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Comment by alpineman | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful. How could someone be against renewable energy? It's incredible, and we should be investing a lot more into it.

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If your paycheck depends on fossils, then you will wholeheartedly sabotage renewables as much as you can.

How indeed. Yet Germany got rid of its nuclear energy capacity a few years ago.

Signed into law in 2002, with the last reactor going offline in 2023. Depending on how you count we got rid of it a quarter-century ago.

Not the best decision, and a major reason why Germany uses so much coal and gas today. But outside some special circumstances nuclear isn't cost competitive with other renewables anymore, so for future plans it doesn't really matter

Germany uses less coal and gas today then in the past and it has been a straight decline both before and after the nuclear phase out [0]. They are currently committed to phasing it out by 2038. We can argue that it may have gotten faster if nuclear was still there but that’s a counter factual that would have to be proved.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

Chernobyl is almost conspiracy worthy with how much money it ultimately directed to Russian oil and gas coffers.

~58.5% of Germany electricity came from renewables in 2025, the last of the fossil generation will be pushed out with more renewables and batteries. They deploy ~2GW/month of solar PV.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/12mo/monthly

As other comments mentioned, in a more perfect world, they would've run those nuclear generators longer to avoid emissions. Alas, we live in an imperfect world. Keeping grinding towards net zero.

Is nuclear energy considered renewable?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292341

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