Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back
The past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Instead, activists championed what they regarded as safer, greener, and more accessible renewable alternatives like solar and wind, embracing their promise of greater self-sufficiency, community participation, and citizen empowerment (“energy democracy”).
This support for renewables was less about CO₂ and more aimed at resetting power relations (through decentralised, bottom-up generation rather than top-down production and distribution), protecting local ecosystems, and promoting peace in the context of the Cold War.
The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.
This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party—today the world’s most influential—which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats.
Indeed, the very book credited with coining the term Energiewende in 1980 was, significantly, titled Energie-Wende: Growth and Prosperity Without Oil and Uranium and published by a think tank founded by anti-nuclear activists.
That lasted until the 2011 Fukushima disaster, after which mass protests of 250,000 and a shock state election loss to the Greens forced that administration, too, to revert to the 2022 phaseout plan.
The original article contains 651 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
You see, it's so much safer for Germans that Germany has been slowly poisoning itself by burning coal for the last few decades breathing in radioactive nuclei from the combustion of ionized compounds in the coal. By slowly breathing in lethal doses of carcinogens, they've completely avoided a nuclear meltdown.
Obviously this was the safer route than a potential failure of a reactor. You know those things that are exceedingly governed or regulated and managed. Because Germany is such an active seismic zone with so many natural disasters that are constantly a present threat to its reactors.
Now tell me again about this oceanfront property in Colorado you have for sale.
But but but a different neighboring country with a completely different political and economic and oversight model had a problem because of wild corruption and utter ineptitude. Therefore we will have the exact same problem. There's no avoiding it! Shut down all the reactors! (/s)
The problem wasn't potential reactor failure but the non-existant space for nuclear waste
Nuclear waste isn't nearly as much of a problem as it has been made out to be. The danger from nuclear waste is due to its high energy levels. But, reactors exist that can be fueled with the waste products of older, less efficient reactors. They can "burn" high-level waste products, producing energy and low-level waste that is dangerous on the order of decades rather than millenia.
And meanwhile nobody talks about coal ash, what is toxic and needs a lot more space for storage.
And it's also radioactive, and its release is far less controlled than a nuclear plant.
There is no storage problem. You are just simply uninformed. . We can process about 95% of the fuel into usable energy. That remaining 5% would end up buried. We have the technology and materials to process it safely and entomb it in solid glass and then bury that glass a mile deep in the Earth. This is proven technology. We know for a fact that this would be a viable long-term storage solution as we have investigated naturally occurring reactors and found that their own fissile material that was encased in magma is still there multiple million years later while being in the middle of an active fault zone. The material naturally and safely decayed and did not spread or disperse through ground water contact in an unmanaged environment over millions of years. The only true obstacle is convincing luddites that. It can be done easily and with fully understood horizontal drilling technology pioneered in the 1950s for oil drilling.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disappearing-pod/the-worlds-only-natural-nuclear-reactor/#:~:text=In%20reality%2C%20the%20French%20had,French%20authorities'%20eyes%20was%20tiny.
The tldr bot summarized only page one of a two-page article. That summary is missing a lot of context.