Everything in life is a tradeoff. To me, the risks of keeping the nuclear plants in Germany are much lower than the risks of continuing to fund Russia.
Also, it will take a while for Russia to build enough natural gas pipelines to China.
In practice, those pipelines will be Putin's leash. (He will need China, but they have no need for him.)
I hope Ukraine maintains its independence, but it's just the first battle in a war Putin accidentally created, and will surely lose.
Putin did NOT accidentally create this war. It's clear that this was intentional and that there are real people suffering because of that intention. He tried opening more doors to see what benefits he could gain. That isn't an accident.
It probably won't escalate to a shooting war outside of Ukraine, but that's mostly because the rest of the world will probably be able to stop him via a proxy war.
He showed spectacular lack of judgment. I'm sorry if anyone thought I meant he lacks responsibility for his actions. I hope Putin is charged and convicted of war crimes.
There is a kind of an economic world war brewing right now, but I expected China to be on the receiving end from the start...
Germany is currently removing the dependency on russian gas. There is a consensus on this within Germany. The discussion on this topic revolves entirely around the question of how quickly to do this.
If this is or sure a multi decade conflict, what does it matter if this takes 1-2y instead of 1-2 weeks?
Gas and electricity are not entirely fungible, but Germany uses enough natural gas to produce electricity to cover the reduced imports.
It’s suicidal for the EU to give up gas short or mid term.
It’s possible to produce the required hydrogen using electricity and electrolysis, but not at a moments notice. You can’t just easily replace gas in electricity production by using nuclear- gas power plants are used for peak load, nuclear power plants for base load.
Although if greens in Germany were actually committed to reducing energy use they would have subsidized converting buildings from gas heat to using heat pumps instead of subsidizing solar production in Germany.
Heat pumps are subsidized in germany.
And if you want to blame the greens - they’ve been the most vocal party asking for energy independence, subsidizing energy efficient technologies and were very vocal against nord-stream 2. It’s just that they weren’t in power at all in the last decade.
The general thrust of your argument seems to be “nuclear power will not help shed Russian gas even a little bit” which seems ludicrous.
There are other niches where gas is used to produce electricity, for example we have a gas micro power plant that produces both electricity and heat for the apartment complexes on the local compound. This too, cannot be replaced by a nuclear plant.
Nuclear weapons is another topic, but those won't be affected by short term sanctions in the slightest...
But what happened in Fukushima or Tschernobyl is bad enough. The damage caused by the Fukushima incident might well run into the trillion US Dollar range. No, it's not cleaned up yet, they still don't really know what to do with all the soil and how to demolish the plant. You really don't want anything like that happening in your country, even at the low probabilities the nuclear lobby claims.