In case it can't, what will be the EU's future without Germany as the economic motor?
Instead of going all-in on local sources or renewables (even power2gas would be cheaper than current import prices), with only 272 wind turbines built so far this year and the goal still being a lowly 2% land covered in turbines, we're replacing one external unreliable source with another, which includes more complicated means of transportation (ship vs. pipe).
Politics and media are discussion short-term topics like continuing to run the remaining 3 nuke plants, and running a bit more on coal for electricity.
Instead, short term actions should just be done, and the time for discussion used to get to some long term consensus on some viable future concepts.
Talking up the "chaos" and refusing to do basic things to help people when "disaster capitalists" would rather leverage the problem to funnel money to their backers is just another chapter in that fight.
As is the weird focus on land coverage. No one sensible is talking about that. It has never been a problem to worry about, and it certainly isn't a metric to aim for.
Germany is the most profitable most efficient economic engine in the EU, by far probably, but if it falters, we'll find another way, as we always have, and maybe end up with less millionaires.
One thing we wont do is allow Russia to start land grabbing unopposed in the hope they ll be nice and stop at Ukraine. We ve seen it before, many times, we've even done it ourselves, we know how it ends.
Of course the first reactors of an entirely new design will have problems, delays and be over budget. It's something extremely complex that needs to be extremely secure.
As with before, lessons will be learned, and future reactors of the same design will come along for cheaper and faster.
I wouldn't go as far as to believe that Russia has infiltrated our whole politics to the point where they can dictate what energy sources we use, but they may well have taken some degree of influence over public perception of nuclear power as inherently "dangerous".
Either way, even if it is for the "wrong" reasons, I do think that the nuclear power aversion isn't necessarily a bad thing; the technology is old, requires massive investments before it can be used and still requires its own type of fuel to run.
Most renewable sources, meanwhile, can be built up more gradually, and every finished wind turbine, solar panel, etc. starts producing energy right away. Acquiring know-how in these fields could also prove very valuable whenever the rest of the world decides to rely more heavily on these technologies (assuming cold fusion doesn't become viable before then)
> Speaking at a global manufacturing conference, the president said: "Wind-powered generation is good but are birds being taken into account in this case? How many birds are dying?"
> "[Wind turbines] shake, causing worms to come out of the soil. This is not a joke," he said.
...
> A study published in 2009 looking at the US and Europe estimated that wind farms were responsible for about 0.3 bird deaths for every 1GWh of electricity generated, compared with 5.2 deaths per 1GWh caused by fossil-fuelled power stations.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48936941
Russia is currently wasting their own money, which they could spend on wars and other useful stuff, by not deploying wind energy, and that's only going to become more true:
> The introduction of a cross-border carbon tax by the EU in the near future or the fact that customers out- side Russia want to decrease their purchases of pollut- ing energy carriers may become a significant incentive for the RES development in Russia, including wind en- ergy. Russian exporters will be interested in investing in renewable energy to save on carbon duties. The entire Russian economy will also be interested in this as it is more profitable to invest the financial resources in the development of green industries within the country than allowing the duties to be paid abroad.
https://wwindea.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/210319-FESMOS...