Hacker News Reader

Comment by Qdulf | Hacker News Reader

This is historical revisionism. Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is rooted in the peace movement and environmentalism, with the majority of public discourse starting in the 1970s.

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.

View on HN

It's kind of all of the above. State and non-state actors have leveraged pretty much every movement there is to their own ends: civil rights, anti-nuclear, pro-nuclear, anti-Iranian government sentiment, pro-Iranian government sentiment, even jazz tours in Europe which were assisted by US intelligence orgs in the 20th century.

It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.

Pro nuclear comes from American conservatives. The same people who claim climate change is a hoax. The same people who hate green energy solutions.

Pro-nuclear comes from scientifically informed progressives, definitely not conservatives.

Nuclear IS a green energy solution.

There's a modern argument that nuclear is greener than oil, gas, and even hydro and everything else. That's pretty new though (and certainly not a no-brainer).

Again. Show us some peer reviewed studies for your claims. A simple search will show you that, according to dozens or hundreds of peer reviewed studies, research and real world examples, a 100% renewable energy solution is feasible.

We don't know what to what fraction that peace movement ran on being propped up by KGB. Those things are not mutually exclusive, genuine protest and getting propped up by a foreign power just for destabilization and giggles.

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.

Revisionism it is not. It was Schröder’s administration that shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants.

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.

>It was Schröder’s administration that shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants.

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.

> That's not even true, it was Merkel's administration.

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.

The alternative is only renewables. And we don’t have to stop all industries for it.

Show us some evidence based and peer reviewed studies for your claims. Repeating the same old and scientifically unproved claims doesn’t help.

Why don’t you show your claims to be true?

Indeed. Also Asse was a political decision, against the scientist who found better places to put the waste, but Asse II was close to east Germany. And West German politicians wanted to give a big "screw you" to East Germany, because they also did something similar.

I'm still against nuclear in Germany. I'm fine with Finland doing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com