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>I marvel at it alright! But obviously not for the same reasons you do. I think it's incredibly stupid, and likely driven by nutters in the Green party who are ideological (and fucking wrong) instead of pragmatic and science based. Anti-nuclear sentiment has always been transversal in Germany. At the time of the shutdowns, the conservatives didn't specially love the plants, but with Fukushima, it was electoral death to support them. Someone farting inside a nuclear plant would have been a political scandal, so they weren't going to wait. The future (correctly) was green energy, and Russian gas didn't seem like a bad bridge; after all, foresight is 20/20. You would have been seen as a cold war holdout nutter for raising fears of Russian dependence. HN always finds public distrust of nuclear to be solely ignorance and oil propaganda, but that's reductive. My (pregnant!) mother woke up one day in the Soviet bloc and suddenly everything fresh in the stores was gone. No explanation, just hushed rumors and "don't eat anything not out of a can." The explanation came a day later. I imagine it wasn't very nice being on the other side and having minimal info during the first days. That's something traumatic that stays with people, not merely a Koch brothers psyop. Sure, the Soviets were reckless, but the worst was avoided. A couple of decades later, the people who lived during Chernobyl are older, time has passed, and public opinion relaxes. Then Fukushima happens, minimal info again, and every bad memory comes back. We get the info? Just fuckup after fuckup: they knew the sea wall was too low, diesel backups were badly designed, staff wasn't trained correctly, HQ wanted to stop seawater cooling during a meltdown to save equipment. This was not a technical failure but gross human error in famously detail-oriented Japan. Every reassurance since 1986 about nuclear energy rang hollow. The time for the fail-safe wunder-reactors was the 2000s with a wide rollout. There are many technical arguments showing that further development and rollout of nuclear energy was the correct choice after Chernobyl, but the public's worries were never "nutty." |
I think we need more nuclear, but it's not realistic given the pricetag and these cogent arguments as why voters are not enamoured either.