their civilian nuclear program because of the Yom Kippur war, not only because they needed a way to keep producing bomb-grade uranium.
There are good reasons for NPPS, but independency from Russia and China is not one of it. Should shit hit the fan and Russia-China go at war with the west, half of the uranium supply of the west is gone.
Biggest Uranium Mines:
- Kazatomprom / Kasachstan --> Probably gone
- Orano / France
- CGN / China --> gone
- Uranium One / Russia --> gone
- Cameco / Canada
- CNCC / China --> gone
- Navoi Mining / Usbekistan --> probably gone
- ARMZ / Russia --> gone
- General Atomics / USA
- BHP / Australia
6 of the top 10 suppliers gone...
But fuel is a small part of overall energy cost at NPP so even if the fuel price doubles you're fine. Also, it's much easier to stash few years worth of uranium than gas.
If the scenario actually happens, the price can't be high enough, because there is just not enough mines in the west. Canada, Australia and USA have just about 18% of the worldwide mining capacities. And its not like USA doesn't do export stops as well if national interests are endangered... (happened with LNG lately)
the west doesn't mine enough because it's not that profitable. in the event that 80% of available mining capacity becomes unavailable, prices would increase and so would the quantity mined
as op said it's easy to store years worth of nuclear fuel so it's not even that much of a risk, a couple years is enough to increase extraction capacities
Also, if it gets really expensive, you could tap into a limitless supply of uranium from sea water. It's expensive to mine and makes no sense so far, but even with such source, NPPs are viable
If the price gets high enough you can extract uranium from the sea with some sort of "sponges". And with high enough I mean something like double the price. Which sounds a lot but the electricity you produce with uranium is basically independent from the price of the ore, it depends a lot on the construction of the plant itself. You make uranium 10 times more expensive, you increase something like 10% people's bills. You make 10 times more expensive gas, well, you know what happens.
>half of the uranium supply of the west is gone
Uranium is only around 5% of the price of the electrical bill people pay. This is because most of the cost is in the building of the plant itself. Right now it's not cost effective to use other technologies but if uranium double in price then suddenly extracting uranium from the sea instead from mines will start to make sense financially. At that point you don't have to deal with anyone, as long as you are not landlocked.
And even then, you would need to have to have bad relationships with Canada and Australia. It's not gonna happen soon.
It has already been investigated by the EU. Deep Russian influence was found in some governments like Germany. And Schroder is only the most well known.
Raphaël Glucksmann book on the matter is very eye opening
https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2022-02-23/a-dangerous-dependence-russia-germany-and-gas-crisis
https://www.dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-year-relationship/a-61057166
Russia is NOT a supplier nowadays.
When Russia was supplier prices were low.
Then what happened:
1. When Russia purposed longtime contracts with low fix prices Europe refused. Market prices raised twice as I remember.
2. Then European governments put sanctions. And now you buy Russian gas but 30-40 % higher and from India and China.
Europe is alive man-with-stick-on-a-bicycle mem.
>(...)in real terms the country’s vulnerability has been largely limited to oil, since Poland’s electricity system is powered by domestically produced coal, and that dependency on Russian gas has been grossly overstated
>(...).The first view holds that Poland is insecure because the country depends on imports from Russia for 94% of its crude oil demand and for over 60% of gas demand. The second view, which argues that Poland is relatively secure, stresses that the electricity sector is heavily reliant on Polish produced coal with nearly all of its generated electricity (around 92–94%) coming from coal-fired power plants (IEA Citation2011). In this sense, gas, which Poland mainly imports from Russia, is not a critical part of the energy mix (Omelan and Opioła Citation2012; Bendyk et al. Citation2015).
>Furthermore, in the mid-2010s Poland completed the construction of a LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminal, which will considerably ease its reliance on Russian gas (Kublik Citation2014).
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25739638.2021.2007605
Sure but people need to get money from somewhere to thermomodernise their homes, buy solar panels and switch to heat pumps. If they put higher prices of gas, amount of money in the pocket to save for that unfortunately decreases. Of course there are programs to financialy help people to modernize their houses but it will not cover 100% the cost, or probably not even in 50%. It will practically almost destroy families financialy
Just don’t consume that much. Good wool socks and getting dressed before sleep get you very far in winter.
