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by uecker 155 days ago
As a physicist I disagree. While one should have left the existing plants running longer (but those things are decided a long time in advance), the exit was fundamentally th correct decision from an economic point of view. The extreme drop in prices in renewables world-wide only comparable to Moore's law also clearly confirms the success of Germany's Energiewende. But you need to look at data, not fakenews to understand this.
2 comments

The success of the Energiewende ? Just take a look at average electricity price and carbon footprint in Germany Vs France.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes

Germany started out with a high amount of coal and lignite (as a domestic source of energy with many jobs depending on it). The carbon footprint dropped with the rollout of renewables according and will be very low once the transition to renewables is completed. It makes no sense to compare it to France, which switched to a nuclear a long time ago. This is relatively easy to understand in my opinion.
Shouldn't this so-called "transition" should be monotonic? The derivative of energy price should be always negative if you're right. It's not. It's very, very, very much not.

If the end state is very cheap energy, why is it the opposite of cheap now?

Look: the "energy transition" is not working. It's done the opposite of work. You have to concede to reality at some point.

The spectacular success of nuclear power where it's been tried combined with equally spectacular failures to rebase first world power grids on renewables should have prompted you to question your assumptions by now.

One must conclude the problem lies not in splitting the atom, but educating physicists.

You're a scientist, right? Can you think of any evidence that even in principle might prompt you to change your mind on nuclear?

There is no spectacular success of nuclear power. It provides an irrelevant fraction of overall power in the world and time and money needed to scale it up would be immense. The France's nuclear industry is an economic disaster and the EDF has been fully re-nationalized (and during the time it was semi-private there was plan to close 17 plants by 2025). The rollout of renewables works very nicely in Europe, there is no "grid failure". I am a physicist, I draw my information from looking at the underlying data, not the press.
Looks pretty successful to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media...

If over half a country's electricity production is "irrelevant", I'm not sure what would be relevant.

Call it a disaster if you'd like. Lights turn on. Meltdowns aren't happening. The French pay 50% less than Germans per kWh.

You do you, but don't sit there and claim you're looking at the data. You can either interface with the real world or live in a fantasy universe and fail. Up to you.

The electricity price in France is artificially kept low, it does not say much about the cost of nuclear. Globally renewables have overtaken coal in electricity production in the first half of 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2rz08en2po Nuclear is not close to this.