I'm pro-nuclear as well, but understand that for many decades the "smart" thing to do was to oppose it. I wouldn't expect a musical artist to have a more nuanced opinion than most of their contemporaries.
I grew up in the 90s and didn't even fully understand what it was, but I remember the fear around it. I remember people in Ireland worrying about Sellafield nuclear power plant in the UK and talking about things like wind direction if there was an incident. And the government posting out iodine tablets to homes.
Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany was entirely manufactured; it was the product of Gerhard Schröder and similar robots who enriched themselves on Russian oil and gas.
Ironically, it is also where the so-called Green Party began.
The debate has always been about what to do with the waste. Our government misrepresented the "Asse" as a solved solution for a final repository, even though it was always only a test repository for low and intermediate-level radioactive waste. But hubris or corruption led to one scandal after another, forever tainting the discussion about nuclear waste in Germany.
Everything that follows is just a reaction.
My counterclaim to your unsubstantiated take: Pro-nuclear sentiment is what has been manufactured. Anti-nuclear is grassroots.
I'm still against nuclear in Germany. I'm fine with Finland doing it.
It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.
Nuclear IS a green energy solution.
Just like that Red Army Faction group whose name in hindsight was much closer to the truth than anyone really assumed at the time. At least at some point it clearly was a KGB operation (visits to a certain Dresden office are documented, and yes, guess who was also stationed in Dresden at the time), likely not from the start but quickly co-opted. KGB, as in the service that was built on the experience of how Germany solved their eastern front in WWI through organizing passage from Zurich for a certain dissident.
Yes, those movements were genuine. But they were also directed to some extent. The fictional Tischbier character in Deutschland 83 comes somewhat close to illustrating that ambiguity.
Where is the peace movement and so-called environmentalism rooted?
Pro-nuclear is pro-environment.
The alternatives are fossil fuels and renewables, which are both extremely anti-environment: water power require large artificial reservoirs and create flood risks, wind power kills/drives away wildlife and is almost useless without efficient large—scale energy storage and other methods of power generation, while solar also requires storage and other power generation but also requires mining of rare earth metals.
Of course we could just stop all of our industries to save power. No more production, no more consumption, no more pollution.
Show us some evidence based and peer reviewed studies for your claims. Repeating the same old and scientifically unproved claims doesn’t help.
That's not even true, it was Merkel's administration. Under Schröder, the plan for the phase-out was formulated and set in motion, only to be stopped and then restarted by Merkel.
The modern anti-nuclear movement in Germany got started in the 1970's by the TMI accident and a book named "Der Atom-Staat". Chornobyl of course put the nails into the coffin.
Nope, that is actually not true.
> Under Schröder, the plan for the phase-out was formulated and set in motion,
It wasn't just "formulated" it was passed into law in 2002 by the red-green coalition led by Schröder.
It was never stopped/rescinded.
https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2012/38640342_...
> only to be stopped and then restarted by Merkel.
That is also not the case. Merkel never actually stopped the phase-out, her administration just extended the running times. The phase-out always remained in place, and for example to prohibition against building new nuclear plants was never touched.
So no.
It had nothing to do with for example chernobyl, where children were not allowed to be outside on the playground for weeks and where you had to pay attention where your food came from and it also has nothing to do that you still have to have the meat of wild boars checked and be careful with eating mushrooms. Totally unrelated.
Seriously, the anti nuclear crowd might have not been rational from the start and still is dogmatic, but it formed exactly, because people did not trust the manufactured state's sentiment of nuclear will provide cheap and clean energy without risk.
Because it is not a clean energy, it is incredibly dirty and dangerous. And those dangers can be handled, if companies and regulators act responsible. But people simply do not trust that they are. And they do have some data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accid...
As further proof of how well that works, Fukushima arrived in 2011: https://www.scribd.com/document/819988755/Examining-Regulato...
Combine that with political decision to put waste into Asse II. Not because it was a good place, just screw with East Germany.
Big demonstration like Brokdorf where around 81. Schroeder begun being a Ministerpräsident in 1990, and 1998 Bundeskanzler.
And naturally the radio waste is fine as long as we store it into other countries.
That’s a catastrophic failure rate under 0.5 percent. Sure, the effects of a failure spread widely and can be a hazard for a long time, but personally I would want to see the same risk-averse sentiment applied to production and use of perfluorinated compounds and fossil fuels, since both of those can spread much farther and cause more of a hazard.
The cherry on top: coal power plants spread significant amounts of radionuclides into the environment.
Check out some videos by Chornobyl Family and you’ll see the state of the environment there.
