Germany in 2020 had a mix of 36.0% from fossil fuels (24.3% of the total from "clean" coal, 11.7% from "clean" gas), 12.6% from nuclear, and 51.4% renewables[2].
Sure, I am not happy that Germany continues to burn so much fossil fuel either, but suggesting that Germany is particularly bad because it doesn't do as much nuclear is just not based in reality.
PS: In absolute numbers, the US produced 774 TWh of electrical energy using coal in 2020, Germany produced 118 TWh. That's 2.35 TWh per million people for the US, 1.41 TWh per million people in Germany. Or expressed yet differently, the US produced 1.67x the energy from coal per capita than Germany.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
[2] https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
Keeping nuclear running and expanding it's role further could be used to replace fossil fuels while expanding renewables at the same time. In the long run, energy storage technology will improve, which will help overcome problem with unstable renewable sources, but I don't believe we will be there soon.
The answer to that could be burning things, along with better storage tech that you mentioned. Not necessarily fossil fuels, but biomass and gas (e.g. "cow farts"). Burning biomass, you can still stay neutral if done right, as the mass will use carbon when growing. Things like algae farming as a fast growing source of biomass may become important. With some additional tech you could filter out some carbon and other emissions and store what you filtered out, and have a negative emission balance considering the whole process.
Biomass and other renewables generally have the other positive aspect that research, development and installation is relatively cheap and quick compared to nuclear.
Another part of the solution surely will be to just use less energy, by investing in more efficient tech. Reducing energy consumption by merely 10% would essentially cover what nuclear in Germany produces now[0]. A lot of companies in Germany already started investing heavily into modernization to reduce their energy need, and this process is speeding up now. A lot of this effort is driven by public policy - from tax incentives to negative incentives in higher energy prices - but a lot is also driven by the realization of management that modernization efforts like this can massively drive down costs mid and long term while also ensuring the production facilities stay competitive with tech upgrades. Another way of policy incentives e.g. are the mandatory labeling of consumer goods in regard to energy consumption and efficiency, as consumers will use this information to buy stuff that's not only "better for the environment" than the competitor but also saves money on the electric bill. Right now, within the EU, such labeling is mostly for electric appliances, but it could be extended further to other areas like food or services, and could cover the entire life-cycle of a product including production and disposal, not just the time consumers operate it.
By the way, I am not generally opposed to nuclear, just opposed to nuclear how we do it now and did it in the past. For one, it's artificially made cheap by subsidies everywhere you look, and that artificially cheap price does not even include the additional costs of long term waste management. And then the plants are rather unsafe, not because they have to be, but because of policy failures. Things like building nuclear plants in regions prone to earthquakes and/or tsunamis, the French having to shut down a lot of their reactors every few summers because they'd be boiling their rivers if they didn't and of course incidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island (thank the Air Force for having an airbase nearby which lead to TMI being build more sturdy than usual thus probably avoiding a really bad outcome), Windscale, etc... all that does not inspire confidence in me that humans and in particular politicians can manage the technology. When Belgium discovers "micro cracks" in high pressure boilers in nuclear power plants, and then their politicians almost immediately declare the plants to be still safe - in a timeframe where they surely cannot have thoroughly evaluated the findings - then that's not great already, then when I consider some people want to build massive nuclear power plants in areas of the world with far less stable societies than Belgium, I want to facepalm.
And on top of that nuclear is not renewable. The fuel has to come from somewhere, which doesn't bode well for energy independence. Right now, a forth of uranium is mined by Kazatomprom a quasi-state-owned company in Kazakhstan, which Freedom House rates a "consolidated authoritarian regime". Being dependent on Russia for gas isn't great; being dependent on Kazakhstan for nuclear full isn't great either.
PS: I would agree that getting rid of (most) fossil fuel energy production is more important than getting rid of nuclear.
Third generation nuclear reactors in France do load following all year round, with great success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Pre...
>These reactors have the capability to regularly vary their output between 30–100% of rated power, to maneuver power up or down by 2–5%/minute during load following activities
And even the BWR can maneuver only at 10% per minute (60-100%).
So first, you cannot just shut them (nearly) off when you don't need them. You will have to run them at 30% at least essentially all the time. Not great if your goal is to use solar/wind as the primary mode of generation.
