[01100011]

Like most backward looking judgements these days, such things require understanding the culture and zeitgeist of the mid 70s.

I'm pro-nuclear as well, but understand that for many decades the "smart" thing to do was to oppose it. I wouldn't expect a musical artist to have a more nuanced opinion than most of their contemporaries.

[jcul]

I think Chernobyl was a big factor in European sentiment towards nuclear power too, in the 80s / 90s.

I grew up in the 90s and didn't even fully understand what it was, but I remember the fear around it. I remember people in Ireland worrying about Sellafield nuclear power plant in the UK and talking about things like wind direction if there was an incident. And the government posting out iodine tablets to homes.

[cluckindan]

More like the robot thing to do.

Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany was entirely manufactured; it was the product of Gerhard Schröder and similar robots who enriched themselves on Russian oil and gas.

Ironically, it is also where the so-called Green Party began.

[Qdulf]

This is historical revisionism. Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is rooted in the peace movement and environmentalism, with the majority of public discourse starting in the 1970s.

The debate has always been about what to do with the waste. Our government misrepresented the "Asse" as a solved solution for a final repository, even though it was always only a test repository for low and intermediate-level radioactive waste. But hubris or corruption led to one scandal after another, forever tainting the discussion about nuclear waste in Germany.

Everything that follows is just a reaction.

My counterclaim to your unsubstantiated take: Pro-nuclear sentiment is what has been manufactured. Anti-nuclear is grassroots.

[AdamN]

It's kind of all of the above. State and non-state actors have leveraged pretty much every movement there is to their own ends: civil rights, anti-nuclear, pro-nuclear, anti-Iranian government sentiment, pro-Iranian government sentiment, even jazz tours in Europe which were assisted by US intelligence orgs in the 20th century.

It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.

[TitaRusell]

Pro nuclear comes from American conservatives. The same people who claim climate change is a hoax. The same people who hate green energy solutions.

[cluckindan]

Pro-nuclear comes from scientifically informed progressives, definitely not conservatives.

Nuclear IS a green energy solution.

[AdamN]

There's a modern argument that nuclear is greener than oil, gas, and even hydro and everything else. That's pretty new though (and certainly not a no-brainer).

[Ringz]

Again. Show us some peer reviewed studies for your claims. A simple search will show you that, according to dozens or hundreds of peer reviewed studies, research and real world examples, a 100% renewable energy solution is feasible.

[usrusr]

We don't know what to what fraction that peace movement ran on being propped up by KGB. Those things are not mutually exclusive, genuine protest and getting propped up by a foreign power just for destabilization and giggles.

Just like that Red Army Faction group whose name in hindsight was much closer to the truth than anyone really assumed at the time. At least at some point it clearly was a KGB operation (visits to a certain Dresden office are documented, and yes, guess who was also stationed in Dresden at the time), likely not from the start but quickly co-opted. KGB, as in the service that was built on the experience of how Germany solved their eastern front in WWI through organizing passage from Zurich for a certain dissident.

Yes, those movements were genuine. But they were also directed to some extent. The fictional Tischbier character in Deutschland 83 comes somewhat close to illustrating that ambiguity.

[cluckindan]

Revisionism it is not. It was Schröder’s administration that shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants.

Where is the peace movement and so-called environmentalism rooted?

Pro-nuclear is pro-environment.

The alternatives are fossil fuels and renewables, which are both extremely anti-environment: water power require large artificial reservoirs and create flood risks, wind power kills/drives away wildlife and is almost useless without efficient large—scale energy storage and other methods of power generation, while solar also requires storage and other power generation but also requires mining of rare earth metals.

Of course we could just stop all of our industries to save power. No more production, no more consumption, no more pollution.

[iSnow]

>It was Schröder’s administration that shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants.

That's not even true, it was Merkel's administration. Under Schröder, the plan for the phase-out was formulated and set in motion, only to be stopped and then restarted by Merkel.

The modern anti-nuclear movement in Germany got started in the 1970's by the TMI accident and a book named "Der Atom-Staat". Chornobyl of course put the nails into the coffin.

[mpweiher]

> That's not even true, it was Merkel's administration.

Nope, that is actually not true.

> Under Schröder, the plan for the phase-out was formulated and set in motion,

It wasn't just "formulated" it was passed into law in 2002 by the red-green coalition led by Schröder.

It was never stopped/rescinded.

https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2012/38640342_...

> only to be stopped and then restarted by Merkel.

