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Comment by gascan | Hacker News Reader

Environmentalists are not the driving force to mine this coal, but many campaign heavily against nuclear, and the effect of decommissioning nuclear in Germany has been increased coal activity.

I'm not placing the blame at the feet of environmentalists, so much as ruing unintended consequences.

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Well yes, but environmentalists usually also call for large reductions in energy consumption as they know renewables can’t provide a like-for-like replacement. Are the consumers of electricity not also to a degree complicit by creating the demand in the first place? I think it helps to look past the proximate cause.

Presumably the same environmentalists are also backing the exit from coal. Using nuclear instead would have just displaced this mining activity (for the uranium) to somewhere else in the world.

But yeah, Merkel’s nuclear shift did seem pretty rash.

It's funny how people associate that nuclear shift with Merkel, given how it mostly was Merkel flip-flopping away from her prior policy of overriding the existing agreements about phasing out nuclear once it started to look bad...

Which environmentalist groups are anti-nuclear? I've never heard that position from groups in the US.

Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND, "association for the protection of environment and nature, Germany"), Greenpeace, Union of Concerned Scientists, Sierra Club, to name just a few.

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