If we’re talking risk aversion, we can address both the major certain risk of climate change and the lesser but still valid risks of nuclear while saving a ton of money and probably getting results quickly. The reason so much fossil fuel money goes into pushing nuclear power is that it guarantees fossil fuel usage continues unchecked for decades before possibly going down, and we don’t have decades any more.
Batteries are one solution, but the power storage requirements far surpass the world’s capacity for battery production, and come with the same caveats: rare earth metals, which need mining. Mining is a huge source of air pollution, as mining equipment is usually diesel powered, and far worse for the environment due to pollution of natural surface and ground water reservoirs.
Uranium mines have the same issues for sure, the scale is just very different.
Many forget that while there is plenty of uranium on Earth, most of it occurs in very low concentrations. The lower the concentration, the higher the CO₂ emissions for the entire uranium chain from the mine to the fuel rod.
Meanwhile, renewable energies receive free fuel from the sun. They are already recyclable today and, with intelligent local and intercontinental grids, will also require fewer batteries for storage.
Have a look at CATL’s sodium-ion batteries, they do not use anything expensive, rare, or particularly damaging to extract from the environment.
Second, power is so cheap with renewables that storage of over-production makes sense. Some of that can be things like pumped water systems but batteries are coming online by the hundreds of gigawatt-hour now and sodium isn’t exactly a rare earth mineral so that’s going to accelerate even more following market forces:
https://electrek.co/2025/09/25/us-first-grid-scale-sodium-io...
https://newmobility.news/en/2026/04/29/catl-turns-sodium-ion...
Again, this is so much cheaper that it makes nuclear even less competitive and it’s online so much faster that you’re basically weighing the gamble that storage which is already competitive won’t get substantially cheaper over multiple decades.
Heavily disagree. A ”green” power contract typically has at least double the price of a generic one.
Having enemies the population is afraid of is good for politicians and they'll take any enemies they can find, and they'll do so indiscriminately regardless of the real nuance of the issues.
Immigrants, abortion, this religion or that, rock music, jazz music, alcohol, marijuana, global warming, windmills, books... just whatever as hard as they can regardless of if it's reasonable or not.
There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s. The world was quite a different place back then. The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking, and Communism was much more expansionary.
Just a small correction, but the anti-vax arguments are very conservative, not liberal.
I wish this was true. How many right wing political parties support policies that improve the natural environment? Doing that is the domain of left wing parties, but I’d love to know of any exceptions.
The US EPA was created by Richard Nixon, for example.
Hang on, are we talking about liberal or leftist now?
Because a lot of these hoax "wellness" movements are conservative. Distrusting science and things you don't understand is a conservative mindset.
Do you have examples? People like the Luddites weren't distrusting of technology, they were distrusting of the owners using it to depress wages.
They may be self described liberal, but their actions certainly aren't.
Anti-Vax people are/were seen the leftist idiots who were anti-capitalist, anti-corpo, anti-the fascist govt, who would rather have died of preventable diseases than perpetuate the medical industry and its capitalist schemes trying to keep us sick to sell drugs and also ban weed.
It's so funny to watch the political sides swap and the doublethink take all of a few days to propogate.
Since antivax is now popular on the right, it has grown into a much larger proportion of the populace. It doesn't help that they now have positions in government.
As a kid I was an anarcho-communist punk rocker but I had a friend who was a christian and his parents were scammy, MLM, right-wing conservative types(think Rush Limbaugh but loonier) who distrusted the government and lied on their taxes. It was obvious how the wings of the political spectrum almost touch at times.
Paranoia and distrust of institutions, mystical thinking, adherence to alternative truth structures.. these are apolitical just as mental illness is also apolitical.
Yes, but I think if you asked which country was more likely to "push the button" in the 50s-70s it would have been the US, and the extent to which the US continued invasions after the collapse of the USSR kind of vindicates that.
> The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking
I don't think this was ever true except in the least useful measure, raw headcount of conscripts.
In 2026 this is decidedly a more conservative stance. They installed RFK Jr., who in addition to Wakefield, is the antivax guy. MAHA specifically (can’t believe they actually stuck with that acronym) is overwhelmingly Republican dominated/supported.
The big problem is having one country be able to do it without deterrents and with impunity. MAD is a good thing, if anyone will have those things at all.
The main natural predator of Americans is other Americans.
It'd be nice to put jingoism aside for a change.
My girlfriends first older brother was one of those babies, the second one survived but is disfigured and needs serious care to live. I had three such kids in my first class at school, four different ones in my second and a sizeable number of parents whose kids didn't survive childbirth. Not being allowed to eat certain mushrooms or digging in the woods was the easier part.
So this may be a bit more tangible for some people than for others.
Ok, maybe not that very last part.