Germany accelerated the development of renewable energy. That was the goal. Nuclear had to go first. Coal is following. The Germany time scale to rebuild its electricity landscape goes over many decades.
By investing many many billions into renewables, instead of investing them into nuclear, Germany helped to kickstart the renewable energy industry, which will over a long period of time be much more successful replacing fossil fuels, than nuclear ever did or will do.
Just building a nuclear power plant here and there will not solve the CO2 problem. Scaling renewable to make it cheap and able for large scale distributed deployment is the way forward.
Anyway, the argument is that instead of panic-closing nuclear power plants requiring more gas and coal plants being run in their place, they could have instead ran them as long as possible while building up the renewables.
Germany was not 'panic closing' nuclear. The nuclear exit was hotly debated for decades and decided long before Fukushima.
Germany was doing a lot more than just closing 'some' of its nuclear reactors and setting a timeline for closing the rest. Germany also removed the centralized monopoly business model around the big nuclear&coal-based electricity companies. The electricity production was in the hand of four large companies who had divided Germany into four monopolistic regions. These large companies had zero intention investing into renewable, since that already owned all the market and were free of competition. The government opened up the market and reduced the influence of the companies.
Germany has in sum now not more coal power than in had then. It has less coal capacity.
Nobody here that I can see are saying not to invest in renewables. But the extremist anti-science, anti-nuclear fear-mongering is as harmful to society as anti-vaxxer propaganda. It's causing real harm and real lives lost.
That's completely ignoring the history. The nuclear industry was started top down by the German government and the big utilities. The WHOLE electricity market (production and distribution) was in the hand of only a tiny few monopolistic companies, with deep ties into politics.
The anti-nuclear movement started as a grassroots movement against this corrupt systems, which forced their energy politics upon the country.
None of these former monopolistic companies had ever invested in renewable energy or had any interest in it. They were sitting on multi-billion Deutsche Mark businesses which were like printing money. The risks for the nuclear technology was even nicely taken up by the state.
Breaking up these monopolistic markets against their will and against the will of many well-earning politicians which after their political career were moving into these big utilities took roughly three decades.
Thus breaking up the market, getting rid of these huge obstacles to a new distributed / decentralized energy landscape was one of the key achievements.
> extremist anti-science, anti-nuclear fear-mongering
The anti-nuclear movement is not anti-science. The nuclear industry has time over time shown its incompetence. Fukushima has exposed how it worked in Japan: the reactor fleet had multiple technical problems (technical designs, systemic underestimated risks, too expensive to fix problems, ...). Many of these problems were technical and many were political problems. The height of a Anti-Tsunami wall is depending on both a risk calculation and a cost problem. These are not independent in a corrupt industry&politics. Companies and regulation authorities will not cause costs (which were needed to upgrade the site) and thus the risk calculations will be down in a way, that the company will not carry extreme costs, which might have had negative effects on its profitability. The tsunami risk will be calculated as so unlikely that the existing installation looked safe - even though Japan is known for strong earth quakes.
Also: the dismantling of a nuclear installation on an Earth Quake fault line is both a problem of determining the risk and a cost problem. In the end the costs and the hope, that nothing will happen, were the reason that no actions were taken. A single earth quake showed for multiple nuclear installations that the risk calculations were wrong. Thus we have the effect that in Japan the majority of nuclear power plants is still offline and the technical problem of reactors with their meltdown is still for a few decades unsolved.
It's not anti-science to break up corrupt and dis-functional energy monopolies.
Running Fukushima as it was designed (and paid for) was 'anti-science' and politically corrupt. Just before the Fukushima accident happened, there were safety inspections and they found nothing of these problems, which later killed the Fukushima site. After the tsunami there were multiple events which early were described as completely unlikely: loss of outside power, loss of emergency power, reactor meltdowns, hydrogen explosions, heating-up spent fuel pools, completely useless emergency plans, need for additional cooling via pumping sea-water damaging the buildings, fear of additional earthquakes hitting structurally weak buildings, radioactive water exiting the building, ...
The whole scale of the Fukushima ebents exposed the anti-science, design-to-cost philosophy of the nuclear industry and its political proponents.
That is, of course, presuming civilization does no collapse because of climate change. Fingers crossed!
The 2020 National People's Congress reportedly supported aiming for 6-8 new reactors a year, which would double the existing deployment in 6-8 years, and the aim is to not just increase the number of reactors but doing so at a pace that will increase the overall proportion of electricity from nuclear.
It’s just frustrating to see energy programs fail due to public opinion shift brought on by random perfectly-timed coincidence since there’s not really anything to blame or at fault. Like how The China Syndrome talks about “an area the size of Pennsylvania” and came out exactly twelve days before the actual Three Mile Island accident lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Deta...
Like: 'On August 26, 2010, a 3.3-tonne "In‐Vessel Transfer Machine" fell into the reactor vessel when being removed after a scheduled fuel replacement operation.'
Plus the Fukushima earthquake (and the following tsunami) showed that a lot of Nuclear installations in Japan were not safe against heavy earthquakes.
