Nuclear is as clean as clean diesel.
Is it a clusterfuck: yes. Is it ambitious to leave nuclear and fossils behind us: yes. As a wealthy society should we try: yes.
We Germans are a bit idealistic and maybe illusional but at least we try.
Is it a clusterfuck: yes. Is it ambitious to leave nuclear and fossils behind us: yes. As a wealthy society should we try: yes.
We Germans are a bit idealistic and maybe illusional but at least we try.
CO2 emissions equivalent to wind and solar (actually slightly better). Safety (deaths per kWh) also equivalent to wind and solar. And land use much much better. Waste is tiny for the energy produced and easily contained unlike other industries, which is why no one has died from waste.
So basically you're rejecting the safest power source with the least environmental impact, and the only source along with hydro that has actually empirically (in the real world) accomplished deep decarbonization of an electricity grid (e.g. Ontario, France, Sweden).
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
Nuclear energy is climate change wise, surely a good deal but environment wise and human population wise, the thing is not that easy.
And nuclear waste is only easy contained if you are the US, Russia, Canada or Australia. Because otherwise you do not have a significant sized land area where you can burry that waste without creating massive problems.
There is nowhere to leak when we're talking multi-cm copper casks, metres of bentonite, and half a kilometre of bedrock.
It is raising the water some few degrees. But that is unfortunately enough.
It was cynical politicians and industrialists who sold the population on a clean energy revolution, all while banking on cheap Russian gas to actually deliver the energy required.
It was the string of conservative governments that followed it that neglected (and, at times, actively sabotaged) the build out of renewable power sources.
German politics are also very collaborative/compromise driven, so it's a mistake to think the outcome would have been drastically different, had we had a SPD/Green coalition rather than a CDU/SPD coalition the last 16 years.
This is especially the case, given that parts of the SPD were and continue to be on Russian payroll.
Ultimately, renewables are very challenging from a technical perspective for a densely populated country with energy intensive industries and limited offshore wind options.
If you ignore the long term waste. There is no way to place a cost on storing that waste. So people hand wave it away. Hoping a way to deal with it is found.
You like breathing radioactive coal waste?