That is also not the case. Merkel never actually stopped the phase-out, her administration just extended the running times. The phase-out always remained in place, and for example to prohibition against building new nuclear plants was never touched.

So no.

[Ringz]

The alternative is only renewables. And we don’t have to stop all industries for it.

Show us some evidence based and peer reviewed studies for your claims. Repeating the same old and scientifically unproved claims doesn’t help.

[cluckindan]

Why don’t you show your claims to be true?

[Mashimo]

Indeed. Also Asse was a political decision, against the scientist who found better places to put the waste, but Asse II was close to east Germany. And West German politicians wanted to give a big "screw you" to East Germany, because they also did something similar.

I'm still against nuclear in Germany. I'm fine with Finland doing it.

[lukan]

Sure, it was all Schröders fault.

It had nothing to do with for example chernobyl, where children were not allowed to be outside on the playground for weeks and where you had to pay attention where your food came from and it also has nothing to do that you still have to have the meat of wild boars checked and be careful with eating mushrooms. Totally unrelated.

Seriously, the anti nuclear crowd might have not been rational from the start and still is dogmatic, but it formed exactly, because people did not trust the manufactured state's sentiment of nuclear will provide cheap and clean energy without risk.

Because it is not a clean energy, it is incredibly dirty and dangerous. And those dangers can be handled, if companies and regulators act responsible. But people simply do not trust that they are. And they do have some data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accid...

[rob74]

> And those dangers can be handled, if companies and regulators act responsible.

As further proof of how well that works, Fukushima arrived in 2011: https://www.scribd.com/document/819988755/Examining-Regulato...

[cluckindan]

What makes you think the Chernobyl accident was not embraced to influence European policy?

[shmeeed]

Occam's razor.

[cluckindan]

How does that make sense? Is it not more simple to amplify and reframe current events than it is to manufacture entirely new narratives?

[shmeeed]

I'm thinking I may have misunderstood you. Who did you refer to that supposedly embraced the accident to influence policy?

[Mashimo]

You still can't eat Mushrooms and wild Boar meet has to be tested in certain places in Germany. That was before Schröder.

Combine that with political decision to put waste into Asse II. Not because it was a good place, just screw with East Germany.

Big demonstration like Brokdorf where around 81. Schroeder begun being a Ministerpräsident in 1990, and 1998 Bundeskanzler.

[pjmlp]

Not at all, we look into Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples of what actual happens when things don't go as the advocates sell it.

And naturally the radio waste is fine as long as we store it into other countries.

[usrusr]

Fukushima hit hard in (West) Germany: Chernobyl was mostly explained away with "because Soviet", it wasn't that hard to convince people that much safer nuclear was possible. But Japan, of all countries, not being able to safely run a reactor? The country of trains running on time and of Toyotas making domestic cars look laughably unreliable in ADAC statistics?

[cluckindan]

In the last 70 years, 600-700 nuclear reactors have been in operation worldwide, and three of them have had major accidents. You already mentioned two of them, the third is Three Mile Island.

That’s a catastrophic failure rate under 0.5 percent. Sure, the effects of a failure spread widely and can be a hazard for a long time, but personally I would want to see the same risk-averse sentiment applied to production and use of perfluorinated compounds and fossil fuels, since both of those can spread much farther and cause more of a hazard.

The cherry on top: coal power plants spread significant amounts of radionuclides into the environment.

[acdha]

Around the turn of the century that was a stronger argument–it’s one of the reasons why I backed nuclear then–but now we have cheaper renewables which can be online decades sooner so the choice isn’t nuclear vs. coal but vs. solar & wind which have orders of magnitude less pollution. Even if we’re talking natural gas, which has killed coal economically, there’s still far more pollution and direct health risk avoided by picking renewables.

If we’re talking risk aversion, we can address both the major certain risk of climate change and the lesser but still valid risks of nuclear while saving a ton of money and probably getting results quickly. The reason so much fossil fuel money goes into pushing nuclear power is that it guarantees fossil fuel usage continues unchecked for decades before possibly going down, and we don’t have decades any more.

[cluckindan]

Solar and wind haven’t yet solved the two major issues: producing power 24/7/365 even when it isn’t sunny or windy (or when it’s too windy).

Batteries are one solution, but the power storage requirements far surpass the world’s capacity for battery production, and come with the same caveats: rare earth metals, which need mining. Mining is a huge source of air pollution, as mining equipment is usually diesel powered, and far worse for the environment due to pollution of natural surface and ground water reservoirs.

