Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19007493

Deciding to turn off all nuclear power plants within a few years as a response to the Fukushima accident was probably the biggest mistake the German government made in the last decade, and one of the reasons we're reliant on coal so much right now. The decision was purely emotional as well, as unfortunately much of the environmental politics here is. It's sad that we lost our position as one of the leading countries in Europe regarding renewable engergy (baring smaller Skandinavian countries with lots of natural energy resources) and are now a laggard that's reliant on brown coal for our energy needs.

Addendum: I'm not against turning off nuclear power plants (I think we should eventually), I just don't agree with the time frame we chose for this. Letting plants run for a few more years wouldn't significantly increase cumulated accident risk and would have a significant effect on our CO2 emissions.

Germany's coal and nuclear power generation never were as fungible as this perennial argument (at least on HN) makes it out to be.

Coal power has been slow to phase out not because the power is needed, but because the coal industry is important, especially in some regions already suffering from the shifting economic fortune of heavy manufacturing. It being the initial core of german industrialisation, it also has an outsized social relevancy as a marker of identity among the labor class.

But for these reasons, Germany would have replaced all coal with renewable energy, French nuclear power, or natural gas generation one or two decades ago. That's still an emission source, but far less so than coal.

The coal industry just employs 20.000 people in Germany according to their own statistics (https://www.braunkohle.de/4-0-Zahlen-und-Fakten.html), of which two third will retire soon anyway, so it's hardly a critical industry I'd say. Politicians had no problem shutting down the black coal production either and it seems that didn't affect much the "identity of the labor class" in the affected regions (at least not mine as I'm from such a region with both of my grandfathers working in coal mines).

What we should have done is to really push renewable energy much sooner and in a more systematic way, then we could mostly be off nuclear and coal energy sources by now. The "Energiewende" politics of the Green party / SPD e.g. involving - among other things - large-scale subsidies on private photovoltaics plants wasn't really a viable strategy (IMHO) and more a way to hand good investment opportunities to upper middle-class / upper-class households (in the early days of solar subsidies people could earn more than 10 % interest rate, guaranteed over 10 years or longer).

This is the same problem California faced. We shut down all of our nuclear plants (over a longer period of time) and we ended up relying more on dirty power. Luckily green initiatives have been on the rise with extended geothermal, wind and solar usage.

> Deciding to turn off all nuclear power plants within a few years as a response to the Fukushima accident

The end of nuclear was decided and agreed long before that. Fukushima just made it clear to the remaining sceptic conservative party that that decision was right.

Why couldn’t something like Fukushima or worse happen to Germany’s nuclear plants?

Anything's possible. But statistically speaking, we're looking at a loss less total environmental damage from the few nuclear incidents that have happened vs. the damage caused by tons and tons of carbon and toxins being spewed by coal plants.

I like to think of it like car crashes vs. plane crashes. Plane crashes are much more publicized, and definitely cause more death/damage per occurrence than a car crash. But because there's so few of them, planes are still much safer overall than cars.

Of course it could happen here in Germany as well, still I don't understand how an accident caused by two extreme environmental catastrophes (really strong earthquake + record-setting tsunami) changes the accident risk for nuclear power plants in Europe. Also, turning off our nuclear power plants didn't make us much safer, as our neighbors have plenty of them just near our border, some of which (Tihange, Cattenom), are much older and unsafer than the plants we turn off here.

Not saying that it's a bad decision to turn off nuclear power plants, just saying the decision should be based on science not emotion.

Don't blame the quake and tsunami. Its water did take out the generators needed for the coolants, the plant was wide open for such an accident. NAIIC found the accident to be forseeable and that TEPCO failed to meet basic safety requirements. TEPCO even had two internal studies on the risk of Tsunamis and how to defend against them but management ignored those warnings. If those warnings aren't enough. Japan's coast is full of physical markers from past Tsunamis, indicating the top of those waves and where the safe ground begins. https://99percentinvisible.org/article/tsunami-stones-ancien...

That, however, needs to be part of the risk calculation as well, in my opinion. Even when there's enough technological solutions to make something like nuclear power sufficiently safe, you can still count on human greed or ineptitude to screw things up.

Tihange is the perfect demonstration that humanity can not handle the responsabilities that come with nuclear power generation. The chief of staff of the ministry responsible for extending the operations on this disaster plant just went through the revolving door for a plush 'job' at the plant's owner. The minister was not amused as he broke the unwritten rule to wait to cash out till after the General election.

