> Is there something impassably / chronically dangerous about nuclear power or is it just public fear that pushes us away from it?

Oil funding of anti-nuclear FUD. Thats it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

First of all, the new German government adjusted the phase-out of coal power to be as close as possible to 2030. 2038 was more a bad compromise by the previous government.

And yes, nuclear power can be dangerous as Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown. Those dangers could probably be addressed by new reactors, but those are very expensive. The big problem are the existing old reactors. They are not as safe and require a lot of maintenance. A few years ago, Germany only had 4 nuclear power plants running through the whole winter as 4 others were down for longer maintenance. Then there is the problem where to plut all the nuclear waste, Germany doesn't have a long-term storage facility (though search started in the 80ies).

I don't really understand why the Chernobyl or Fukushima disasters should be considered evidence of nuclear power being dangerous.

The Chernobyl plant had severe design deficiencies, and the operators were apparently not properly informed about the dangers of operating the plant the way they did at the moment. The Soviet Union was not exactly the epitome of environmental responsibility. Lots of things went wrong.

The Fukushima disaster was precipitated by a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami that pretty much leveled the entire area and stopped the emergency generators. The backup generators also failed. Pretty much everything that could go wrong went wrong.

People were displaced, and the radiation leakage should be considered significant environmental damage.

The number of people displaced was tens of thousands. Although few deaths have been confirmed, if you're pessimistic, you might be able to come up with a larger figure.

However, the Fukushima disaster was a once-per-several-decades event. Coal causes hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths every year through direct air pollution, not to mention the indirect effects from climate change. That's not a rare accident. That's business as usual.

Yes, nuclear power has risks, and sometimes something goes wrong. Lots of work has been done to minimize the risks, as should be. But it's entirely emotion-driven and intellectually untenable to consider nuclear to be a major risk, comparatively. The damage caused by accidents that apparently should happen at most once per several decades in well-managed (or even less well managed) plants is still a fraction of the damage that coal-fired or other fossil-fueled plants cause every year as part of their normal operation.

If anything, the lesson to be learned from the Fukushima disaster should be: "consider carefully whether to build nuclear plants in an area where major earthquakes and tsunamis are statistically to be expected; design and manage plants responsibly; other than that, it's probably fine".

Nuclear waste is still be a problem but it's hard to imagine it being anywhere near the magnitude of the problems that burning fossil fuels causes.

However even those old reactors are several magnitudes safer per MWh than coal, over 20 000 people die each in Europe due pollution emitted from burning coal that as much as several Chernobyl's each year (even if we use the most pessimistic estimates).

The old reactors were intentionally unfunded for years to make them so expensive that it looked better to decommission them.

> underfunded ... expensive

You're at least going to have to provide some numbers if you want that conspiracy theory to be taken seriously.

For me it's not an engineering problem but a human one. Since the waste from a single power plant during one year of operation is enough to kill hundreds of millions of people we have to ensure no madmen get their hands on the waste for thousands of years after we have spent all the watt-hours the waste has produced.

We're leaving that problem to hundreds of generations to come, who will get no benefit from it, just so we can have cheap energy today. That seems unfair. It's equivalent to Julius Caesar building the aqueducts using some technology that France would still have to pay for today.

I think investing in energy storage - hydrogen, ammonia, pumped storage to mention a few - would be vastly better. Solar and wind already generate more electricity in Germany than nuclear ever did, if it could be stored during the proverbial cloudy days, the problem is solved permanently and in a much better way than with nuclear power plants.

"waste from a single power plant during one year of operation is enough to kill hundreds of millions of people"

You know what else can kill millions of people? Pesticides, and anyone can buy them.

Bhopal disaster killed thousands of people and left 500,000 with debilitating injuries when a pesticide factory operated by Union Carbide Limited had a leak due to lack of maintenance. The CEO is wanted man in India, but has fled to the US and theybare refusing to extradite.

> Since the waste from a single power plant during one year of operation is enough to kill hundreds of millions of people

Chances of that happening is minuscule and if left uncheck, global warming will kill more than that.

> who will get no benefit from it, just so we can have cheap energy today

Or they figure out better ways to use it that don’t involve killing people.

> proverbial cloudy days

According to this website[0], Germany had about half a years worth of sunny days in 2020. 50% is a long shot from proverbial and according to tfa it’s being bridged by other EU nations and coal.

[0] https://ru-geld.de/en/country/weather-and-climate/sunshine.h...

The water in a small lake is enough to drown a billion people.

These horror fantasies mean nothing.

From a political point of view re-introducing nuclear in Germany would be suicide for anyone attempting it.

It‘s just not a politically viable option. That’s the reality of it, irregardless of anything else.

Is the real reason perhaps that those coal-fired generators are running 32-bit Unix?

Not only is it solvable, it's basically been solved for years.

https://youtu.be/c1QmB5bW_WQ is aimed at the lay audience.

The issue is that radiation is a silent killer, so it is extremely easy people with vested interests in (say) fossil fuels to exploit our inability to access risk. Coal hurts people every single day, but it doesn't have the same poetic weight as radiation so this is lost on the general public.

Nuclear power is expensive, however. Dealing with the waste is also an issue but firstly, forcing us to deal with the waste seriously is potentially not such a bad thing (assuming we need nuclear in the long run, which unless storage comes a very long way we presumably will), and secondly this is the kind of question where a government with a lot of political capital needs to just find some deserted land to build a long term solution.

It's mostly expensive due to artificial reasons. If we invested the effort we have in renewables into nuclear, the price, availability and reliability would increase in a similar fashion.