Uranium mines have the same issues for sure, the scale is just very different.

[acdha]

First, it’s rare to have protected periods where the entire grid has no wind, solar, hydro, etc. That can happen regionally, but it’s not a secret and grid operators prepare for it just as they do the impact of heatwaves shutting down nuclear or fossil plants getting iced up.

Second, power is so cheap with renewables that storage of over-production makes sense. Some of that can be things like pumped water systems but batteries are coming online by the hundreds of gigawatt-hour now and sodium isn’t exactly a rare earth mineral so that’s going to accelerate even more following market forces:

https://electrek.co/2025/09/25/us-first-grid-scale-sodium-io...

https://newmobility.news/en/2026/04/29/catl-turns-sodium-ion...

Again, this is so much cheaper that it makes nuclear even less competitive and it’s online so much faster that you’re basically weighing the gamble that storage which is already competitive won’t get substantially cheaper over multiple decades.

[pingou]

Most batteries do not use rare earth metals. Even if they did and it was an issue, we would find alternatives if that was necessary, just like rare earth free motors were developed to avoid all the downsides of that come with those.

Have a look at CATL’s sodium-ion batteries, they do not use anything expensive, rare, or particularly damaging to extract from the environment.

[Ringz]

Uranium mines will become a problem if every country tries to make 25% of electricity with nuclear. Electrification of primary energy might even need more nuclear according to some pro nuclear people.

Many forget that while there is plenty of uranium on Earth, most of it occurs in very low concentrations. The lower the concentration, the higher the CO₂ emissions for the entire uranium chain from the mine to the fuel rod.

Meanwhile, renewable energies receive free fuel from the sun. They are already recyclable today and, with intelligent local and intercontinental grids, will also require fewer batteries for storage.

[pjmlp]

One nuclear accident is already one too many.

[stevesimmons]

As opposed to premature deaths from fossil fuel emissions, deaths of rooftop solar installers (surprisingly common), wars in the Middle East involving oil interests, drowning and environmental damage from dam failures, etc, etc.

[cluckindan]

One Parkersburg, WV is already one too many, yet next to nothing is done.

[pjmlp]

Chernobyl area is still no man's land, 40 years later.

[youngtaff]

There’s not actually that much high level waste… thing the UK has a couple swimming pools worth after 50 years of operating reactors

[JuniperMesos]

I quite enjoy the 1979 Dan Fogelberg song Face the Fire from a purely musical perspective, despite it being an anti-nuclear-power anthem written in the wake of three mile island. There's no reason to expect that Kraftwork's poltical ideas are good ones or were good ones at the time, even if it resulted in some good music.

[colechristensen]

It was largely our own governments wanting to scare us of nukes so we'd be scared of the Soviets, like in America with the schoolchildren doing duck and cover drills.

Having enemies the population is afraid of is good for politicians and they'll take any enemies they can find, and they'll do so indiscriminately regardless of the real nuance of the issues.

Immigrants, abortion, this religion or that, rock music, jazz music, alcohol, marijuana, global warming, windmills, books... just whatever as hard as they can regardless of if it's reasonable or not.

[TurdF3rguson]

The Soviets were parking nukes in Cuba in striking distance of the White House. If that's not legitimately terrifying to you, I just don't know.

[thombat]

Which directly followed the USA stationing Jupiter missiles in Turkey with the range to strike Moscow. As part of the mutual climb down from the missile crisis the USA removed the Jupiters, as both sides then understood the wisdom of avoiding hot brinkmanship

[GJim]

It's genuinely amazing how few people in the USA appear to be aware of what you have written.

It'd be nice to put jingoism aside for a change.

[satao]

americans are the most brainwashed people on earth when you consider how naïve of their own propaganda they are

[amanaplanacanal]

Which in hindsight seems like just a sideshow, since both sides already had ICBMs in development that can strike from anywhere in the world.

[zorked]

Not anymore than the US being able to strike worldwide to this very moment. They are the only country that has used nuclear bombs against civilians.

The big problem is having one country be able to do it without deterrents and with impunity. MAD is a good thing, if anyone will have those things at all.

[TurdF3rguson]

One of those things is scarier to American school children and their teachers than the other.

[pjc50]

Objectively, nukes have killed 0 American school children and their teachers while legal constitutional American gun owners have killed thousands every year.

The main natural predator of Americans is other Americans.

[soperj]

scariest thing for American School children and their teachers is the way that the second amendment is administered.

[lostlogin]

School children aren’t easily scared by boogie men, but maybe they should be. The Iranian girls found this out.