The problem with telling people they need to be "more scientific and less emotional" when dealing with fear or threats, is that it doesn't work.

If they knew how to be more logical, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place. They don't. And just saying you "should" is not enough. It doesn't enable them to be more logical.

Communication that produces better outcomes requires to put the focus on why the threat isn't a threat and STOP. There is no need to tell people, beyond that they are illogical in the way they are handling fear. Good communicators, with the skill to reduce threat perception of everyone in the room do it all the time. And they produce better outcomes.

Why couldn’t something with an impact of Fukushima or worse happen in any other industrial plant? I.e. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppau_explosion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

I don't know anything about the design of Germany's reactors, but the Fukushima disaster was caused by a "zipper" effect of one easily preventable failure leading to the next.

For example, the ducts that vented hydrogen overpressure vented into the interior of the reactor building rather than outside. This lead to the explosions.

Because we don’t build nuclear power plants directly at the coast in a region prone to earthquakes and tsunamis.

Geography.

There are no tsunamis in Germany.

Historians disagree https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/forscher-warnt-vor...

There are no “real” earthquakes too.

There are real earthquakes in the Netherlands. Are you sure?

In the last 1000 years, there have been only three earthquakes in Germany that were magnitude 6 to 6.5. (1356, 1756 and 1911).

That once-in-200-years magnitude 6.5 earthquake is 400x less intense than the 2011 Japan earthquake. And yes, without a sea there is no tsunami risk.

Really? I would think they'd be incredibly destructive, if they ground liquified...

Fukushima was an extremely bad design in an extremely bad place, overseen by an incredibly mixed interest oversight agency.

France, Germany, and probably even the USA have much better cards to play. Heck, even China doesn’t trust itself that much in its nuclear power ambitions because of the huge cost corruption would bring.

France has Cattenom, a spectacularly bad nuclear reactor they conveniently built right at their eastern border (in a region with predominantly west winds).

If you mean this one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattenom_Nuclear_Power_Plant), under incidents, the only fatal accident has been a fall onto a hard floor.

That feels like the ethical thing to do. If you are to build nuclear reactors, at least own the fallout.

West winds (Wikipedia tells me the English term is "Westerlies") blows towards the east.

First of all, I'd like to point out that the whole nuclear energy was pushed a lot by politics in the 1950s. Without money from the public purse no sane company would have gone for this technology.

Japan is just as technologically advanced as Germany, yet one of the nuclear plants, as predicted by Kraftwerk (the band), blew and fucked up the whole northern Pacific. Germany has had its technological disaster, for example Eschede, so don't think its powers plants to be 100% safe.

We still don't have a long-term storage solution for the nuclear waste produced by the power plants, and don't forget about waste from decomissioning the actual buildings, that's not the stuff you want to recycle for a road. If a wind turbine is decomissioned, you simply strip it, melt it and make a better one.

Building a new nuclear power plant now is betting against a huge leap in battery technology. If that leap happens it's bye-bye for fossil fuels.

> fucked up the whole northern Pacific

What now? The death toll from the Fukushima Daiichi failure is: up to 1.

> We still don't have a long-term storage solution for the nuclear waste produced by the power plants

Yes, we do. Put it in the side of a mountain. Nuclear waste has always been a political problem, not a technical one. The US already has a site picked, Yucca Mountain, and only NIMBYism has gotten in the way.

> Nuclear waste has always been a political problem,

Actually all energy production has/creates 'political problems'. One has to deal with those, too. Otherwise claimed technical solutions will fail in the real world.

> not a technical one.

I don't believe that for a second. This is the overly optimistic view of technocrats or the industry.

Don't forget the people who died because of the evacuation.

You know that production of cement produces CO2, yes?

Every single Windmill needs a massive foundation. Its not like you could put them into the ground like a toothpick. Here are some facts from a windfarming project which i've randomly chosen:

[1] https://www.forconstructionpros.com/concrete/article/1088605...

On average, each of these below-ground support systems used 60 truckloads of concrete (750 cubic yards)

Lafarge also supplied 20,000 tons of Type I cement for soil stabilization of approximately 44 miles of roads,...

I don't think it differs that much from any other.

Do you think that has [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_value ?

> First of all, I'd like to point out that the whole nuclear energy was pushed a lot by politics in the 1950s.

