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by jacquesm 1436 days ago
What you can imagine isn't all that relevant though, once the decision to mothball an installation of this size is made it isn't as though you decide to run your car for another year. This is a massive infrastructure project, with all kind of regulatory hoops they need to jump through to operate safely, including training of employees, gear certification and so on. Starting things back up again could well be a multi-year project.
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Germany's GDP is 4 trillion dollars, its government budget is over 400 billion. Refurbing 3 nuke plants is nothing with those resources. The entire manhattan project that pioneered nuclear power only cost about 50 billion in today's money, but they aren't even starting from scratch like that. If they wanted it to happen I can't see any financial or technical blocker.
Sure, but why bother? These 3 plants would only add a tiny bit to the German electricty production. They really won't be missed. And they cannot be used to replace gas, as gas power plants are used for quick responses, not base load.
But it isn't a problem of money. Sure we could pay for it. But that doesn't make things with a 1.5year lead-time appear in 3 weeks. You can buy _more_ but you can't buy _faster_.

So sure, in a year or two we can get these reactors back online. In 10 or 15 years we can even get new ones. But these time scales don't help in the next winter and on those time scales we can come up with solutions that are even better and not at risk at making eating shrooms you find in the forest killing you..

Why do you assume you know better than experts?
Because those particular experts were on Russian payroll.
Source please.
That article is about the Stasi infiltrating the German Green Party.

> Indeed, far from being an indictment of Stasi infiltration of the Greens, Gieseke and Bahr's study is a portrait of a largely failed attempt by the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) to co-opt the nascent left-wing party on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

How did a few Stasi cooperators the 1980s Green Party translate into experts recommending Germany's nuclear power plants be shut down in the late 2010s?