I recently wrote a reply to someone else with the same argument about the German greens, which I'll recycle here:
"It's bad enough that nuclear proponents ignore the massive cost of nuclear compared to renewables once you factor in building costs, insurance and storage imho. But then to pretend like the conservatives didn't have a choice but to bungle the nuclear exit really is too much.
The CDU never listened to the greens when it came to not killing the solar industry and serving it to China on a golden platter. Or not killing our rail infrastructure by continually delaying maintenance so that we would have to do much more costly repairs later.
But in this instance, they do, and do it in a way that is a gift to the energy companies, and instead of noticing the obvious corruption at play, people still blame the greens."
Sorry if the tone is a bit harsh, but I'm really annoyed at the amount of dishonesty surrounding nuclear energy.
Yeah, it's crazy how successful that particular piece of propaganda is. The conservative CDU is responsible for the decommissioning of nuclear plants, while the Greens extended the lifetime of the remaining plants. It's literally the other way around, but people don't question it - it feels too good to complain about the Greens, right?
It’s successful because it belies the unseriousness that some of even the strongest proponents of the crisis can have.
I’m an environmentalist. This has been a crisis my entire life. I’m happy for nuclear to be a solution exactly because it’s a crisis. Do I think it’s the best choice long run? No. It has externalities that are concerning. However, it’s a serious crisis, so go ahead and build them if it can help.
I’m an urbanist. I live in a housing crisis. I’m happy for ugly five over ones to be built to help people afford a place to live because it’s a crisis. Do I think they are ugly? Yes. Would I prefer a significant amount of revenue? Sure. However, it’s a crisis, so go ahead and build them.
When your coalition starts getting picky about solutions, it signals that they don’t actually believe it’s is a genuine crisis.
It's fine if that's your takeaway as long as you're aware of the full context. I'm just tired of people misrepresenting the situation as "the German Greens made Germany demolish their nuclear plants"! Large enough parts of the population were scared of nuclear accidents, so the conservative CDU used the nuclear exit as a way of garnering votes in the then-upcoming election.
You might argue that this fear is unfounded and dumb, and again, I won't disagree. But it's not the German Green's stupidity, it's the German population's stupidity. That's why I think it's important to mention this fact every time - otherwise it will be used to fearmonger about "environmentalists want to de-industrialize and go back to living in mud huts!"
There are good reasons to phase out nuclear (which was supported by all major political parties, a decision of the vast majority not only the green party).
E.g. usually, the proponents ignore the risks.
The day before Fukushima they would have said, Tchernobyl cannot happen here.
The next castastrophe comes always from a direction nobody anticipated.
In the 2010s CDU in Germany delayed modernizing the german power grid by a huge amount which the greens could not catch up entirely during their recent term in the government (as part of a difficult coalition).
This power grid is now a bottleneck to install and use intelligently more solar, wind and batteries (new solar already compensated for the phase out of the last 3 nuclear power plants in the early 2020s).
CDU is again in power and again doing counterproductive measures to slow down modernization of the energy system.
There is no need for nuclear but for faster modernization of the grid and for more renewable energy production and storage capacities.
> The conservative CDU is responsible for the decommissioning of nuclear plants
This is a lie.
The atomaustieg was decided by the SPD+Green coalition in 1998 as a condition for the Green joining Schroeders coalition.
The CDU actually reversed course just before Fukushima but unfortunately Merkel then undid that to try to win voters away from the greens by joining the fearmongering post-fukushima.
> the Greens extended the lifetime of the remaining plants
By 3 months, under enormous pressure from all sides during the worst energy crisis in postwar german history when they could have reversed course or extended them longer. You don't get much credit for this.
This was inarguably one of the greatest political mistakes of the 21st century so far and the blame is squarely on the Green party and their voters. The real propaganda is you trying to deflect it into the CDU.
Obviously foreseeable consequences of an action are owned by the agents that pushed them and sit on the critical path of that action happening. The Greens fit this criterion. They pushed nuclear decommission first, without renewables ready to replace. To any reasonable observer, it is obvious that this ensures that coal would replace the nuclear. They did it anyway.
There's another factual error in your above comment the previous poster didn't correct: Nuclear energy was replaced with renewables, not coal. It would have been preferable to first replace coal with renewables, then move on to expensive nuclear, but that's a different argument.
Doubling down on your second wrong argument is not giving your observations credence. It was the conservative party in a coalition with the free-market Liberals, who passed the law giving a binding timeline for the nuclear shutdown.