No. If anything, that has set back nuclear tech for a century, as the designs funded were designed for weapons manufacturing first, energy second. Nuclear is very convenient (very infrequent fuel shipments) and powerful. Which is why well-funded navies use it extensively. The US Navy, for instance, has a perfect track record, under much harsher conditions.

> We still don't have a long-term storage solution for the nuclear waste produced by the power plants

We do, actually. Breeder reactors. If it is energetic enough to pose a serious threat, it's energetic enough for fuel. Once we have extracted most of the useful energy, the waste is much less dangerous and can be dealt the same way we deal with other hazardous materials.

> If a wind turbine is decomissioned, you simply strip it, melt it and make a better one.

I don't think it is as simple as that. Source for this claim? Re-purposing for other applications I can buy

> and don't forget about waste from decomissioning the actual buildings

It's basically the reactor vessel, which is not that big. The entire plant is not radioactive, after all. In fact, it is LESS radioactive than a comparable coal power plant, which can't even be built nearby, as it would trip all sorts of alarms in the nuclear power plant.

> Japan is just as technologically advanced as Germany, yet one of the nuclear plants, as predicted by Kraftwerk (the band), blew and fucked up the whole northern Pacific.

It was a decades old design that had a design flaw which was documented AND IGNORED. And yet, it survived a major Earthquake AND a Tsunami. If that's not safe I don't know what is. It would have been fine if not for more fuckups, like incompatible power so generator trucks couldn't be connected, even though they were dispatched. It's worth it to point out that Fukushima's reactor shut down as designed. As did other nuclear power plants, which experienced no issues at all.

> Building a new nuclear power plant now is betting against a huge leap in battery technology. If that leap happens it's bye-bye for fossil fuels.

Look, I'm all for renewables. But we are not there yet for baseline power, which a few (modern!) power plants could easily provide, supplemented by solar, wind, geothermal. Powering things like an aluminum power plant with renewables is going to be a tough task.

> so don't think its powers plants to be 100% safe.

Nothing is 100% safe. Solar panel installation kills more people per year than all nuclear accidents ever, combined. And most nuclear power plants running today are ancient designs, because it's difficult to get permits to build more, due to public perception. But you wouldn't use the safety record for a car built in 1960 to claim that cars nowadays are inherently unsafe, would you? Why use the same argument for nuclear power plants? We need to replace the old junk with modern power plants.

> Which is why well-funded navies use it extensively. The US Navy, for instance, has a perfect track record, under much harsher conditions.

The Russian navy does have reactors, too. They are creating environmental catastrophes...

> We do, actually. Breeder reactors.

Breeder reactors are even more dangerous than our typical reactors. There have been only few built and those were extremely costly and problematic (for example those in russia).

> It was a decades old design that had a design flaw which was documented AND IGNORED.

They had many design&engineering flaws. Yet the japanese thought they were perfectly save. The large earthquake exposed several severe design flaws.

> And yet, it survived a major Earthquake AND a Tsunami

It didn't.

After the earth quake basically all japanese reactors were shutting down. After several years of downtime only a few are running. some will never be running again.

Basically it's a total loss of several dozen reactors (and other nuclear installation) and a damage going into zillions. But you claim they 'survived'.

The "Japanese" are a lot of people. TEPCO management decided it's okay, but some other Japanese were who raised the issue.

Anyway, debating how a nuclear catastrophe fared is always a nice thing, because we know it was a catastrophe.

The fossil fuel catastrophe is still ongoing, yet people just ignore it, because... well, because who knows why.

There were people evacuated because mine fires, because refinery fires, because power plant fires. But that's not as big news as Fukushima.

We have the harrowingly beautiful Chernobyl series, but we also know that the total toll on human lives were/are still lower than the fossil powered equivalent.

Anyway. Dangerous is relative. Just as environment catastrophe. (The Russian Navy does what it does under thousands of meters of water, hardly a serious health risk.)

And any new reactors, breeders or not, are by default safer than anything else we have currently running, coal or not. Because we have improved standards and technology.

Finally, the whole problem of cost is that it neglects the cost of health harm. Factor that in and it becomes irrelevant what kind of reactor, because all are better than other forms of power generation.

> but some other Japanese were who raised the issue.

Only few. Most of the politicians and industry had no complaints. Protest movements were largely not existing.

The general corruption in the nuclear&political&industrial complex is known.