Then 2% to 5% per minute in changes is high latency compared to alternatives. If you need 10%-20% more NOW because there e.g. was an unscheduled break in a football (soccer) game and everybody got up, turned on the lights and the coffee maker and whatever then you're out of luck because the latency is too big to cover those additional 20% in the time you need them. 20% would take up to 10 minutes for nuclear to adjust, 2 minutes at least, realistically something like 5 minutes. And by the time it adjusts your grid will have broken down and everybody will be sitting in the dark.
Load-following with nuclear plants only works well enough if you have a pretty good idea of when the load is going to change in advance. Which in many cases historically you did, and you had non-nuclear fallbacks to compensate for when you were a little or even a lot off. You had a pretty good idea because you could estimate both the demand as it progresses during a day and the generation too. E.g. you knew what a "normal work day in November with this weather forecast (cloudy average temp 8°C, here is how temps will likely develop during the day), sunrise 07:07, sunset 16:22" looks like with enough historical detail from similar past days to plan for it. With solar and wind, you still know that about the demand side, but you can be a lot less sure about the generation side.
That's why you usually use gas (and historically coal) "peakers"[1]. They were and are in use for when your estimates were off, even if your base load comes from the best load-following nuclear. They can be maneuvered a lot faster with demand, and can be (almost) shut down when not needed. And what you need in a wind/solar world in particular is true peakers not base load plants with limited load following capabilities.
Does this clarify what I meant?
In contrast, the US seized civilian nuclear power plants after three mile island, fifty years ago.
Well, in 2002. Really long before that, because nobody was allowed to build new ones in ages already. But 2002 formalized the ban into law. Then came Merkel and reversed the shortened service life times for existing reactors. And then in 2011 after Fukushima, she re-reverse it. (No idea where you got the 2015 from).
Germany still has running reactors, by the way. We did not just shut them all down, as you say. We shut down the very oldest ones still in operation, then shut down more and more in the time frame we originally planned to shut them down before Merkel's initial reversal and kept doing that for the last decade. The six remaining facilities will be gone by end of next year, tho. They will have been in production for at least 33 years each, at that point.
So we had a decade to get our shit together and replace the nuclear with something else sustainable. We fell short, but not that short.
>with no real alternatives
There are alternatives, real ones, proven working ones. A mix of less consumption, driven by more efficient tech, wind/solar/water as the work horse and biomass to compensate for "bad" weather and some storage for the worst case. We could be emission-neutral and nuclear-free now, while not significantly more expensive (we'd have had costs regardless of what we built, building new nuclear plants isn't free either, and we would have needed new ones if we went the nuclear route instead). If there had been the political will to actually do so in the Merkel government... And that doesn't even take into account the European grid and how European nations could bridge temporarily increased demand/temporarily lower productions of individual members.
Germany invested heavily into renewables at first, but this got more slow-paced recently, again thanks to some of Merkel's people, in particular Peter Altmaier who was "Secretary of the Economy" and considered his job to be a fulfillment center for old garde lobbyist needs.
Regardless, over half the electric energy production is now from renewables. So I guess, there is some light at the end of the tunnel.
But the problem with the German nuclear plants is that they are old, old builds with old tech, and way past their expiration dates, even with the constant upgrades they received over the years. Every inspection in the last decade raised serious "wtf" moments (and inspections are rather lax and even more so before Fukushima). Nuclear can be reasonably safe if you take the time and money to make it so and don't build them in earthquake alley, but these particular ones stopped being safe a decade or more ago.
So you either have to spend serious coin (billions) to modernize the still existing ones, all the while you take them off grid for extended periods of time, or you have to spend serious coin (billions) to build new ones, which will take you like a decade before they go into production anyway. Nuclear is too expensive, frankly. Renewables today are already cheaper, if you also account for all direct, indirect and hidden subsidies each receives.
New or upgraded nuclear is not seen favorable by most (according to polls) Germans, me included. I'd rather see that money go to installing renewables capacity instead, and investing into renewables tech research.
But sure, if we actually had new-ish and safe reactors that could be safely operated for another 10 or 20 or whatever years, I'd personally say: go for it, keep them running for that time instead of coal and gas plants.
