[marcinzm]

So which boogey man controlled their uranium access and made them shut down all their plants?

[rhatsf]

If you judge by U.S. Russian uranium imports until well into 2024, the culprit would have been Russia:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/russia-restricts...

The U.S. of course is a sovereign nation and can decide for itself how long it trades with countries that it calls "terrorist states".

[marcinzm]

The US imports uranium from 12 countries and has its own deposits. Plus you can stockpile it. It was probably more to prevent Russia from selling to terrorists than a dependency.

[pydry]

It was the opposite - the lack of a boogey man in ~2011.

They were shut down because they weren't that reliant on it to begin with (the level to which electricity from nuclear power mattered to Germany is routinely exaggerated), because they were horrendously expensive to maintain and fix (nuclear power is always $$$$$$$$$) and because of Fukushima.

Most countries that are build their own nuclear power plants or nuclear power plants in other countries (e.g. Sweden, France, America, Russia) either have expensive nuclear arsenals which they want a nuclear industrial base to help maintain or have a boogeyman that makes them want to be able to ditch the NPT and build a nuke in a hurry. For Sweden that's Russia, for Iran that's America, for Japan that's China.

Poland has just recently gotten interested in building nuclear power stations, after having zero interest for a long time. You can probably guess which boogey man was responsible for that.

[blibble]

> because they were horrendously expensive to maintain and fix (nuclear power is always $$$$$$$$$)

almost the entire cost of nuclear is the capital cost of construction, running costs are a rounding error

germany shut down their nuclear because the russia successfully funded the greens over an extended period to convince germans that "nuclear bad"

[pydry]

Maintenance on aging plants is also very expensive (just ask the French) and German plants were getting long in the tooth.

Decommissioning is also very, very expensive, and disasters like Fukushima are also very very very expensive (that one cost about $1 trillion).

It wasn't some secret plot by Russia. Russia exported most of the uranium they used. Fukushima just made nuclear power more of a headache than it was worth, especially given the cost and pressure from the environmental movement (who had agency, despite what you might believe).

The reliance that the US/Europe had on Russian uranium is, in fact, one reason why it was never sanctioned.

The greens in Germany are mostly captured by America these days - that's why they shifted to becoming massive war hawks.

[blibble]

> Maintenance on aging plants

the three that were last turned off were practically new

there was even one that was fully constructed and ready to be turend on, and then never was

> Decommissioning is also very, very expensive

but once the plant has gone live you'd be paying that anyway

so you might as well keep the existing reactors running for as long as they remain safe

> and disasters like Fukushima are also very very very expensive (that one cost about $1 trillion)

fortunately germany isn't very prone to tsunami

the russian psyop seems to have worked pretty well on you!

[marcinzm]

Poland had a quarter of Germany's per capita GDP in 2010. You're basically saying that German acted like a developing nation in term of it's energy strategy. That's not a positive argument. When you don't have money then you do whatever you can to survive. When you do have money then you need to think about the future. Poland's GDP is now half of Germanys so it's doing just that since it now has the money to do so.