A while back someone unironically described Germany's nuclear power policy as "the single most catastrophic decision ever made by any government in peacetime".
German here. Accurate description if you ask me. It's one of the dumbest and most irrational decisions ever made in energy politics. It's completely inexcusable.
Germany is repeating the same mistake because of pride. If there are still talks about needing to use fossil fuels to bridge the gap introduced by eliminating nuclear, then eliminating nuclear was clearly the wrong move. The reactors should be maintained, upgraded, and worked on so that there's a lot of employment and a lot of clean, independent energy.
But the actual point is that people who rage about shutting off nuclear plants, usually don't bring these arguments, and don't care for the environment. Many of the more vocal ones somehow have adopted the mindset that environmentalists aim to destroy modern society, because they are against cars and harmful industry, so they want to reset everything into a medieval state. And nowadays, they seem to drift very hard into arguments of the "Great Reset" conspiracy and the like. And one result of this thinking is to be against everything which their enemies want, and support all of what their enemies hate, like nuclear plants.
So, what I mean to say is, there is a loud group of people who support nuclear plants, because they hate environmentalist for whatever reason, not the other way around. And while not all supporter of nuclear plants are from that group, it seems to be at the moment the msot vocal group.
The push for "we shouldn't do renewables, because they can't do the job, so we should invest in nuclear" is about taking the wind out of renewable's sails. Even if we turn around today and start building a hundred nuclear plants all over the world, it will take decades for them to come online and start displacing fossil fuel energy production, meaning a long delay until fossil fuels stop putting billions into the pockets of certain people. They do this because even at the half assed effort we have now, renewable power generation is increasing by tens of terawatts per year in germany alone.
This is why the same people who DGAF about all the carbon we release into the atmosphere and all the pollution we dump into rivers suddenly "care" about "windmills kill birds", why conservative states like Florida, with ample sun, continue to push for laws that screw over home solar.
Nuclear is mostly carbon neutral energy, which is great, but if we wanted to solve climate change with nuclear energy, we needed to start building it in the 70s, when all the pushback happened. Unlike most other situations, the second best time to build nuclear is not today. Maybe it will be good to have it in the mix in the future, but we can't let it distract us from the renewable energy sources that have the potential to decarbonize our world before even the first new nuclear plant could come online.
It also might not even be cost competitive anyway.
A. Construction start to finish is well under a decade.
B. This concern is true of any alternative energy source.
> The push for "we shouldn't do renewables, because they can't do the job, so we should invest in nuclear" is about taking the wind out of renewable's sails.
The push against nuclear is to line the pockets of renewable companies, and exploits the layman's misunderstanding about environment impact of nuclear and its alternatives.
There are just as many manipulative, disingenous arguments by Big Oil as by Big Renewable.
Tesla has $100B+ bigger market cap than any "Big Oil" company.
There's no political party left you could vote for if you are in favor of nuclear.
America at least had a great chance to invest in nuclear energy and completely end dependence on the middle east for it's energy, but it chose Reagan instead.
It wasn't their decision, the reactors had to shut down anyway for at least some years, as they are lacking fuel and an up-to-date operating permit. The remaining reactors were already running on their last ounce, and it would take some years to produce new rods at Russia, even if we ignore the political problems.
And that's even ignoring the billions(?) of euro for penalties that Germany likely had to pay in that case, because the whole shutdown was executed somewhat shaky from the old government.