[fakwandi_priv]

>Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early.

Why doesn't the article explain why the Germans are retiring their plants? I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's. From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy but I feel when convincing other people of this you need to portray the good and the bad.

[cm2187]

Pretty much because Merkel decided so in the days following Fukushima. Not exactly the result of long term strategy.

[hesk]

That's too simplistic. Retiring nuclear power plants has been the long term goal of the German anti-nuclear movement since the 70s. They were an important faction in the founding of the Green Party. When the Green party came into power in 1998 in a coalition government, they passed a law to retire all nuclear power plants by restricting the remaining energy output they could produce. BTW, this was done in consensus with the German nuclear industry. In 2009, a free-market/conservative coalition came into power again and they reversed course. Then Fukushima happened, a couple hundred thousand people demonstrated against nuclear power in Germany, a Green-led government won the elections in a historically conservative state, and Andrea Merkel changed her opinion.

Long story short, phasing out nuclear energy has been a long term goal and has broad support in Germany.

[detaro]

You are aware that the "long-term strategy" had been to phase out nuclear, with laws and contracts laying out a gradual shutdown in place, and Merkels government slowed that process down against majority opinion in the population before Fukushima? The shallow "Merkel did it after Fukushima" meme is a mockery of what has been a long democratic process that Merkels government tried to renege on, with nuclear power having been a contested topic for decades.

[hugi]

Fukushima was an excellent demonstration of what can happen. You devastate huge areas of land and make them unlivable for generations. This is especially applicable to the United States that has proven entirely unable to handle it's own nuclear waste and just accumulates it at the sites where it's generated, waiting for disaster to happen.

[stcredzero]

Pretty much just going by feels. Not exactly good governance.

[catdog]

Also the beginning of this statement is not really true:

> Germany, which went all-in for renewables…

This might have been the case more than a decade ago with the green party being part of the government but the political climate changed. Angela Merkel talks a lot about saving the climate but actual policy is the opposite slowing down the switch to renewable energy as much as possible.

> From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy

Not really,

* It's expensive as hell, it just might seem cheap because a lot of the cost is offloaded to the tax payer in the long run

* Even western first world countries operate nuclear power plants which have known safety issues (look at e.g. France or Belgium) so even if we could technically do it safely, our societies are not politically mature enough to implement it.

* Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster so it's not even as clean as often advertised

[acidburnNSA]

> Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster

[citation needed]. It was in the 1950s, for sure, before we knew that you should ventilate the radon. Today a lot of it is done in ways that's much cleaner than mining for resources for coal, fracking, or heavy metals for millions upon millions of battery banks, wind turbines, and solar panels.

Remember E=MC2 is the key excitement about nuclear energy. There are 2 million times more Joules in a kg of uranium than in a kg of coal/gas/diesel/lithium. Thus you don't have to mine all that much of it to power the planet.

In fact, with breeder reactors and reprocessing (super expensive, but that's another story), you could power the entire US for a few hundred years off the depleted uranium sitting in the yard of an enrichment plant in Kentucky.

[bjourne]

Most of Germany's plants were built in the 1970s and were reaching end of life dates anyway. They probably would have been decommissioned in the early 2020s but Merkel accelerated the process due to the Fukushima disaster.

[loeg]

> Why doesn't the article explain why the Germans are retiring their plants?

It does, although it doesn't draw the connection directly.

> I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's.

The con's (both for Germany, and the US) are (quotes below from the article):

> irrational dread among the public and many activists

> ...

> people estimate risk according to how readily anecdotes like well-publicized nuclear accidents pop into mind.

For Germany in particular:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...

Tl;dr, Germany politic interest in nuclear phase-out began around 2000 as misdirected "green" activism and was escalated by irrational public fears in response to Fukushima in 2011.

[mpweiher]

> why the Germans are retiring their plants

Politicians bowing to the wishes of an ill-informed public.

[lispm]

There was a decades long discussion about nuclear energy in Germany. You can bet that the public was much better informed about nuclear, than the politicians and the nuclear industry liked.

There were a bunch of failed nuclear projects like the pebble bed reactor, the fast breeder or the storage sites. Watching them made the decision to get out of that type of industry much easier. Germany had the same level of corrupt nuclear industry, which is known from Japan and which has been exposed there.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

Nobody really believes science that goes against their deep settled beliefs.