[Tepix]

Their nukes are still within striking distance.

[01100011]

I think it came from peaceniks and hippies mostly. You're talking about the equivalent of modern anti-vax liberals. Anti-science and given to conspiracies and mysticism.

There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s. The world was quite a different place back then. The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking, and Communism was much more expansionary.

[pjc50]

> There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s

Yes, but I think if you asked which country was more likely to "push the button" in the 50s-70s it would have been the US, and the extent to which the US continued invasions after the collapse of the USSR kind of vindicates that.

> The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking

I don't think this was ever true except in the least useful measure, raw headcount of conscripts.

[happymellon]

> anti-vax liberals

Just a small correction, but the anti-vax arguments are very conservative, not liberal.

[soperj]

hate to tell you this, but there's a whole contingent of "granola moms" who won't vax their children. They're the same people that subscribe to those teething stones that are really only a strangulation risk.

[happymellon]

Yep, and a lot of what they say is deeply conspiratorial conservative rhetoric.

They may be self described liberal, but their actions certainly aren't.

[soperj]

Conspiratorial sure, conservative though not sure how it gets labelled that. It's not a deeply ingrained philosophy of conservatism, and crazy is broad spectrum.

[tekla]

Its so fucking wild to see how fast the winds change. And since its inconveniently politically incorrect, history rewrites or "they were actually the opposite of us and lying"

Anti-Vax people are/were seen the leftist idiots who were anti-capitalist, anti-corpo, anti-the fascist govt, who would rather have died of preventable diseases than perpetuate the medical industry and its capitalist schemes trying to keep us sick to sell drugs and also ban weed.

It's so funny to watch the political sides swap and the doublethink take all of a few days to propogate.

[JuniperMesos]

There are both liberal and conservative strains of anti-vaccination sentiment that have been more or less prominent at various times.

[secretsatan]

There is undeniably a middle class anti vax wellness leftist movement whether it was originally conservative or not, unfortunately.

[userbinator]

Appeal to nature is something that definitely cuts across the political spectrum.

[lostlogin]

> Appeal to nature is something that definitely cuts across the political spectrum.

I wish this was true. How many right wing political parties support policies that improve the natural environment? Doing that is the domain of left wing parties, but I’d love to know of any exceptions.

[happymellon]

> wellness leftist movement

Hang on, are we talking about liberal or leftist now?

Because a lot of these hoax "wellness" movements are conservative. Distrusting science and things you don't understand is a conservative mindset.

[TheOtherHobbes]

And trusting science while distrusting technology you do understand is a leftist mindset.

[Forgeties79]

> You're talking about the equivalent of modern anti-vax liberals. Anti-science and given to conspiracies and mysticism

In 2026 this is decidedly a more conservative stance. They installed RFK Jr., who in addition to Wakefield, is the antivax guy. MAHA specifically (can’t believe they actually stuck with that acronym) is overwhelmingly Republican dominated/supported.

[lizardking]

There is a difference between the "smart" thing to do and what's considered to be the right opinion by "smart" people. Lobotomies were endorsed by elite medical opinion (Moniz won a Nobel for it in 1949). Smart-person consensus often doesn't survive contact with reality. Smart people are as susceptible to groupthink, moral panics, and manias as anybody else.

[account42]

No it was never the smart thing, always an uninformed emotional reaction based on fear.

[atoav]

I grew in the area most hit by Chernobyl fallout in Europe. The disfigured newborn kids who didn't make it would probably not share your view.

My girlfriends first older brother was one of those babies, the second one survived but is disfigured and needs serious care to live. I had three such kids in my first class at school, four different ones in my second and a sizeable number of parents whose kids didn't survive childbirth. Not being allowed to eat certain mushrooms or digging in the woods was the easier part.

So this may be a bit more tangible for some people than for others.

[rectang]

There are a number of pro-nuclear advocates on this page who can’t just engage in good faith but instead dismiss and deride their interlocutors as “crazy”, “paranoid”, “fear mongers“. It’s infuriating because the origins of anti-nuclear sentiments are often plain and perfectly understandable, as your poignant anecdotes illustrate.

[pfdietz]

I'd get angry with them, but at this point the renewable wave is so overwhelming and unstoppable that they are just screaming into the void. I know they are set up for bitter disappointment, having constructed a false defensive narrative to prop up their world view, and I kind of pity them.

Ok, maybe not that very last part.

[pjmlp]

I rather not have another Fukushima or Chernobyl in Europe.