Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gud | Hacker News Reader

Germany closed their nuclear plants when the fear of nuclear was at an all time high, due to Fukushima.

At the same time, the risk of war has been downplayed ever since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Gerhard Schröder was one of the strongest political voices behind the de-nuclearization of Germany. After his chancellorship he was on the board of Rosneft and was appointed to Gazprom's board but I believe didn't end up taking it.

Read into that what you will, but it sounds very geopolitical to me.

Gerhard Schröder did not care one bit about nuclear. He was in a coalition with the Greens who wanted to get rid of all nuclear power plants (whose fuel, by the way, mostly comes from Russia if I recall it correctly). He was Putin's best friend, though. When Merkel took over, she stopped or delayed the closing down of the NPPs only to speed it up again significantly after Fukushima.

> whose fuel, by the way, mostly comes from Russia if I recall it correctly

Currently, sure. But it's possible to load enough nuclear fuel from Australia on a rowboat to power Germany for 10 years (that would be about a suitcase).

An alternative explanation is the Greens didn't care about nuclear until Gerhard Schröder started to scare them with Fukushima.

That would have been quite a feat of divination. Schroeder was chancellor until 2005 while Fukushima happened in 2011 (during Merkel's government, which actually had pushed the nuclear exit further into the future at first and then rolled back that decision after Fukushima).

The important event was Chernobyl in 1986, from then on it was pretty much clear that Germany would leave nuclear power behind (and this was the Green party's main agenda, and what made them 'big' during the 90's).

[flagged]

And why so exactly?

Why do you think?

I do not think that at all, hence why I asked.

He is considered to be aligned with the Putin regime:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sanction-gerhard-schr-de...

And that is enough to whish him ill? Hint, Schröder was long gone from power when Putin invaded Ukraine.

Not defending Schröder in any way, just pointing at some discurs issues.

I don’t get Fukushima driving a worry about nuclear but not about tsunami or earthquake which killed orders of magnitude more and caused Fukushima in the first place.

Nuclear powerplants exploding have a tendency to make pretty large swaths of land uninhabitable for decades or centuries, in a densely populated country like Germany that's a bit of a problem.

Where has this ever happened with reactor types used by Germany?

So according to your logic, it must have happened first to worry about the possibility of a GAU?

By the very definition somebody already worried about the GAU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design-basis_event https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslegungsst%C3%B6rfall

Not exactly sure what a GAU is.

If an event has never happened, and the risks have been adequately mitigated, no, I don’t see the need to worry.

GAU = "Grösster Anzunehmender Unfall" roughly translates to "maximum conceivable accident", almost exclusively used for nuclear accidents (or sarcastically for lesser problems, like accidentally deleting a database without a backup at hand).

The fact that this is a very common German word should tell you something about the complicated relationship of the Germans to nuclear energy ;)

That’s simply an oversimplified view of risk, mitigation adequacy, and the dynamic and often unpredictable nature of real-world events.

The 'nuclear exit' was officially started in the early 2000s under Schroeder (in coalition with the Greens), then the Merkel government actually extended the nuclear power plant lifetime again, then Fukushima happened and the lifetime extension was rolled back on pressure from the public.

While Schroeder might have had his own interests in mind and eventually became Putin's useful idiot, the shutdown of nuclear power was a popular opinion in Germany at least as far back as Chernobyl and then reinforced by Fukushima.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com