Germany is obviously unable to produce sufficient renewable energy. It's far too inelastic.
It's Germanys fault the electricity is so expensive.
Billions quickly become very abstract things.
As part of its stimulus package, Germany intends to expand the role of green hydrogen to help end the country's reliance on coal. The government agreed on a plan on how to spend the €9 billion earmarked for the project.The plan, which could see hydrogen eventually make up about 10% of the country's total electricity capacity, was unveiled as part of a €130 billion ($147 billion) stimulus to help reboot the economy during the coronavirus pandemic. The hydrogen commitment is part of some €40 billion earmarked for climate-related spending.
Physicists like power as much if not more than politicians.
However, she was hardly in a position where she would have lost office. The next federal election was 2 years away, and nuclear, while at the time an important topic that dominated the media of course, was hardly the only topic. Her party might have suffered a somewhat in the short term - in state elections for example - but it's rather unlikely her party would have "lost" the next federal election and she her office.
She also never expressed a strong pro-nuclear stance while Chancellor (and as far as I know not before that either), and certainly did not justify such a stance with her scientific background. While in office as Chancellor, she called nuclear a "bridge technology" that should be kept around a while longer until Germany can switch over to renewables at its own pace.
The decision to partly reverse the nuclear exit - and the exit was decided years before and was generally seen favorably by Germans - by delaying when nuclear power plants had to go offline - she never planned to build new plants, for example - was less of a declaration for nuclear and had more too do with appeasing the nuclear lobby, and the industry lobby which feared higher energy costs. And it wasn't a decision she was really making all by herself, there was a lot of pressure from within the elites of her own party (most of which do not hold any degrees in physics, just saying), aside from all the lobby pressure.
She might have thought and/or still may think of nuclear as favorable, be it because she has a PhD in what was called theoretical chemistry - tho it is more physics than chemistry what she did and concerned nuclear decay reactions/processes - or be it because years before she became chancellor she was Federal Minister for the Environment which includes "nuclear security and oversight", or be it just because any everybody kinda has an opinion. But regardless, she didn't express a very pro nuclear opinion, as you suggest.
Unless she declares herself now that she is not running for office anymore, we will not really know what she truly thinks about nuclear and why. Not that her opinion on the matter is particularly more important than the opinion of others...
New nuclear power plants were banned altogether. The agreement became law in 2002 (Atomgesetz). Angela Merkel, objected to the agreement, calling it a “destruction of national property” that would be revoked if the CDU came to power.
To be fair I only looked for 30 seconds and it is hardly a smoking gun to call not building nuclear power a destruction of national property as being 'pro nuclear'.
Merkel, according to your Spiegel reference said:
>Die Begrenzung der Restlaufzeit der deutschen Atomkraftwerke käme einer Vernichtung von volkswirtschaftlichem Vermögen gleich.
Which translates to
>Limiting the remaining service life of German nuclear power plants would be equal to destroying national economic assets.
So her concern was about shutting down existing nuclear power plants earlier than initially planned. She kept true to her word, and reversed that, only to re-reverse herself after Fukushima.
That's however not necessarily a very pro-nuclear stance, more a pro-"let them continue printing money with their existing plants because they have been good friends to the CDU in the past" stance.
What she didn't say however is that she favored investing in more nuclear power generation and nuclear technology in general.
An ambiguous statement in this context :)
A physicist that likes power.
If that's her calculation, she needs to redo it.
Knowing what's best is way different from personal political goals though.
North/northwest Europe got pretty damn scared by the Chernobyl fallout (in practice many kinds of wild game was banned for sale for many years afterwards in some countries and we measured everything that could possibly be contaminated) and that scare runs deep for many still today.
(This is why you have the irony that the "green parties" in Europe are so damn anti-nuclear despite at least some of them realizing that you can't properly fight global warming without nuclear power)
Well, that's technically incorrect - you can still fight it, you just have to renounce some energy use (at worst).
When the decision was put in place it was around 2011/12 iirc, back then the climate crisis debate was not nearly as big as it is today.
Also, burning coal is not the main target for the future of energy generation in Germany. The coal plants are just a side effect of the transition to a primarily renewable energy generation. Unfortunately due to coal energy companies having very close ties with the the ruling CDU Party, it's not surprising to see them get special treatment.