I'd like to add, my view. I'm from Lower Saxony and in an area nearby they tried for years to establish a temporary storage for the high nuclear waste. I never trusted the notion that the temporary storage will be save, properly maintained and kept from leaking into the local water supply.

Add to that, that we have had very old reactors who were constantly extended rather than properly renewed. Further emphasising that they won't care proper for the waste products.

Then Fukushima happened, the movement for anti nuclear gained massive momentum. I assumed of course that the lack in energy will be compensated by building renewables and subsidising homeowners to build their own solar on their roofs. Why wouldn't we, we were already talking about increasing renewables to safe the climate.

The announcement came that atom is being phased out. Big hooray for everyone who had to live next to the old plants or in areas where end-storage 'solutions' were.

Aaaaaaaand they increased the god damn coal which is way worse and really no one wanted but the lobby for coal and fossile fuels.

Now lots of ppl. on the internet always advocate for nuclear, but never address the fears of the ppl. properly.

The thing is, having a high nuclear toxic waste storage in your local area is shite just as shite it is to have the damn ash piles from coal.

If nuclear really wants to make a proper comeback, in my opinion the first thing they need to solve is the waste. We have too much of it already and have solar, wind and water (tidal preferably over damns because those fuckers can break if not maintained proper) who do not create any nasty waste and by products.

What the fuck are you talking about? Did you even bother to read the article?

"The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.

This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party—today the world’s most influential—which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats. This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022, and passed a raft of legislation supporting renewable energy.

That, in turn, turbocharged the national deployment of renewables, which ballooned from 6.3 percent of gross domestic electricity consumption in 2000 to 51.8 percent in 2023"

Ah yes, the arch-conservatives, the Greens and Social Democrats.

which is funny because fossil fuels are everywhere poisoning the air and environment in general, not different from the nuclear radiation bogeyman

The best thing to do when you fall off a horse, is climb straight back up on it. Rejecting almost limitless power because of an accident almost 40 years ago is foolish to me. Luckily research didn't completely stop and modern plants are a lot safer with a lot of medical applications for the waste.

Sorry but this sounds like: A car crashed when I was young because the driver was drunk. I will never trust a car again.

Yeah but if Germany hadn't been so anti-nuclear, by 2023 it could have been (for example) 53% renewable, 5% coal, 17% gas and 25% nuclear. Comparing the dying tail end of nuclear to just after it finally died is not useful.