Long story short, phasing out nuclear energy has been a long term goal and has broad support in Germany.
Chronologically was the other way around, and her "Our party now consider nuclear harmful" stance didn't change the outcome post-Fukushima. But it's typical Merkel of the time, changing her tune to whatever's politically advantageous.
Didn't you say the same as OP, with a lot more words?
But I agree that the devastation of huge areas of land is a problem, but let's also keep in mind that the reactors that blew up where early generations reactors. More modern design do not present those risks [1]. Judging nuclear energy based on 1960s design is like judging aviation based on the safety records of 1930s planes.
With "early generation reactors" you mean all the ones that exist. The whole "next generation reactor" / "generation 4 reactor" thing is at this point nothing more than vague plans for what could be.
Chernobyl, of course, was a horrific design that didn't even have a containment dome. Nobody builds reactors like that anymore.
And GenIV is a little more than vague plans; e.g. Terrestrial Energy's molten salt reactor has already gotten through the hardest part of Canada's licensing process, which puts them on track for a demo reactor by 2025 or so.
If your country is the size of the USA and nobody bothers if you let it disappear somewhere in the desert. Which is not the case in Germany and most of the countries. People just don't want to have a nuclear waste dump near by and Germany needs to spend a hell lot of money to clean up the last mine they used as a dump already.
The tech is dead and the lobby won't be able to ride that current artificial hype for ever...
In particular Fukushima case, the evacuation caused more harm than fallout would do, so, in retrospective, it would be better to not evacuate.
There is no "huge areas devastated and unlivable for generations".
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/17/hitachi-set...
> 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
[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.
Till and Chang argue in their book about the IFR that if we start building IFR style plants for production usage it's entirely possible that costs drop to about LWR levels.
So far fast breeders have been expensive, but that's largely because they've all been one-off designs largely for R&D purposes without much effort to reduce costs.
For reprocessing, their argument is that electrorefining (pyroprocessing) would be much cheaper than PUREX. To the point that the lower fuel acquisition cost and cheaper waste disposal could make it roughly comparable to once-through LWR costs, even with relatively cheap uranium.
Such a shame IFR was shut down.. sigh
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.
Politicians bowing to the wishes of an ill-informed public.
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.
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.