>So if you want to actually treat climate change as an important problem, why would you shutdown non-emitting source of power that you already have?

In Germany's case because they saw what happened in Japan and made an adjustment to their projected risk assessments and decided it wasnt worthwhile.

It may have been the wrong decision, especially given the difficulty in measuring the risks involved but it wasnt an irrational decision.

Nuclear power has a small chance of going wrong but when it does it goes very wrong.

And when it did, Japan had to fire up all of its coal and natural gas.