[Findeton]

Renewable energy is unpredictable, thus you need a backup source of energy for when there's no wind, sunlight or rain. It's yet unfeasible to store large amounts of energy unfortunately so that means using either natural gas or coal, because you need to be able to rapidly increase/reduce/regulate the energy output. It's coal at the moment for Germany and that means more pollution and dirty politicians that don't care about the environment, just about votes. Actually nuclear power plants can nowadays also regulate their output fast enough, but they got rid of those.

[wongarsu]

Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine coal was on its way out due to purely economical factors: coal plants are more expensive to operate than natural gas plants.

Of course recent months changed that since a lot of our gas used to come from Russia. If we went all-in on nuclear we could reactivate (East) German uranium mines that were closed shortly after reunification. But (traditional) nuclear also loses on economic factors, on top of being politically untenable.

[iSnow]

Just to add: the German NPPs were not able to regulate output fast, b/c they were of an older generation.

[Moldoteck]

it's possible to store huge amounts of energy with hydro, but at that point nuclear is not that bad in terms of price and nr of people killed by nuclear vs hydro accidents, so again Germany fkd up

[simondotau]

Actually, the death toll from hydro is many orders of magnitude worse than nuclear. It's almost insulting to compare them. (And before anyone pipes up, you don't get to exclude Chinese hydro from the ledger, for the same reason we don't exclude Soviet Union nuclear.)