Germany to switch off last remaining nuclear power plants

The "Green shift" is fundamentally not scientific, but driven by emotions and buzzwords, and hand-wavey things which can appear to be environmentally friendly or in some cases, just pure environmental accounting cheating/fraud (like moving your emissions to another country instead).

What all professional politicians really care most about though is their own personal reelection, and you can't get reelected without appealing to a wide enough audience. Doing "green" things is their current strategy to appeal to (non-rational perceptions held by) younger demographics.

And that movement was strong back then, because chernobyl happened, the clouds came over here and to this day, it is recommended against eating mushrooms from the forest regulary.

Then Fukoshima revitalisied that traumata and in the heat of the moment, the decision was made.

It started with Chernobyl but Fukujima was essentially the event that made the government speed up the whole plan.

Plus: the still unclear situation on how and where all the nuclear waste will be stored for the next thousands of years.

Note that nuclear plants only contributed to about 5% of all the electrical power in Germany.

Kind of the same how oil companies shill for windmills and solar while telling everyone that nuclear power is very, very dangerous, because they know that windmills and solar aren't a solution and all countries that rely on such tech will be dependent on oil and gas.

Renewables aren't really seen as a threat to fossil fuels, unlike nuclear power.

West Germany was looking for a nuclear waste site. I think long to medium term? Not sure. Anyhow, they had like about a dozen potential sites. But then East Germany places a nuclear waste site very close to the border.

Politicians do what they do best, step over the suggestion of the scientist and place all the nuclear waste into Asse II, which is close to the border. Just to fuck with East Germany. No, Asse II was not on the list of potential sites :)))

Now we are combined again with a nuclear waste site smack in the middle of Germany. Groundwater leaks in and we have to dig up the old rusting barrels again.

They have to dig a whole new tunnel just to get to them. It's insane. Oh, and before that we and a few other countries just throw the barrels into the ocean.

This was a long time ago, so you might think we found a new site. No :) NIMBY is strong.

France and Finnland have some decent long term storage.

Combine the bad government track record with that Germany is the birth place of homeopathy and 50% of the population believes in angels. Sprinkle in a bit of Fukushima and Chernobyl. My mother sometimes talks about how she was scared and my sister could not play outside.

Sure, a large part of it is not rational.

Switching off the nuclear power plants is a concious descision of the German society to go without from nuclear power. The descision is not between nuclear and fossil. The decision is between nuclear, and using less energy (when renewable cannot fill the gap).

I find it surprising that the proponents of nuclear power, who are often free-market libertarians, have so little faith in the market. If we produce less power, prices will go up at first. But only marginally, because it will become more lucrative to build new (renewable) power plants. And energy-intensive industry will be scaled back in times where not much is generated. The economy works basically like a buffered solution. That's why I'm confident, when we turn off the last nuclear plant, nothing will happen.

Nuclear power makes sense in stable peaceful societies where long term planning and maintenance mitigate the risks associated with it.

Europe is perhaps, not currently a stable peaceful place where that makes sense.

In other circumstances I’d be all for nuclear power… but, maybe some solar panels that won’t fuck anything up if the conflict in Ukraine gets out of hand or global warming / ai / banking crisis causes a society collapse isn’t such a bad call in the short term, eh?

for example, germany does not have much space for radioactive waste and the people do not want to live near radioactive waste. so politicians can't decide where to put all the waste.

also the performance of nuclear plants are not convincing: if you look to france where many nuclear plants have to shut down because there is not enough water to cool down the plants.

Other rational arguments: The infrastructure is unwieldy and extremely unpopular at best. Germany has no path to solving the nuclear waste issue, partly for political reasons: Nobody wants that (or other parts of nuclear infrastructure, really) in their backyard, and backyards are spaced pretty closely in the old world, and when every citizen has the same voting weight, tough luck. It just doesn't work.

Ukraine is teaching us another point: Nuclear power plants are weak points in the national security, and extremely so in wartime. Even when the enemy shows restraint (Russia strangely does, in that regard) there is an awkward element of hostage taking. Nuclear power is a bet on multiple decades of peace and everything going just right. And if you were really that interested, you could easily find lots more arguments.

Just like it makes (economic) sense for Germany to use its ECB role to put struggling economies into debt agreements that, for instance, transfer control of national infrastructure like airports to German corporations.

Of course, in both cases, the superficial reasons given are bright fairytales of benevolence, and the German economic benefits are cast as convenient but coincidental externalities.

The generation born after WWII developed a deep desire to not repeat the slaughter of WWII and many felt that their parents essentially lied to them about their experiences during the Nazi era and their responsibility for it. This mistrust transferred to government policies that would rebuilt the German armed forces, join NATO and by extension come under the "nuclear umbrella" of the US. Nuclear power was seen by many of these people as a bridge technology into nuclear weapons.

Regarding Chernobyl, it might be difficult for Americans to understand how scary and personal that crisis felt for many Germans. I personally can't remember the incident, but our parents shaved our heads and kept us indoors for days and weeks out of fear of potential nuclear fallout. It is comparable to the psychological impact of the COVID-epidemic for many of that generation. My wife is from Eastern Bavaria and forest mushrooms and wild boars over there still have elevated radiation levels and are not recommended to be eaten in many cases.

The phaseout of the last nuclear power plants was essentially decided more than two decades ago under a green-left government. A bit more than ten years ago, a center-liberal government came to power and would have been able to reverse the decision (many politicians in the two parties would have liked to) but Fukushima happened and this became politically untenable. To remove the topic from the political discourse, Angela Merkel pushed through an acceleration of the phaseout schedule.

Today, even the companies running the power plants have lost interest. Re-certification was not done in recent years and would take the remaining power stations offline for months or years, anyway. All of them are many decades old now, beyond their original life span.

So is all of this "rational"? Maybe not in hindsight, but I would argue it was for many people at the time and given that nuclear power never contributed more than roughly 25% to Germanys power production (I think), renewables are growing rapidly and no nuclear power station has been built without massive government subsidies, I personally think that re-entering the nuclear arena does not make any sense for Germany at the moment.

The number of nuclear reactors in operation in the EU peaked in 1989. More than thirty years of decline demonstrate low political, taxpayers and eventually industrial support. There are only so many years you can invest at training and financing without returns.

Only nations with a nuclear deterrent still moderately invest in nuclear power. Industry and society in general moved on.

That says it best. Germany will probably see a dramatic increase in fossil fuel consumption. They will also likely see higher energy prices.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-coal-region-brin...

Why does the German government and anti-nuclear activists insist on pushing this falsehood? After a few decades most of it will have decayed into low-radioactive isotopes. It will then just be the usual chemically toxic industrial waste.

France and Finland have a decent solution.

Germany was really really really bad at storing nuclear waste. Which is why I'm also against nuclear power plants in Germany.

But what we know for sure is that history already now points at Germany on how to not store Nuclear waste.

> Bis spätestens im Jahr 2038 soll das letzte Kohlekraftwerk in Deutschland stillgelegt werden.

No, not completely.

Even after decades of search and committee, Germany still does not have a long term nuclear waste site. And with a history of the government fucking those up in Germany it's understandable no one wants them. Emotional yes, irrational not.