Germany trading nuclear for coal in 2022, and the role of the Greens supporting it, was widely reported by credible outlets; see for example [1]:
> With little natural gas supplies of the country’s own, and its heavily supported renewable sector unable to fully make up the shortfall, German leaders faced a dilemma. To maintain enough gas reserves to get the country through the winter, they could try to put off the closure of Germany’s last three remaining nuclear reactors, which were scheduled to shutter by the end of 2022 as part of Germany’s post-Fukushima turn against nuclear power, and even restart already closed reactors.
> Or they could try to reactivate mothballed coal-fired power plants, and make up some of the electricity deficit with Germany’s still-ample coal reserves.
[...]
> Last week, the country’s parliament, with the backing of members of the Green Party in the coalition government, passed emergency legislation to reopen coal-powered plants, as well as further measures to boost the production of renewable energy.
I acknowledge that the politics and history of the nuclear decommission is more complicated than I understood - [2] seems to be a useful walkthrough. But it all happened with Green support and is the fruits of decades of Green ideological advocacy.
What does the German Green Party say in their own political platform today about the use of thermal power plants? Are they in favor of them, to be used to balance the grid when renewable energy fails to meet demand, or are they against the construction and continued use?
I know what the Swedish green party has on their platform, open to be read at any time on their website or in paper materials, or heard by their political representatives. Their position is that thermal power plants are critical to the energy grid in order to enable renewable energy and keeping costs down. They wish to use either bio fuels or green hydrogen to fuel those power plants.
The issue I got with that plan is that current thermal power plants in practice do not use exclusively bio fuels or green hydrogen, and that the environmental science around bio fuels are poor at best and full of green washing and practices that are extremely bad for the environment. The costs of bio fuels and green hydrogen has also demonstrated to be massively expensive, making the cost of nuclear cheap in comparison.
My views of the green will change when/if the green drops their support of thermal power plants, and their overwhelming dependency of using biofuels produced from corn as a way to reduce emissions. Biofuels need to be produced without using artificial fertilizers (natural gas), and without burning down forests to make space for the farming. It also need to be cheaper than nuclear, which disqualify green hydrogen as it is produced, stored and handled currently. Carbon capture and artificial fuels are disqualified on the same point, being overwhelming more expensive than nuclear.
As an anecdote, the Swedish green party leader and a right wing party had a political debate during last election. The Right wing party wanted to demolish an oil fueled thermal power plant that is currently operated in south of Sweden, and replace with new nuclear power plant. Paraphrasing what the green party leader said: "Thermal power plants are a natural part of the Swedish grid, and nuclear energy is way to expensive. We need those plants to keep the grid stable and prices low."
>What does the German Green Party say in their own political platform today about the use of thermal power plants?
Doesn't matter, at least in Germany. Maybe it's different in other countries, though this would surprise me. Here, nobody reads the party platforms, as they do not correlate with the actions of our political parties.
If you vote according to party platform, then you should probably vote for the conservatives or the reds, as they pretend to be good for the economy and the workers.
I think it's better to judge a party by their actions, instead.
If you judge the political views of a party on how they vote (i.e. their actions), then the result will be a mess. Political parties vote in blocks and alliances, with negotiations and give-and-take. They regularly vote against their own interests if their negotiations means getting their own politics through. One has to look at both what they say and what they do, in order to understand why they voted one way or an other.
There have been recently in Sweden a discussion around party voting and block voting. In concept, every politician could vote independently based on their own views and opinions, but as a practical matter they vote according to party politics. Some has now voiced that this should be mandated according to election result, while others want to keep the current system where elected has a choice to ignore party politics and be independent after the election. The reason this has become an issue is that recent elections has been very close with only a few seats difference between the blocks, thus independent (called "wilds") representatives has the ability to overturn votes when the blocks artificial maintains the relative balances between each other.
Last, if we look at the actions, then guess how the green party voted when it came to construction of new thermal power plants in south of Sweden.
"It's bad enough that nuclear proponents ignore the massive cost of nuclear compared to renewables once you factor in building costs, insurance and storage imho. But then to pretend like the conservatives didn't have a choice but to bungle the nuclear exit really is too much.
The CDU never listened to the greens when it came to not killing the solar industry and serving it to China on a golden platter. Or not killing our rail infrastructure by continually delaying maintenance so that we would have to do much more costly repairs later.
But in this instance, they do, and do it in a way that is a gift to the energy companies, and instead of noticing the obvious corruption at play, people still blame the greens."
Sorry if the tone is a bit harsh, but I'm really annoyed at the amount of dishonesty surrounding nuclear energy.