> And any new reactors, breeders or not, are by default safer than anything else we have currently running, coal or not. Because we have improved standards and technology.

That's not the case. Many principal problems of breeders are not solved. For example the need for very problematic fuel processing plants.

> Finally, the whole problem of cost is that it neglects the cost of health harm. Factor that in and it becomes irrelevant what kind of reactor, because all are better than other forms of power generation.

I don't think that's the case. See the extreme costs of nuclear power plants in the UK.

By 2038. That's incompatible with the Paris agreement.

As a reaction to ongoing protests the government has started a so-called Climate Cabinet, that's working on plans to reduce GHG emissions sufficiently to limit warming to below 2°. They're supposed to present their results in about a month.

Incidentally, Friday's For Future is calling for a global climate strike on September 20th. Probably there is a demo in your city too. Join if you can.

We (the people of Munich) tried to get our local coal plant to close in 2022. We voted last year and the outcome was essentially ignored. Now it will shut down in 2030. Too little, too late. And Munich could have afforded it easily.

But to replace it with what? I assume not with solar and wind, as that would mean that you won't have electricity on windstill nights.

Solar, wind, storage and an improved grid. It's always windy somewhere.

Even modern natural gas plants would have just half the emissions.

> That's incompatible with the Paris agreement

Honest question: is this still seen, internationally, as a serious agreement?

Great news, but 19 years. Man.

Things take time, I get that. But we're getting close to human lifespans there.

The world in the year 2000 was such a different place in so many ways. It's difficult to imagine what 2038 looks like.

Nineteen years ago, top end computing hardware was something like a Pentium III. Windows XP had not yet been released.

That article is from January 2019 and it's not correct. There are no plans in Germany to shut down coal power plants completely.

Oh stop and for a moment think at the effort to rebuild all our homes to highly energy efficient standards. Replace all conventional heating systems with heat pumps. Redesign cities to remove sprawl and car-centered lifestyles in favor of public transport, disseminated centers. Reorganize consumer supply chain around home delivery and less wasteful routes.

I see plenty plenty GDP coming from all this work, perhaps the only problem is that it wouldn’t land in the pockets of the current lobbyist crop

Finally. The coal plants in germany were pretty unfortunate considering how much EU cares about the environments (even if some people don’t agree with it that much)

The EU as such doesn't care that much about coal. For example, Poland, Germany's neighboring country, has a high percentage of it's power come from coal, and no short-term plans to change that/no alternative energy source. The flip side of Germany abandoning coal is that energy has to be imported, and energy prices are among the highest (or actually the highest) in Europe.

More Coal stats: https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c... PDF

Germany best coal reserves have depleted; 20 years is a long time.

On the other part of the world -> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/climate/coal-adani-india-...

> JAN. 26, 2019

So now will Germany depend on Russian gas, coal power imported from Poland and nuclear power imported from France? Can an industrial nation depend on imported electricity? For me this looks like pipe dream. I can guarantee, after this insanity Germany will have most expensive electricity in EU (after much richer Denmark as it is now): https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Edit: typos

Well, if you refuse to look at the details, everything looks like a pipe dream.

In reality, Germany still exports electricity to "nuclear powered" France.

The plan to stop coal plants does not count on higher energy imports, particularly not in the form of electricity.

> In reality, Germany still exports electricity to "nuclear powered" France.

France imports very cheap electricity from Germany when wind/solar works very well and exports very expensive electricity when wind/solar works badly. It's a pretty much balanced trade between the two in terms of electricity but it's far from balanced in monetary terms, Germany pays the non-stability of their grid at a high price.

> France imports very cheap electricity from Germany when wind/solar works very well

or when nuclear doesn't deliver enough electricity. Like in cold winters (high demand) or hot summers (low production).

There's no such problems in France right now. There's much lower consumption in the summer, it's the time planned for maintenance, producing more would be useless and I don't recall any issue with the winter load.

> it's the time planned for maintenance

also unplanned maintenance, overheating rivers, drying rivers, ...

Google is your friend:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nucle...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/30/heatwave-may-for...

https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-power-supply/germany-...

https://energytransition.org/2017/01/france-cant-meet-its-ow...

> also unplanned maintenance, overheating rivers, drying rivers, ...

Those are a very small number of reactors and not affecting in anyway the grid, it's totally planned, you do get clickbait article every year though. By the way, they are only being stopped by regulation as well, not any technical problem.

