Started basically after chernobyls effect declined on German forests and mushrooms, AFAIK there still many mushroom places in Germany which are unsafe

But before Fukushima, it was mostly an empty statement of intent. The nuclear industry was already winding down, but not really because they were taking the decision for granted, they were just assessing the tiny (at the time) risk of it not being reverted as too much for them.

Fukushima changed the perception of exit plans from "yeah, right, I'll believe it when I see it" to "yeah, definitely". Fukushima hit hard because before that, Chernobyl was quite successfully framed as a failure not of nuclear technology but of Sovietism. But Fukushima happened, of all countries, in Japan, famed for accuracy and reliability (they can even run trains on a schedule!) and full of respect for the limited land-mass they have (compare Shintoism to American "exploit and move on"). If they can't handle it, nobody can. A lot of people were reevaluating their perception of Chernobyl and so their personal "disasters in my lifetime because nuclear is hard" counter did in effect not double from one to two, it, jumped to two straight from zero. Opinion shifted from almost a tie to almost unanimous.

Bill gates documentary on Netflix was really, really interesting and touches this. Even made me appreciate Bill Gates which I didn't think was possible because of Windows :-)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10837476/

Basically all the reactors involved in the incidents are based on very old technology and had design problems (which is not surprising as the technology and science was new at the time these were built - fukushima 1971, chernobyl 1977).

What we really should do is to work on reactors whose main functionality is to provide energy with extremely minimal possibility for meltdown. It's too bad that even with resources of Gates it seems to be impossible to advance the nuclear technology - I see it as the main way to save our planet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/te...

Germany did have a thorium based reactor, it had multiple incidents and was never profitable.

It was only online for two years and was eventually torn down. Well, the cooling tower was, they still have to wait for the reactor to lose it's radioactivity.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

I make my living off of the splitting of atoms, so the opinions I hear are not reflective of the broader population. It's always interesting to hear what people in the wider-world think. A big part of the perception problem, I think, is that people don't really spend a lot of time to do significant research about how power is made. This is understandable--the power industry is kind of setup to keep the generation side hidden (both physically and figuratively). All most people really need to know is that when they plug it in to the wall, electricity will flow from somewhere and their vacuum (or whatever) will work. I suppose that's something that needs to change.

I also wish it were more practical for interested people to tour operating nuclear power plants. They're amazing feats of engineering and operations--and that's very evident everywhere you look at most plants--but they're not so easy to visit for most people.

Not being able to explain it to the general public like they are three years old is one of the mayor flaws of nuclear.

>>spent more money on research to make them safer

>It's a very common opinion among people who have researched this significantly

The nuclear industry has spent a lot on PR to convince the public that they're safer but so far criminal liability for accidents is still minimized and the liability cap (i.e. free government insurance for accidents) is still incredibly low.

I'd personally be more convinced of their frequent protestations that they're 100% safe if they lobbied to increase their own liability rather than engaged public relations firms to put a happy face on their industry.

Actions do speak louder than words, don't you think?

Moreover, if you raised the liability then the research into making them safer ought to more or less take care of itself. The greatest incentive for executives is avoiding criminal liability.

If the owners of fosil fuel power plants were made to pay for all the damages they're directly and indirectly causing, I'm pretty sure they'd suddenly like nuclear power a whole lot more.

If I remember it correctly, almost nobody was talking about Chernobyl at the time because everyone knew that was just a mix of stupidity and the level of understanding at the time just being vastly different from today.

Additionally lots of soviet-style reactors were in own country and next to use.

The "Single event" that people were reacting to would be Fukushima, recently beforehand.

IMHO it's not an "outlier" single event, not after Chernobyl. The track record matters.

But it is on the other side of the world. Unlike Chernobyl.

That's not quite correct, politics and electability of stances on the topic play a big role, even in Germany.

In 2001 socdem-green coalition agreed on an "Atomaustieg" that would not allow new plants to be greenlighted and the old ones would be phased out by some time 2015–2020.

In 2010 when Merkel first had a sole conservative-liberal coalition, those plants got an extension for another 8 years and even an unpopular "Austieg vom Austieg" (exit from exit) seemed viable.

It was only in 2011, as a direct consequence of Fukushima that Merkel's stance changed (or she saw an oppurtunity to push through with it, if that was her personal preference).

In my opinion, she saw that an "exit from exit"-stance would have endangered her re-election. So it was a largely political driven decision, regardless of what the educated concensus in Germany was. It took away a main attack talking point of the green party, which was polling at about 25%* in post Fukushima-2011, realms the green party only got back in only 8 years later, in the wake of the climate crisis topic last year.

Saying that Germany's handling of the energy sector is purely rational, simply doesn't hold up to the political realities, which can be quite messy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...

* http://pollytix.eu/pollytix-german-election-trend/

I was under the impression that nuclear plants needed to be close to population centers anyway, or at least that it was ideal. The plant closest to my city is about 40km away, easily sighted from one of the city hills here in town.

> Externalities: even though I've read about various ways to store/dispose of nuclear waste long-term, I've yet to hear of a solution that seems clearly safe -- especially compared to the alternative of not producing nuclear waste in the first place.

Nuclear waste used to be my main reason for not liking nuclear power. The thing is, if you're gonna argue that way, what about CO2? It stays in the atmosphere for far longer, unless we find some good way to actually put it underground again, which atm wejust don't.

The benefit of nuclear waste is that there's far less of it, so putting it underground is actually viable.

And it's not even like renewables don't have their own environmental problems; just look at how many bats and birds are killed by wind turbines.

Wind turbines don’t solve the base load problem though...

Sure, there are plenty of interesting proposals for Uranium extraction and breeders. What worries me is that despite decades of large-budget research, most of them have never been successfully demonstrated. I don't think that hoping for all the technological problems to disappear is a very good strategy.

On top of that, even with current easily accessible Uranium sources, nuclear energy is significantly more expensive than both fossil fuels and renewables. I don't see that getting better with even more complicated reactor technologies.