Reply #21: Paranoid Environmentalists?

[Yo_Mama]

Nuclear plants do need scheduled maintenance. Seven of the older plants were ordered shut down in the wake of Fukushima. That leaves only 10 - Germany has had a plan to phase out nuclear power since the 1990s, so they haven't been building new ones.

So it is very easy for normal maintenance schedules to produce this situation. The RWE AG maintenance has been scheduled for months. There were also requests for inspections that might have a few more plants down than expected, but the point is that the nuclear industry just doesn't work this way.

If you will read the article, two of the reactors are supposed to be up before June. To the degree maintenance can be safely scheduled, it is usually scheduled during times of lower power draws.

There are a lot of reasons why the environmentalists' claim is stupid:

This is an older article from 2010.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf43.html
Ever since Chernobyl the German public has not been in favor of nuclear power. If you will scroll down, you'll see a table showing that as of 2001, 7 of the plants were scheduled to be shut down by the end of 2012, and all the rest of the plants were scheduled to be permanently out of operation by 2022. Then in 2010 they decided to extend their lives, because the Germans are quite dependent on their NPS's for electricity. So after Fukushima this year they decided to shut down the oldest 7 already.

These plants are older and you would expect them to be down for quite a bit of maintenance anyway.

The other thing is that an additional tax was put on nuclear fuel, which led companies to consider changing plant operational parameters - they needed to go for more of the remunerative power consumption at the demand end rather than the lower-paid baseload. That requires changing plant operational performance, and while it is possible to cycle nuclear plants up and down, you want to be careful when you are doing it. Fuel burns differently. So you would expect these plants to require more frequent shutdowns for fuel inspections.

Here's another article that mentions the issue:
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C_New_plans_for_German_reactors_2012101.html

The extension of operational limits on German nuclear plants came with a hefty tax of €145 per gram of uranium or plutonium set to net the government some €2.3 billion per year. This is causing German utilities to reconsider their operating regimes, possibly away from the baseload role to follow demand curves instead. All German plants were built to have load-following capability and can moderate output by a few percent per minute. This practice, however, comes with operational issues such as potential uneven burning of nuclear fuel in the core and additional stresses on some components.