Additionally, renewables had more severe issues at the moment from the heatwaves, above 25 degrees, solar panel outputs drops a lot and generally there's not much wind either during this kind of weather to compensate.

https://twitter.com/TristanKamin/status/1153624647243620355, Here is the electricity production in France for this summer, there's definitely one source of electricity working better than the others during heatwave...

I don't know why people keep bringing this up, it's an non-issue and it's never been one.

> Those are a very small number of reactors and not affecting in anyway the grid, it's totally planned, you do get clickbait article every year though. By the way, they are only being stopped by regulation as well, not any technical problem.

What do you think regulation is for?

> Additionally, renewables had more severe issues at the moment from the heatwaves, above 25 degrees, solar panel outputs drops a lot and generally there's not much wind either during this kind of weather to compensate.

We were breaking a lot of records with renewable energy here in Germany lately...

> What do you think regulation is for?

Those regulations are there to save fishes, they're not related to nuclear plants, coal plants also have the same issue. That's to save wildlife. If you don't care about fishes, the plant technically works.

Since there's a need for maintenance anyway and less demand, that's not worth killing the fishes with warmer water.

A nuclear power plant does not work 'technically', if it harms the environment.

I mean we're going in circles here, it's not needed to start those plants in summer anyway so...

Sure, you can always import German electricity.

The reason those plants are not needed (as I said multiple times they are not) is because you have 50% share of electricity heating. And you obviously don't need any heating in summer...

France imported energy from Germany long before renewables became a thing.

Also: The French state heavily subsidizes nuclear energy.

Every electricity source is heavily subsidized anyway, I don't think there's any exception.

I think that there is an exception if a nation wants to have a nuclear industry complement and partially amortize the production of nuclear weapon.

The subsidies in France led to the absurd situation that electric heating is much more prevalent than anywhere else, even though renewable electricity is supposedly more heavily subsidized.

That's not an absurd situation, that's making France way ahead of other European countries for the carbon footprint of heating, it would be nice if other countries could catch up.

And renewables were not even a thing at that time anyways.

Currently the situation in France is that the nuclear energy is made artificially more expensive to fund renewables with the goal of increasing the renewable share but even with that market distortion, renewables are still failing to compete.

In reality, heating with natural gas is more carbon efficient currently, than using most commonly available electricity mixes. Cheaper, in any case, than heating with nuclear electricity anywhere but in France. Of course you can make a case where nuclear power is cheaper, if you disregard any of the risks, political problems, and clean-up costs associated with it. Particularly in France, all those costs are covered (or mostly ignored) by the government. The private energy companies certainly can't pay it.

France still has to import electricity from coal power, so the carbon footprint isn't that great in any case. And you can't claim that slightly raising electricity costs offset the dozens of billions that went into the French nuclear sector in any way.

> Particularly in France, all those costs are covered (or mostly ignored) by the government.

That's an argument constantly repeated by the anti-nuclear activists, it's of course totally false, there's extensive (100+ pages) reports every few years on all the external and primary costs.

> France still has to import electricity from coal power, so the carbon footprint isn't that great in any case. And you can't claim that slightly raising electricity costs offset the dozens of billions that went into the French nuclear sector in any way.

That's not true in any way but if you are concerned about that, you can check https://www.electricitymap.org for other EU countries (this takes into account import as well). Most of them (except Scandinavia) are doing 6x to 10x worse than France at the moment and have a very long way to catch up.

Can you substantiate that claim?

So how you will balance the grid? You can export excess energy to whenever you want, but what happens when renewables are inactive? Russian gas?..

That's a typical objection of people who haven't studied the details.

The engineers who are behind such proposals and plans actually now that sun and wind energy isn't constantly available. That's way there is a mix of energy sources and technologies, including, yes, Russian gas. But also American Liquified Natural Gas. Oil. Electricity storage systems. And maybe even new nuclear reactors in the future, once a few nagging problems have been figured out.

There are great engineers for sure in Germany. Not everybody left for Valley or Switzerland. But having 2nd most expensive electricity in Europe is a crystal clear result of bad engineering.

Or, you know, we could build wind turbines and solar panels and reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels.

