Nuclear power is not counted as "renewable" in Germany. So this number will only go up.

You're right. Or actually we're both wrong. Coal is not renewable either, so replacing nuclear with coal megawatt-per-megawatt is going to keep the number at present levels.

However, greenhouse gases and other nasty emissions will go up if you start burning coal instead of splitting atoms. I will not open the can of worms about nuclear waste vs. greenhouse gases.

Nope, you're still wrong. What will go up is emissions, as nuclear is replaced with coal. However the percentage of renewables will continue to rise, as new wind and solar is installed. It's just a bit curious that for a while, at least, emissions and renewables percentage will both be rising simultaneously.

> However the percentage of renewables will continue to rise, as new wind and solar is installed.

True, but not related to replacing nuclear with mostly coal and other fossil fuels. If the trend of solar power and other renewable sources of energy continues, the percentage of power produced that way will, of course, go up.

Nuclear will be replaced primarily with CCGTs. It's publicly available information.

I really don't understand how/why you make such statements, demonstrating no idea of Germany's energy investment/infrastructure roadmap.

Why would the percentage go down if you replace one non-renewable energy source with another one?

You're right. Nuclear fuel is most definitely not renewable.

Well, it's inexhaustible within the next few millennia, which is the same criteria by which geothermal is considered renewable.

Nuclear really should be considered renewable, the only reason it's not is politics.

> it's inexhaustible within the next few millennia

In case of uranium, you're off by an order of magnitude...

No, I'm not. The low number that gets thrown about is for commercially available deposits at the present market price. The price of the raw uranium is a very small portion of the price of running a nuclear plant -- it could increase by two orders of magnitude and not have a material impact on the plant bottom line. At that point, it would be economically feasible to extract it from seawater, where there is enough of it for effectively forever.

Extracting it from seawater is, however, not necessary. Even small increases in the market price make a lot of new deposits available -- uranium is quite abundant in earth's crust.

The reason uranium and nuclear fuel is so cheap is that it was consistently overproduced during the cold war. Before the 2007 speculative bubble there was effectively no new activity since the last government-funded uranium boom.

I think he meant in the other direction. There is enough uranium for 20,000 years of consumption if we stop throwing away most of and actually burn it fully.

Current designs only burn a few percent of it, then store the rest as waste.