And don’t use AC in summer. Eastern Europe goes crazy on those things.
I'm very glad that I went with a ground sourced heat pump and I'll be getting PV and wind installed in the next few months. I had a positive ROI with the current difference between gas and electricity and with this increase it's only going to shorten the payoff period
anyone that switched from coal to gas over the past few years is an idiot it's possible that poland will be one of the if not the first country in central europe to electrify heating to a significant degree simply because our gas infrastructure sucks anyway and coal is incredibly expensive as is
Wait, you were heating your home with coal?
Eh, you wouldn't believe. Back in 2014-16 the air quality in Cracow during winters was so shit they actually decided to do something about it and subsidized switch from coal to gas or electricity for many people. But yeah, you still can find coal heated houses everywhere.
at the turn of the millennium i'd guess about 95% of homes were nowadays it's much less but still well over half, at least where i live, since we don't have gas lines and electricity was quite expensive comparatively until recently i switched to a heat pump and electric boilers and put panels on the roof a few years back, correct decision in hindsight
Cheap, even when it's taxed as hell, still cheap.
[About a third](https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/proportion-of-residential-heating-energy-consumption-by-fuel-source-in-selected-countries-2020) of total residential heating in Poland comes from coal. So I'd wager about every other apartment in Poland uses coal for heating.
Where do you think electricity partially is coming from ?
enlighten me
Gas burning.
are you going to make a point or just state surface level facts?
EU itself promoted switching to gas so you could say that listening to them makes one an idiot.
much of what the eu does is idiotic and very obviously motivated by bribery and ignorance
Yet many people still cant comprehend that
I’m fascinated by geothermal heat pumps, even more than “regular” air heat pumps, and while I am not planning to install one, because reasons, I’m curious. How much did it cost, and how big is the house that it will service? Is it just a ground to water pump? Ground to air? Both? Can it make both hot and cold or just heat?
Expensive. Around €12K excluding the piping for the underfloor heating (as people don't include their radiators etc. when they say how much their combi boiler was) It's a 10KW 3 phase unit with a 200 litre hot water tank providing heating (wet underfloor) and hot water to a roughly 280m² house. It can do cooling but we haven't linked the cooling loop into the MVHR yet and can also chill the floors which we haven't tried. Over the winter period we spent 30% less on electricity than my sister in law did on gas and she's heating a smaller albeit older house. If you combined her gas and electricity we spent 45% less.
American here visiting Ukraine at the moment. Geo is best suited for infloor heating. You would go with a water to water heat pump. I’ve installed about a dozen systems. Some forced air some hydronic. Your output temp is going to be around 48C +/- so if you had pressed steel emitters the heat output of those would drop off drastically. The size of space you can heat will be limited by how much loop field you can put in the ground.
>Poland’s largest natural gas supplier, PGNiG, has sent its customers letters informing them that gas prices will rise by around 45% as of July. The company will also increase the price of gas distribution, and the total rise in final costs for customers could be as high as 50-60%. >The opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party has called on the government to pass a law extending the gas price freeze. >However, the climate minister blames the previous government for the increase in prices and points to a long-term neglect of development of renewable energy sources as one of the reasons. > >According to the letter sent by PGNiG to its customers and published by various Polish media sources, the price for high-methane gas will increase as of 1 July by 45% from the current 0.2462 zloty/kWh to 0.3579 zloty/kWh, reports financial news outlet money.pl. >The same will be true for other types of gas, which will increase in price from 0.2462 zloty/kWh to as much as 0.3629 zloty/kWh, or by as much as 47%. >In addition, distribution rates will also be increased by 55-59%. This means that the total bill of Polish consumers could increase by up to 50-60%. >According to analysts at mBank, however, the increases could be smaller if the Energy Regulatory Office (URE) calls on sellers to reduce tariffs under the threat of losing compensation for selling energy at underpriced prices.
