Actually it has been a way longer process starting in 2000/2001[1], with Fukushima having a significant impact.[2] It doesn't seem the Chernobyl series was responsible.
[1] https://www.terradaily.com/2003/031114130333.jlvf6wjx.html
The whole reason is historical, because of Chernobyl, Sellafield, the Fukushima. People have been wary for years. Netflix series Dark reflects this mindset pretty well.
The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government.
German here. We Europeans also have another issue: where to put the waste. Unlike Americans who have lots of deserts where no one gives a flying f..k about anything you dump there because there is no human life in a hundred km range, Europe is densely populated and surprisingly people don't want to live near a nuclear waste dump.
Additionally, unlike Americans we have personal experience with nuclear disaster from Chernobyl - to this day, many decades after the event, you have to check wild pigs and fungi in Bavaria for radioactivity if you want to sell them. And current operators of nuclear plants haven't been exactly trustworthy, given many thousands of incident reports of which quite a number can be boiled down to shoddy construction or maintenance.
On top of that, we have had massive fuck-ups of our governments in the attempts to find a permanent storage site:
- former salt mine "Asse" which was used from 1967-1978 turned to be a colossal disaster - the barrels rusted and leaked, to make it worse it was known at the time that the barrels would only last three years, and now it's estimated to need billions of euros for retrieval of all the waste
- former salt mine "Gorleben" was inspected from 1979-2000 as a permanent storage site, but (again) it came out that the location was chosen for political reasons, not scientific
- former GDR site "Morsleben" is unstable, needing billions of euros to prevent collapse
- current projects to search a new final site are expecting to take until (at least) 2031 with finalization of storage in year 2095-2170 (!!!), at a total cost of 50-170 billion euros.
As a result of all of this - especially the last point, who can even guarantee there will be a German nation in over 150 years of time from now?! - German public is extremely skeptic of nuclear energy.
In other European nations, French and British projects for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns. Even if there were public support for nuclear energy, no one trusts government to complete such projects in time and budget anymore, further weakening nuclear energy.
Edit: Totally forgot about the boatload of issues involving power plants europe-wide, see e.g. https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nucl... for a list. You really have anything there, from fundamental construction issues over your run-off-the-mill accident and old age (many plants are 30 years or older) to outright gross negligence. To put it short: We Europeans can't operate nuclear power responsibly, no matter if organized under capitalist, communist or modern-ish government control.
There won't be much of a future for nuclear fission power in Europe, no matter what some of our bought-off leaders (Macron, Orban) spout.
We do not actually have that kind of issue, nuclear waste takes very little storage space.
It's just not yet economical to extract it out of the spent fuel for use.
You might say, well, hydrocarbon waste is much less dangerous. But that's negated by the fact that you need about 1,000,000x as much coal to replace the energy provided by nuclear. And in fact, the total amount of radioactive contaminants in that quantity of coal is roughly equal to the amount of nuclear fuel you would have required in the first place had you just used nuclear alone!
The problem is largely a political one.
As far as I know using the waste as fuel is only possible in new reactor types, which are still under development - and in the case of molten salt reactors, it's not even sure yet if these actually can be built because of material science issues (aka, how to construct piping that stays durable for decades when exposed to hot, aggressive molten salt).
It is simply not fair towards future generations to literally dump even more waste to them and hope they manage to figure it out, when we could alternatively also build out the European power grid and go fully renewable using wind, solar and ocean/rivers for generation, batteries and hydro for storage and natural gas/hydrogen for peak demand.
It is not impossible to get even faster buildout in the next ten years, all we need is politicians deciding to do so instead of giving billion dollar handouts to fossil fuel companies and actively impeding buildout!
>In other European nations, French and British projects for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns.
China has managed to build reactors using same EPR design on time.
It's the same as with tech debt, with the difference that your average startup's tech debt can't be turned into a dirty bomb by flying an airplane into it.
>unsafe "temporary" solution
There's nothing unsafe in this particular temporary solution. It's the other way, if something leaks, you can relatively easily fix it. It's only problem if you bury leaking stuff underground.
Also, proper solution is to use "waste" in breeder reactors, which only problem is political opposition to them.
1) Store the stuff above ground => risk terrorism, sabotage and "normal" accidents (e.g. lighting strike, earthquakes, corrosion leading to leaks), additionally: no one wants to live next to a nuclear dump so you won't get political support but rather fierce backlash from the people living near the chosen site
2) Store the stuff under ground => risk of collapse, of leaks and other issues as have already happened in the existing attempts
> Also, proper solution is to use "waste" in breeder reactors, which only problem is political opposition to them.
Breeder reactors IIRC have the problem of plutonium proliferation, molten-salt reactors aren't even close to being developed enough to be put into production.
But Fukushima is in Japan, and Japan and Germany feel much more similar, from a technological standpoint, than (West) Germany and the ex Soviet Union. Even though Fukushima was geographically much farther away than Tschernobyl, it somehow was "closer", politically.
"If it happens in Japan, it can happen here, too" - I know a few people that regularly vote / support the CDU (Merkels party) and most of them had this exact change of mind.
Chernobyl/Pripyat is in northern Ukraine, on the border with Belarus.
Ukraine is totally fine with nuclear power. Belarus plans to expand the existing plants. To the west, Slovakia's grid is mostly nuclear and is currently doing finishing touches on their new reactors. Hungary is also pro-nuclear.
The radioactive plume from Chernobyl then moved northwards, towards Baltics, reaching the populated parts of Scandinavia. Well, the grids in FIN and SWE are heavily nuclear-based, Finland is about to launch another 1500MW reactor.
So - the countries most affected by the Chernobyl disaster are unanimously pro-nuclear, while DACH countries, basically unaffected by it, are somehow in panic-mode whenever the word 'nuclear' is uttered.
Also, Austria did reject nuclear power in the 70s, before Tschernobyl, with one power plant (Zwentendorf[3]) already built but not yet running, via a very close referendum. So the anti-nuclear sentiment was already partly there (in Austria more than in Germany), but its very probable that Tschernobyl (and Fukushima) pushed enough people "over the edge" to give the anti-nuclear sentiment a comfy political majority across almost all political parties.
Why the other countries did not follow this trend, I don't know. They'll have their reasons :-)
[1] https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Bilder/BfS/DE/ion/notfallschut... [2] https://science.orf.at/stories/3206079/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plan...