.. after Fukushima. Trading one tail risk for another.
(Germany has oddly lagged in deploying renewables, though. Possibly due to lack of offshore sites, meaning that wind farms have to be deployed against the efforts of NIMBYs)
Which is not to say there's not also NIMBYism. There is in fact a ton of opposition to buildup of renewables from both conservative-leaning citizens and left/green-leaning advocacy groups.
We don't stop flying after planes get into an accident. We evaluate and improve our designs and controls
But with nuclear with go with knee-jerk reaction for some reason
The last German government before Merkel came to power, was a coalition between the Green party and the Social-Democrats (SPD), this government decided to phase-out nuclear power in Germany in favor of renewable energy by limiting the running time of existing nuclear power plants.
The next German government was a coalition between conservative CDU under Merkel and SPD, and the nuclear phase-out remained untouched.
But when Merkel won the federal elections a second time and was able to form a coalition with the Liberal-Democrats (FDP) replacing of the SPD as a coalition partner, who had voted in favor of the nuclear phase-out, they decided to cancel the nuclear phase-out.
This happened in the autumn of 2010 and was a controversial decision for the public opinion. When Fukushima happened half year later it was widely seen as a confirmation of the inherent risks of nuclear energy and thus the Green party’s energy politics, not because Germany is especially prone to Tsunamis, but because it showed that it's impossible to rule out and plan for every possible dangerous situation in advance, and that even a high-tech country like Japan, on a comparable technical level to Germany, was not able to stop the meltdowns.
Elections in federal states shortly after Fukushima resulted in a landslide loss for Merkel's CDU and big wins for the Green party, the CDU losing one of its stronghold states [1] it had before held constantly for 58 years.
As far as I remember Merkel foresaw the public reaction and almost immediately after Fukushima voiced out in favor of reversing the cancelation of the nuclear phase-out, but could only get a solid backing in her party, after the losses in the federal state elections.
[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/-fukushima-strahlt-bis-baden-wu...
That reason is propaganda. The anti-nuclear people use anything they can to whip people up into an irrational frenzy whenever anything happens, and it has worked pretty well.
It's not actually sparsely populated at all.
The statistical risks from nuclear actually causing a disaster are absolutely tiny in comparison, especially considering the upsides, but the Germans and Austrians want to be EU's nuclear doomers for shits and giggles just because Chernobyl and Fukushima happened, even though so many nuclear plants worldwide have run for decades without issue.
But sucking on the sweeet teat of Putin's gas for decades and burning it was the "greener" alternative for them instead.