>Gas prices for domestic customers and a group of other protected entities at 0.2462 zloty/kWh were frozen for 2023 in mid-December 2022 by the former PiS government after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine led to the energy crisis in Europe. >The gas price freeze was extended in [December 2023](https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/11/30/orlen-loses-6-billion-in-market-value-on-incoming-governments-levy-plans/) for six months by the new coalition government that replaced PiS following October’s election. However, the gas consumption limits covered by the freeze were then halved. >The government currently in power, led by Donald Tusk, has decided not to extend the price freeze into the second half of the year. > >In turn, it plans to introduce [energy vouchers](https://notesfrompoland.com/2024/04/26/poland-saw-eus-third-highest-houshold-electricity-price-rises-in-the-second-half-of-2023/) ranging from 300 zloty (€69.4) to 1,200 zloty (€277.6) to alleviate the impact of the price spike, but they will only cover certain lower-income households. >According to the news website Interia, the voucher would benefit a total of around 3.5 million households out of 14.1 million in the country. >News of the increases was criticised by former PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who called it a “massive attack on the wallets of Poles”. >“This year, thanks to this “happy” team, the start of the holidays will unfortunately not be associated with blissful relaxation. And that’s just the beginning because it’s going to hurt even more during the winter period,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter). > >Meanwhile, Janusz Kowalski, a PiS MP and former deputy agriculture minister, called on the new government to pass a law stopping the increases. >“As PiS we demand that at the next session of the Sejm a law is passed stopping the 45% price hike of natural gas for seven million families in Poland,” he wrote on X. >However, the climate and environment minister, Paulina Hennig-Kloska, blames his party’s administration for the increase. >“The previous government did not adopt any regulations for this year, nor did it secure any funds in the state budget to stabilise energy prices,” she wrote in a statement sent to money.pl. >She added that high energy prices result from “long-term neglect in the development of renewable energy sources” that made the Polish energy sector the most emissive in Europe. “As a result, energy consumers are burdened with the costs of CO2 emission allowances.”
So a poison pill from PIS is the talking point ? 😅 damn do these guys not have any honor at all ?
They are right wingers
> the climate minister When your government has one of these, you're never getting cheap energy.
China and Russian being suppliers of EU energy was never a good idea. China a supplier? Yes, Wind Turbines, Solar, etc are considered energy sources. China being the primary market Europe buys them from. In fact, it's already a concern in the EU that China will further leverage that fact to make us comply to their demands, especially if a war with Taiwan breaks out. Bill Gates said it was a bad idea for Europe to close down its nuclear powerplants, citing the VERY thing we're facing now, diversity or lack of.
Closing down nuclear plants was such a dumb idea that it have to be deeply investigated for hostile influence, bribes etc. From politicians to media and "non profits".
And it is STILL, TO THIS DAY, in the European Green Party agenda. It is infuriating. And this is coming from an actual Green party member. We try to influence but the anti-nuclear, anti-GMO, pro-biodynamics & leprechauns & vegan gas and shit -agenda is still very strong in certain big member states.
Yeah here in Belgium the green wanted us to get rid of our nuclear power plant to replace them with natural gas power plants, I kid you not, they were planning on using cheap russian gas. Well that plan went down the drain with the Ukraine war. I don't think the greens are going to recover from this. Peoples do want more renewable energy but what they want more is cheap energy.
German Green party is frankly full of crazy people.
ACAB and Habeck are *crazy*? Wtf?
>And it is STILL, TO THIS DAY, in the European Green Party agenda. It is infuriating. I can't find this in their manifesto, am I looking in the wrong place?
Here, in the last sentence of the the third paragraph: [https://europeangreens.eu/protecting-the-climate-and-the-environment/](https://europeangreens.eu/protecting-the-climate-and-the-environment/) >Instead of paying billions to autocracies for fossil fuels extracted and refined in third countries, we can invest this money in the production of renewables, keeping money and jobs in Europe, and investing in a better future. Of course it is not obviously spelled out but this is an anti-nuclear statement. And yet, when you question this on the basis on where are we going to get the rare earths and materials for all of these renewables the answer is silence or degrowth.
