> For a bit more depth here, it turns out that German anti-nuclear (and other green energy source) activists were funded by Russia, a fossil fuel empire.
That sentence falsely implies that all German anti-nuclear sentiment is a result of Russian (and previous soviet) financing, which gives the wrong impression, I think. Some more depth:
Growing up and living here, Germany’s anti-nuclear sentiment is majorly home-grown. You don’t get the multi-million public demonstrations just on foreign-financed activists. You don’t get multiple German federal election won just on foreign-financed activists. Insinuating so disregards the local politics and societal sentiment of Germany from ca. the 70s onwards.
Germany’s anti-nuclear sentiment is based on multiple strands, in my experience:
* General “radiation” skepticism, amplified by literature including children’s literature and tv reporting, sometimes even by real scandals like the leukemia thing.
* The very real possibility of Germany automatically becoming a nuclear battlefield of hundreds nuclear tactical explosions in the Cold War. Both the Warsaw Pact and NATO planned going nuclear from the first day. (Nuclear weapons and power are of course different things, but ... well)
* The search of nuclear waste storage location (not just spent nuclear fuel but secondary waste, high and intermediate level waste) was absurdly missmanaged. And then there is a string of accidents at pilot waste storage facilities. In my opinion you can’t explain the 2011 decision on Fukushima alone without talking about the preceding Asse II scandal.
* And yes, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima turbocharged pre-existing sentiments.
That is not to say Russia (and the Soviet Union before) as petro-states don’t have an interest and don’t try to corrupt. They certainly do.
Given what we know, they seem to have targeted politicians [1], more with a Pro-Gas-message, less with an anti-nuclear or green-energy-message. Both would be dumb for someone who wants to sell fossil fuels [2]. It’s no surprise that they seem now to target AfD and BWS, the far right and left parties with a pro-fossil-fuel-message. But that's the same in all western democracies.
[1] Small nitpick about your source [0]: Waszczykowski is a member of PIS and former minister in Poland’s PIS government. PIS has made a habit out of targeting Germany for domestic populist sentiment and in intra-EU squabbles. I’d interpret the question partially in that light. Giving the timing of that question I’d suspect the somewhat distorted kernel of truth must be Schwesig and the Nordstream II foundation, but I’d hesitate calling Schwesig an anti-nuclear activist, more a somewhat corrupt or naive politician.
[2] Russian/Soviet Gas was never a replacement for nuclear power in Germany. The vast majority of Germany’s gas usage is residential or industrial not in power plants. Burning gas domestically in apartment/house boilers for heat or in industrial applications doesn’t profit from electric energy – because replacing all these boilers is a multi-generational infrastructure project. Instead nuclear in Germany’s power mix was slowly replaced by by green energy and biofuels:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...