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East Germany nuclear power plants were shut down due to security risks.
Chernobyl was a fucked up crazy event here too.
Even now you need to test meat from animals when they are shot I a certain area due to unhealthy levels.
And while France build 56 plants we never build that many in the first place.
And countries still struggle to build them. Olkiluoto 3 was planned to be done after 4 years, it took them overall 18 years!
And yes we are a democracy and a lot of people in Germany don't like to live next to a nuclear power plant.
France has the double of density btw.
Stop writing simple comments for complex issues
Nuclear energy is more expensive than any other mean of energy production. That is, when subsidies and disposal of nuclear waste (for a long, long time) are part of the equation instead of privatizing earnings and collectivizing costs. Moreover, nuclear energy produces waste for generations and generations to deal with. In all those decades of nuclear energy production we haven‘t been able to find a good solution for a secure disposal of nuclear waste. Because nobody wants it nearby. Similar to the ExxonMobil CEO quickly becoming a NIMBY regarding fracking when it was supposed to take place near where he lived.
The shift to renewables was slowed down because of cheap gas from Russia and „alternatives“ such as nuclear energy production. Both massive mistakes.
What we had needed was massive investments and partnerships within the EU and with nearby countries such as Norway and Switzerland e.g. for pumped hydro storage, green hydrogen and massive European energy networks (e.g. for solar energy from southern Europe).
That will be our tasks for the next years and statistics show that we have massive investments into solar energy and heat pumps to tackle future challenges.
There only scenario in which shutting down a nuclear plant within the next, say, 50 years makes sense is if it has physically deteriorated to the point of it's stability being unknown.
Once there is a surplus of entirely green energy, you can consider removing nuclear idle capacity, but even then you'd have to ask "why?".
Yes, nuclear produces (manageable) waste. But coal throws its waste into the air, actively killing people of lung cancer and harming cognitive ability, while slowly boiling the planet. And that's before we look at mining.
Solar and wind would be nicer, but there's no discussion to be had about removing nuclear while coal and oil power is still out there killing us and the planet.
Heck, if you're looking at lives saved, nuclear wins - the total direct and indirect deaths per power unit of nuclear is lower than wind, as the large number of windmills needed to be constructed bump the worksite accident numbers.
Also, they delayed shutdown of some nuclear plants due to the energy crisis.
But guess where the fuel for their nuclear power plants was coming from? Hint: starts with an R.
In the US we're replacing nuclear reactors with wind and solar at 2x the rate we're losing nuclear generation capacity. Germany has also seen incredible solar growth: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/germany-goes-all...
They're still planning to eliminate coal from the grid, and not only that, they're dropping the plan to do so from 2038 to 2030: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/geared-germany-en...