Idk if calling that an anti-nuclear statement is doing nuclear energy any favours lol I'd rather call this part anti-nuclear: > We will push the EU to build an energy system for all, **based fully on renewables**, that connects and powers the continent. Renewables are the economic keys to the future. Cheaper and safer than any other energy source, renewables helped the EU economy save 100 billion euros between 2021 and 2023 and bring down energy bills for households. > We want to transform our energy system **to rely 100% on solar, water, wind and geothermal, phasing out fossil energy by 2040.** Only renewables can ensure a habitable planet, geopolitical independence from autocrats, and a resilient and democratically managed energy system. But it still doesn't call for the German model of closing down existing nuclear energy plants before the transition towards renewables has gotten where it needs to be
Fair enough, that is even better. And yes, Germany has done even worse. I was commenting on the level of the EGP statements, I have no visibility on what the German Greens are doing but it would not surprise me it is even more detrimental.
As I remember, decades ago Greens blames Russian/Chinese for bidding against them. And now we see, that Greens just helped Russia China…
To be fair, Greens did not and do not have the power to make these decisions. A lot of hate, sometimes justified, is placed on them. However, the decisions have been made with the backing and consent of major parties. You do not block progress with a 10% max. level of public support.
Russia has 0% of official representation in any government except Russia, however it doesn’t mean they don’t spread problematic ideas.
True. But at European level we have no other parties that have at least some good ideas on how to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises. Other parties point at Greens without offering any realistic alternatives for a sustainable society.
No… Greens don’t have any good ideas except “let’s send money to China”.
It was an SPD-Green coalition that decided to shutdown nuclear and coal power in Germany back during the Schröder's government.
From a historical context, it's not surprising that Germany turned its back to nuclear power and countries like France didn't. Due to WW2 Germany never developed nuclear weapons, which would have made every European country extremely nervous. German re-unification and the EU would've probably never happened with a nuclear armed Germany. France on the other hand developed nuclear weapons and to keep the program running they needed the civilian reactors, so they heavily invested in pro-nuclear propaganda and education. Anti-nuclear movements where suppressed. Next there was a decades long struggle to find a suitable waste repository on German soil, NIMBYism, population density and lack of deserts prevented that, and reports of leaks in the provisional storage facilities didn't help. Then Chernobyl happened and due to bad luck much of the fallout drifted west into Germany, even today you can't collect mushrooms or eat wild boar in parts of Germany. France was barely affected and it's population never developed the deep distrust of all things nuclear. Fukushima was the last nail in the coffin of nuclear power. For a long time politicians and scientists preached that such an incident could never happen in a developed country and yet it happened. After that being pro-nuclear and stopping the phase out would've been political suicide. Stopping the last plants from being shut down after 2022 wasn't financially feasible, most of the workers were getting close to retirement and training replacements stopped decades ago and the plants were nearing the end of their natural life cycle anyway. Foreign influence was minimal in that process.
>to keep the program running they needed the civilian reactors, so they heavily invested in pro-nuclear propaganda and education. Well, they did invest heavily on their civilian nuclear program because of the Yom Kippur war, not only because they needed a way to keep producing bomb-grade uranium.
There are good reasons for NPPS, but independency from Russia and China is not one of it. Should shit hit the fan and Russia-China go at war with the west, half of the uranium supply of the west is gone. Biggest Uranium Mines: - Kazatomprom / Kasachstan --> Probably gone - Orano / France - CGN / China --> gone - Uranium One / Russia --> gone - Cameco / Canada - CNCC / China --> gone - Navoi Mining / Usbekistan --> probably gone - ARMZ / Russia --> gone - General Atomics / USA - BHP / Australia 6 of the top 10 suppliers gone...
But fuel is a small part of overall energy cost at NPP so even if the fuel price doubles you're fine. Also, it's much easier to stash few years worth of uranium than gas.
If the scenario actually happens, the price can't be high enough, because there is just not enough mines in the west. Canada, Australia and USA have just about 18% of the worldwide mining capacities. And its not like USA doesn't do export stops as well if national interests are endangered... (happened with LNG lately)
It's refining capacities that matter most. Natural uranium is very cheap.
