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Comment by barney54 | Hacker News Reader

My reading of the situation is that Merkel went anti-nuke because the greens in Germany were anti-nuke and she needed more support. It was all about electoral politics.

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I'm not sure about that. IMHO, one of the major reasons Germany (beyond party lines) went anti-nuclear after Fukushima was the sentiment that "something like Tschernobyl can only happen in countries like the Soviet Union / the eastern block", that was the political position of most parties (except Greens, of course) since the 80s. The West German nuclear plants were "always safe", something like Tschernobyl "could never happen here". This sentiment was a major part of the reason why the East German nuclear plants were shut down immediately after the collapse of East Germany, even before the Unification. They were Soviet and unsafe.

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.

The question is - why did this trend arise specifically in German-speaking countries?

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.

The nuclear power plant in Belarus is a political project funded mostly by Russia to increase political ties with Belarus. It cannot be profitable without "free" money from Russia.

I don't think "unaffected" is the right term. Yes, DACH didn't get much radiation in median, but in some areas (mostly Bavaria[1] and Austria[2]) there was quite a bit of radioactive rain. For example, its still not allowed to eat wild boars / deers in parts of Bavaria, because they accumulated too much (> 10k Bq/Kg) radiation, mostly Caesium 137 from the Tschernobyl incident.

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...

Ukraine was against nuclear power and nuclear weapons until war. Now, we need to have an ability to quickly produce few plutonium nukes in case of emergency, so we need weapon grade nuclear reactors to produce nuclear waste with plutonium.

Being anti-nuke and being against nuclear power are two completely different things.

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