Germany already does that quite a lot (>30% of their production in average come from renewable), but there is a distribution issue. The north generates a lot of electricity using a combination of windmills and solar panel, but the south doesn’t for some reasons (I guess the environment isn’t adapted? Not sure why). And there are a lot of problems (not necessarily technical) to bring the electricity from the north to the south. As far as I understood, the government need to get the authorization from each land owner on the way to be able to install new cables and infrastructure, and that takes crazy amount of time. Nobody want to have this going through their property.

Germany just lost 20000 jobs in wind power last year because they essentially stopped all construction.

Wow, that’s a massive blow. Do you have a source for this?

Only in German, http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/19/116/1911619.pdf

Germany imports most of its natural resources, because we don’t have them anyway. That‘s why we rely so much on exporting products.

Renewable is not stable, what do they add to offset this risk, gas powered plants?

EU grids are interconnected. They will buy electricity from neighbors.

The neighbors generally have very similar wind/solar patterns so that's not going to help much. Currently when that happens, they just buy electricity from France at a high price like the other neighbors.

This is potentially good news for Europe, as I am sure Germany will force other countries to follow suit. Most likely using a diktat given via the EU commission.

In 2016, nuclear + coal made up 30% of their energy production (including exported energy) so that’s a pretty big chunk to replace in 20 years.

https://energytransition.org/2017/01/renewable-energy-produc...

Your replaced your whole comment and now the replies don‘t make sense anymore.

Whoops I replaced it in 2 minutes and thought I got away with it.

Yes.

Easily.

Well, not easily. It's pretty expensive to build all the wind turbines and solar panels and storage. And insulate homes, and replace oil heating with heat pumps and replace ICE cars with electric cars.

It's just that we have no other choice.

Why is nuclear energy never mentioned as a remedy to global warming? It doesn’t have any of the problems renewables have, is safe enough in its current incarnation and research is looking promising enough that one can reasonably expect the waste problem to get taken care of properly. Plus we won’t run out of fuel for like 1000 years.

Because it's too late to start building nuclear plants. We need to be carbon neutral in twenty, at most thirty years, if we start a linear reduction to zero NOW. Building a nuclear plant takes at least a decade. When it's done we already used up all our remaining carbon budget.

And that's for the current speed at which nuclear plants are build. If we wanted to build an order of magnitude more, we'd first have to train nuclear engineers to staff them. And scale up production facilities for pressure vessels.

Germany had a 30-year long public discussion on nuclear. There is an overwhelming majority who rejects it. And for good reasons, too. If there is no other way to achieve our goals, we may have that discussion again, but I doubt it.

What were the good reasons? Is Germany at risk of tsunamis or sub-Soviet-level engineering incompetence?

Do they fear statistics, which point out that nuclear is one of the safest forms of power per kilowatt, most comparable to wind and commercial (non-rooftop) solar?

Nobody knows where to put the waste, failures are catastrophic if rare and they have turned out not to be that rare if enough plants are deployed. As I said, it was a long discussion. Nobody wants to reopen it and I‘ll leave it at that.

As opposed to coal, oil, gas etc where we know where to put the waste—into our atmosphere. That's great. Let's shut down the nuclear and keep the coal going until renewables step up.

But for a few paranoid NIMBY protesters, everyone knows where to put nuclear waste—send it to breeder reactors.

Also, catastrophic nuclear failures are not deadly. Radiation from Fukushima has killed 1 person. And despite being the most absurd scenario possible to contemplate, radiation from Chernobyl killed between 30-100 people.

In 2011, there were 163 wind turbine accidents in England that killed 14 people. Wind kills more people than nuclear, and nuclear makes orders of magnitude more electricity.

You are joking if the radiation hasn't affected generations in those places.

Well, Germany invested a zillion into a pebble-based thorium high-temperature reactor.

Technological marvel.

It didn't work reliable enough and was too costly. Closed down by the industry relatively silently...

There is a site for nuclear waste. It does not work as expected. It needs to be cleaned for a few zillions...

Nuclear is dead in Germany. Nobody wants it, it's too costly, it lacks critical solutions (like fuel reprocessing and nuclear waste storage), which also nobody wants to host.

Actually, not for good reasons. For bad reasons.

Because when you give people two options:

1. With 99% probability all remaining humans will die a slow, painful death in 60 years.

2. With 1% probability you will have to move homes to not get cancer in 20 years.

A decisive majority of the voting people will choose option 1.

No, but it can be powered by importing coal and nuclear power from its neighbours.

Edit: An unpopular fact it seems but Germany imports over half its power https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany