Shutting down nuclear makes sense, we have much safer ways nowadays to generate (transform) energy. Storing the nuclear waste is a unsolved issue that is passed on to our children.
Radioactive waste is radioactive because it still has stuff in it that can be refined into usable fuel ore for further use.
The reason this was not done was because it was cheaper to mine new ore than refine older waste. This is quickly changing.
When uranium pellets are used up they become depleted uranium and have industrial uses as ballests, armor, or (controversially) as weapons. These are about as dangerous as lead. Don't eat them but can be safely held on your hand or buried with minimum danger.
Nuclear power is our path to a green future and people like you spreading ignorance are why countries like Germany are now dependent on despotic totalitarian regimes.
If making more grid storage was cheap and easy, we would have built it decades ago. This is why Germany is still burning so much coal.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...
Solar and wind cannot support a base load period. Battery tech is great and believe me it's cool but lithium ion batteries have been in place since the 70s and the chemistry hasn't improved.
Instead of sitting on our hands with a thumb up the bum, waiting for breakthroughs that never come, we have solutions today that work and should be leveraged before those gains in chemical engineering and material science happen.
Modern reactors are far more resilient and safe. The reason building new reactors is so expensive comes down to the permitting and license process. Building is easy, dealing with the $300/hr lawyers and regulatory overhead that makes bringing new reactors online is why it's so expensive.
You want to know who has the safest track record of nuclear reactor operation? The navy.
If one looks at France, for example, one can see that they have been doing this quite successfully for 30+ years.
It's not a know-how problem, it's a political problem.
The "use once and store" attitude that results in needing safe places for highly radioactive material for 100's of thousands of years is insane, when you can just use the stuff until it's "worn out" and the resulting lower level waste only needs caring for for some small handful of decades.
And we need more fast-breeder reactors, too, FWIW.
Unfortunately Germany took the approach of shutting down nuclear before they had eliminated all coal plants. An operating coal plant will kill many people just through its normal emissions.
>...The five EU countries whose coal power plants do the most harm abroad are Poland (causing 4,690 premature deaths abroad); Germany (2,490); Romania (1,660); Bulgaria (1,390) and the UK (1,350).
Besides killing people in neighboring countries, Germans are also prematurely dying due to their use of coal and being downwind of its neighbors:
>...The five EU countries most heavily impacted by coal pollution from neighbouring countries, in addition to that from their own plants are: Germany (3,630 premature deaths altogether), Italy (1,610); France (1,380); Greece (1,050) and Hungary (700).
https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin....
As a comparison, in 2022, there were 2,776 road traffic fatalities in Germany.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1331134/road-traffic-fat...
While Germany has a long term goal of stopping the burning of coal, every year this is delayed is more people dying. Energy supply disruptions have actually caused them to increase their use of coal:
>...The ‘intensive use’ of German coal power plants lead to additional emissions of 15.8 million tonnes of CO2 in 2022, according to a report by consultancy Energy Brainpool commissioned by Green Planet Energy. Due to the energy crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, Germany temporarily reopened decommissioned and soon-to-be decommissioned coal power plants last year to avert gas shortages, which resulted in more CO2 being released. According to the authors, the emissions are ‘additional’ because they are not accounted for in the European Emissions Trading System (ETS). Germany's total emissions amounted to about 750 million tonnes last year
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/intensive-use-german-co....
>...Storing the nuclear waste is an unsolved issue that is passed on to our children.
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
In the future there will be better solutions to deal with the rest of the waste. Newer reactor designs would also make it possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. Through many cycles, the IFR ultimately causes 99.9% of the uranium and transuranium elements to undergo fission and produce power; so its waste is just the fission products. These have much shorter half lives; so in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium ore."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least.
People have different problems and priorities than you, and if you decide to annoy them on top of the hardships they've already been burdened with, this might be the straw that will cause them to eventually radicalize. Just look at the AfD banners of the day, and you will see that they use every opportunity like this to grab voters. I've seen posters that said "Klima-Kleber ins Knast", so this is a factor that may bend people down.
What I don't like about Germany is that left-leaning people love to shout out their virtue with demos, banners, stickers, banter and whatnot, but when they are confronted with an actual working-class crowd, they just brush them off as "Nazis", and we don't talk to "Nazis".
From what I know nuclear energy is not really cheaper than other sources. Also Germanys energy was 2021 only 12% nuclear.
Sounds for me they are very much Nazi-like.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/afd-politician-h%C3%B6cke-charged-with...
The German authorities are doing in their trousers because of the AfD's meteoric rise. They will do anything so that the average voter thinks that utter incompetent clowns like Scholz, Bärbock and Habeck are indeed good political choices. Any and all elements (like 3 word quotes) are going to be used to ban the real opposition.
The sad fact is that a stuffed animal could do better for Germany than the current coalition. The AfD is in the right place at the right time.
https://www.volksverpetzer.de/hintergrund/25-hoecke-zitate/
In fact, his own party members are unable to tell apart his writings from "Mein Kampf": https://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/bjoern-hoecke-oder-...
As for comparing Hitler quotes. Haha, very funny. But it turns out by that metric Taylor Swift is a genocidal monster[1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/08/who-said...
Yeah, and you were wrong. Newspaper rhetoric is not a tenth as cheap and nasty as what you hear from fascist assholes like the AfD.
Why should Germany be any different?
"We have so many foreigners in our country that a holocaust would be fruitful once more."
"We should found an SA[1] and clean up!"
"Homosexuals in prison? We should do that in Germany as well!"
"Such people we obviously have to dispose of."