People from the anglosphere often seem to think that Russian and now Qatari gas is a replacement for the nuclear power, which is rather wrong: The vast majority of Germany's natural gas usage is residential for heating and in industry.
Gas is hard to replace ad hoc with electricity because you'd have to replace boilers in millions of homes and apartments, a multi-decade infrastructure project.
> Gas is hard to replace ad hoc with electricity because you'd have to replace boilers in millions of homes and apartments, a multi-decade infrastructure project
The best time to start a multi-decade infrastructure project was multiple decades ago. The second best time is now.
Boilers need replacing anyways, so this could have been very gracefully over time.
I have no doubt that the German public is full of true believers. That does not exclude Soviet/Russian influence. I don’t have any solid evidence but the Soviets/Russians had several motives, means and opportunities to spread anti-nuclear influence.
Not only would a (West) Germany with abundant cheap nuclear power have energy to compete industrially, they would have the ability to enrich plutonium which might lead to the development of a home-grown nuclear strike capacity within a short range from Moscow. That is, assuming such an idea was politically possible.
All energy is fungible. Certainly the cost of switching is not free, but the time to begin doing that was decades ago.
Russians and companies interested in perpetuating the dependency on fossil fuels.
E.g. Greenpeace Germany had weirdly close links to Gazprom, and was even at one point selling natural gas as "green" and "renewable". Greenpeace Belgium was lobbying for the closing of nuclear power plants and replacing them with gas ones. I find it hard to believe that even Greenpeace could be that blind without external help.
I think the timeline matters here. While the effect of CO2 emission on global warming are known (to some extent) for more than a century already, in the eighties and early nineties, it was not a chief concern of the general populace in Europe, while the (perceived or actual) dangers of nuclear energy certainly was.
I went to primary school (1-4 grade) in the mid 1990s in a small post-communist country. Fossil fuel burning producing emissions bad for your health and harming the planet was something that was a part of the curriculum in like the second or third grade (I remember it vividly because the teacher asked why are trolleybuses better than bused, I was sure it was something to do with the engine, but didn't want to risk embarrassing myself; I was right, and I told myself I should be more confident in myself).
If it managed to get into the curriculum of a small post-communist country in the mid-1990s, "green" organisations should have been aware of the impacts of emissions and CO2. And for what it's worth, Greenpeace up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine made it infeasible, was pushing for closing of actively running and already amortised nuclear power plants and replacing them with gas.
It's hilariously ironic how one of the most iconic green movements actually ended up causing more damage to the planet on the planetary scale than helping. Sucks for us all that have to live with it though, just because a bunch of blind idiots couldn't be bothered to think.
I don't know how much gas they actually sold at the time, but some major oil/gas pipelines were built during the 1960s, 1970s and early 80s. So the intention was clearly there.
That's interesting. Even if the volume was low, perhaps the Russians were nevertheless interested in sowing dissent in the German public opinion. In particular, making sure the energy sector is always dependent on some foreign source.
That plus well developed civilian nuclear power gives the means to developing atomic bombs, and Russia has every reason to fear a nuclear-armed Germany
I doubt that this was a major concern as US nuclear weapons have been stationed in Germany since 1960. They remain under US control but the German army is trained to use them in the event of a war. And of course Soviet nuclear weapons used to be stationed in East Germany during the cold war. So for practical purposes Germany was already nuclear-armed.
But who knows. This was 15 years after the end of WW2. It wouldn't be too surprising if there had been lingering fears in Russia about what Germany might be up to outside of NATO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331523
People from the anglosphere often seem to think that Russian and now Qatari gas is a replacement for the nuclear power, which is rather wrong: The vast majority of Germany's natural gas usage is residential for heating and in industry.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...
Gas is hard to replace ad hoc with electricity because you'd have to replace boilers in millions of homes and apartments, a multi-decade infrastructure project.