Wind farm in Germany is being dismantled to expand coal mine

1: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy

Now they conveniently blame the green party who certainly wanted it but never got close enough to power to bully anyone into actually doing it.

Conservatives ran the country for almost two decades, with Angela Merkel and yet the green party is the reason.

It’s almost as transparent as people blaming Democrats for Trumps debt expansion. Works every time

Compare them to nuclear heavy, clean France.

Your perception has been deceived by marketing. Stop following the news. Follow the data instead.

IMHO and in many external observers opinion they did it the wrong way, the sane way would be as renewable adoption grows to first phase out carbon, then gas, then nuclear. Gas was forced to phase out (Russia->Ukraine war), and for some reason they are closing nuclear before renewable is common enough, so the only remaining option is carbon.

Much of their progress was replacing coal with cleaner natural gas imported from Russia, which they had to reverse. They also had to make up for the old nuclear power plants that were retired without replacements.

The second reason is very popular because the alternative is saying "If we keep or start doing X in 10 years this country will be heaven on earth or a hellscape!" When people hear that even true believers will be a tiny bit skeptical.

On the other hand "Country Y does X and it's a hellscape or maybe heaven on earth!" In that case - there's no "maybe" on the table. The result is right now.

the current times have made the optics even crisper

Further nuclear likely comes with catastrophes like Fukushima every few decades and the problem of nuclear waste (just calculate what posting a single person to watch it for a million years costs). Germany suffers from Chernobyl to this day with mushrooms and game being contaminated with radionuclides above legal limits.

Germany has managed to reduce both fossil fuel use in total as well as coal use for electricity while shutting down nuclear (https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutsch...). Nuclear now being shut down we can expect faster shutdown of coal plants.

But that's not rational. Disabling nuclear power more than negates the effects of investing in wind and solar. Actually wind and solar are worse than nuclear, since the former are highly volatile and can't act as a stable baseline energy source.

Greens were useful idiots to Gerhardt's plan to power Germany's economy using cheap natural gas from then-nascent Putin regime in Russia.

It's arguable he wasn't wrong in fact, if you look at the fact that Germany drove a lot of the EU economy for the past 2 decades, he's probably feeling quite justified in selling his country's energy sector out to Russia.

In light on what is the real-world consequences of that decision; I would qualify it more as mindblowingly mistaken.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

That's a very positively way to say "mind-blowingly stupid".

Why would Russia turn off their main source of money?

Through the lens of energy independence this move makes a lot of sense.

Make no mistake, people didn’t like nuclear in Germany for historic reasons fusing cold war armageddon fears, Chernobyl Trauma and anti-americanism. The majority did not like it. Every nuclear fuel transport was a fight. Every power plant was fought by a combination of NIMBY and groundswell opposition. We are tightly settled and no place could be found to dispose of nuclear fuel that didn’t have the entire local population rise up.

They voted for it to be abandoned. And then the russians came along offering basically out of sight, NIMBY proof power cheap, an unreasonable package for politicians.

(Germany’s are the greatest NIMBY nation in the world. We fight power lines (it makes children sick), wind power (it kills birds), prisons (they create crime), internet lines (they destroy nature), wifi (makes children sick). We, especially our intellectuals, are a bunch of crazy ass people with centuries deep insane obsession about homeopathy, Kneipp. Ideological blinders so large they blot out the sun about misunderstood peaceful russians.

The last 15 years of German prosperity was not, as people would love to delude themselves, engineering ingenuity- it as powered by cheap Russian power, out of sight, and Chinese Manufacturing. The entire economy got addicted to it and the party stopped last year and the cost of it has become apparent.

The Nuclear decision has to be seen in that context, a ruinously stupid short term focused energy policy influenced by well placed Russian corruption and passed by the largest parties in the country because their constituents, large industries, donors and yes, unions, wanted it. It was a devils bargain but it allowed them to pretend progress.

Now the green party, who yes always wanted this but never ever had the power to force any of it, is a convenient scapegoats for ‘you made the population do it’, but that entirely flies in the face of how decisions are made and laws are passed in Germany.

We also would have to get foreign workers. A lot of NPP workers went into early retirement.

As of now Germany has no “Endlagerstätte”, all current wast storage sides are intermediate. The last attempt to establish a permanent storage side failed horribly and the nuclear wast that was interned there will be extracted under high costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

India and China are building coal power plants as they have a rising electricity use and don’t manage to build enough renewables and nuclear