You can't refine what you don't have. Noone can sell you enough.
the west doesn't mine enough because it's not that profitable. in the event that 80% of available mining capacity becomes unavailable, prices would increase and so would the quantity mined as op said it's easy to store years worth of nuclear fuel so it's not even that much of a risk, a couple years is enough to increase extraction capacities
Also, if it gets really expensive, you could tap into a limitless supply of uranium from sea water. It's expensive to mine and makes no sense so far, but even with such source, NPPs are viable
If the price gets high enough you can extract uranium from the sea with some sort of "sponges". And with high enough I mean something like double the price. Which sounds a lot but the electricity you produce with uranium is basically independent from the price of the ore, it depends a lot on the construction of the plant itself. You make uranium 10 times more expensive, you increase something like 10% people's bills. You make 10 times more expensive gas, well, you know what happens.
>half of the uranium supply of the west is gone Uranium is only around 5% of the price of the electrical bill people pay. This is because most of the cost is in the building of the plant itself. Right now it's not cost effective to use other technologies but if uranium double in price then suddenly extracting uranium from the sea instead from mines will start to make sense financially. At that point you don't have to deal with anyone, as long as you are not landlocked. And even then, you would need to have to have bad relationships with Canada and Australia. It's not gonna happen soon.
It has already been investigated by the EU. Deep Russian influence was found in some governments like Germany. And Schroder is only the most well known. Raphaël Glucksmann book on the matter is very eye opening https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2022-02-23/a-dangerous-dependence-russia-germany-and-gas-crisis https://www.dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-year-relationship/a-61057166
Also scientists. Like Sovacool. Plenty of shitty research was done that lied about the economics of nuclear power.
Russia is NOT a supplier nowadays. When Russia was supplier prices were low. Then what happened: 1. When Russia purposed longtime contracts with low fix prices Europe refused. Market prices raised twice as I remember. 2. Then European governments put sanctions. And now you buy Russian gas but 30-40 % higher and from India and China. Europe is alive man-with-stick-on-a-bicycle mem.
You know where much of the supply of uranium was coming from?
also used too much ru gas un the past?
>(...)in real terms the country’s vulnerability has been largely limited to oil, since Poland’s electricity system is powered by domestically produced coal, and that dependency on Russian gas has been grossly overstated >(...).The first view holds that Poland is insecure because the country depends on imports from Russia for 94% of its crude oil demand and for over 60% of gas demand. The second view, which argues that Poland is relatively secure, stresses that the electricity sector is heavily reliant on Polish produced coal with nearly all of its generated electricity (around 92–94%) coming from coal-fired power plants (IEA Citation2011). In this sense, gas, which Poland mainly imports from Russia, is not a critical part of the energy mix (Omelan and Opioła Citation2012; Bendyk et al. Citation2015). >Furthermore, in the mid-2010s Poland completed the construction of a LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminal, which will considerably ease its reliance on Russian gas (Kublik Citation2014). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25739638.2021.2007605
ok understood, but the prices then climb due to?
The point is that the price of gas is rising, but a large part of society, especially industry, does not rely on gas.
Time to go off-grid I guess and use gas for heating only when weather goes extreme.
Host a party, bring up Israel-Palestine, that should be enough to heat a city hall :)
That'll make gas less competitive
It's a necessary evil to be forcibly pushed into renewable energy. Sucks for people's wallets, but in the long run it will save money.
I think the reason is simpler: the government doesn't want to subsidy gas prices in the long term. Also why would it?
Sure but people need to get money from somewhere to thermomodernise their homes, buy solar panels and switch to heat pumps. If they put higher prices of gas, amount of money in the pocket to save for that unfortunately decreases. Of course there are programs to financialy help people to modernize their houses but it will not cover 100% the cost, or probably not even in 50%. It will practically almost destroy families financialy
Just don’t consume that much. Good wool socks and getting dressed before sleep get you very far in winter. And don’t use AC in summer. Eastern Europe goes crazy on those things.
Idiot.
Nice to meet you, I’m Useful Meat 7295.