> Germany literally shut down working reactors...

They were EOL, I'm not sure what you expected them to do with them? I don't really care about whatever pro/anti nuclear stance you have, I think it's pointless to even discuss in the German context because that ship sailed years ago.

Prolong their lifetime like many countries constantly do? There are literally reactors from the 50s in operation, reactor life can be increased with maintenance and security improvements.

The shutdown was planned 3 years ago. The reactors were prepared for the shutdowns, maintenance was cancelled and also no new radioactive material was sourced for them. So, it was not easily possible to just revert the decision and just keep those reactors running. Even getting them back to a state, where they could be kept running longer would have taken several years.

More like 22 years: New nuclear power plants were banned altogether. The agreement became law in 2002 (Atomgesetz) https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-ge...

And yet it wasn't replaced by coal as that is getting phased out too.

They also brought their coal phase out date forward by a decade, which seems like progress.

There's coal, gas and nuclear for the base load. Nuclear went away and gas got too expensive. What replaced it if not coal?

You tell me, here's the statistics for electricity generation from fossil fuels https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...