Heck, as long as it was properly guarded, you could store the waste in my backyard shed without any health issues arising.

I do not think relying so much on nuclear energy was a bad move but it should have been a transitional thing (to renewable energy, fusion, anything else?). And it requires good forward thinking, commitment and the kind of leader we have not had for decades.

Finally, the EPR looks more and more like a big mistake. Smaller designs might have been more successful and offered more agility in time of crisis.

They're like the kids in high school who decided they were avowed communists, except now all grown up.

The continual leaking of nuclear waste into the ground water at the Asse II underground nuclear waste storage site is a huge issue.

And so, already in '98, the Energiewende was started.

In the early 2000s Merkel tried to roll back the Energiewende, but was forced to roll back the rolling back when Fukushima happened, and people realized we had plants of the same construction type, where continually the emergency generators failed, and everyone said "nothing wrong, even if the generators fail, it can never go up".

German nuclear controls are just as much of a joke as nuclear controls in Japan or the US, and in most countries, they’re even worse.

One nuclear plant in Germany has bribed regulators for years to just sign it off, despite it violating regulations. Then there’s the plant in Belgium, where construction workers drilled through the containment vessel to screw a holder for a fire extinguisher on it.

Holes stayed open for many years.

Nuclear is a nice concept in theory, but in any capitalistic society, it can not work, because greed will end up with companies trying to save money, and if bribes are cheaper than following the laws, they will do that. If lobbying is cheaper, they’ll do that. If they can just leave the country and can’t be held liable, they’ll just do that.

Why do you think regulations around coal generation are any easier to enforce than regulations around nuclear generation?

You can talk about possibilities all you want, but the fact is that as they are done coal waste is a lot more dangerous. So it's weird to put so much emphasis on closing nuclear plants first.

Filter all the pollutants out, and use Compressed Carbon Storage for the CO2. We already are enforcing the first on all existing plants, and working on the second.

But long-term, renewables are the only solution.

Also, how do you store the pollutants, and why doesn't that technique work for nuclear waste? I'm guessing that storing the pollutants consists of putting it in good, strong containers, which works fine for nuclear waste too. It's not perfect, but it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it's mercury or uranium leaking.

For instance, wind power: http://i.imgur.com/xHyOoc9.jpg

This picture was taken just prior to these two engineers jumping to their deaths rather than being burnt alive. I assume the turbine spontaneously catching fire is not an intentional design feature, but rather the result of inadequate quality control during manufacturing?

There were no deaths directly attributable to radiation exposure (although 300 Tepco workers were exposed to above lifetime legal limit radiation). WHO estimated life time risk of thyroid cancer for infants in the immediate area increased by 0.5 per cent, relying on the linear no threshold hypothesis (an untested hypothesis that the UN has recently backed away from).

More generally, the IPCC calculated nuclear fission to be the second safest form of power generation in human morbidity and mortality terms end to end, mining to waste disposal (the first being hydro electric). The stupidity of the German decision makes me want to scream.

And most German plants are like that.

Then add the fact that German inspections are a corrupt business regarding nuclear plants, and that the nuclear waste storage was a huge disaster polluting tap water for a large area, and you can see where the problems come from.

One of our largest nuclear waste storages, and it’s all leaking into the ground water.

At any rate, shutting down all German nuke plants because of something like this is akin to shutting down all coal mines because someone held a BBQ and accidentally started a fire.

It was Angela Merkel's decision. She's a physicist.

[0]http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595235...

[1]https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics

[2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

[3]http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/as-u-s-shutte...

And all the while we are the only sane people in our own eyes.

In 2015, the total power generation in Germany was 559 TWh. Renewables amount to about 121 TWh, i.e. about 22%. [0]

Newbuild house prices have increased by 40% in the last ten years

That sounds like a lot. From what I can find, construction prices have increased by about 20% since 2005 -- that goes for virtually all kinds of construction, including road construction[1][2]. Must be all the heat exchangers in those new roads... I'm not sure if that figure is corrected for overall inflation, it doesn't appear to be (cumulative inflation in Germany since 2005 is about 15%[3]).

[0] https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_de.htm [1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/Preise/B... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baupreisindex#/media/File:Baup... [3] http://www.zinsen-berechnen.de/inflationsrechner.php

http://m.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article156130737/Energie...

Primary energy is 3704 TWh[0], so 3% jives with the numbers I gave (so you were off by a factor of 3). 27% of that is heating, 39% transportation. The key to reducing those is gains in efficiency, ie. things like insulation, combined heat and power, renewable heat on the one hand, more efficient cars and more public transportation on the other hand.

[0] https://www.bmwi.de/BMWi/Redaktion/PDF/E/energiestatistiken-...

This is so wrong I don't know if you're pushing some sort of agenda or just trolling.

Read the facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

It was a, if not the major topic in the first federal election I was allowed to vote in.