Summary
A new Innofact poll shows 55% of Germans support returning to nuclear power, a divisive issue influencing coalition talks between the CDU/CSU and SPD.
While 36% oppose the shift, support is strongest among men and in southern and eastern Germany.
About 22% favor restarting recently closed reactors; 32% support building new ones.
Despite nuclear support, 57% still back investment in renewables. The CDU/CSU is exploring feasibility, but the SPD and Greens remain firmly against reversing the nuclear phase-out, citing stability and past policy shifts.
Well, if that’s so rare and can essentially be ignored, I’m sure you’ll easily find insurance for nuclear plants that will cover the cost of a potential disaster. I mean, after all, it evens out over all the nuke plants, right? The market handles it, right?
There’s a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover. Modern nuclear generators just can’t blow up like Chernobyl. Fukushima is a bit different, but maybe we shouldn’t build reactors in places where they can be hit by a tsunami in the first place. And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.
And that doesn’t change the fact that shutting down nuclear plants and replacing their energy output with coal caused more radiation in ash and other particles which are spread out of the chimney to the environment as a part of normal operation.
And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
Yeah. And what’s stopping other stuff to be “a bit different”?
Japan got damn lucky the wind blew everything seawards. If the fallout had hit Tokyo, this would have been a very different story.
And who did that? Nobody. There were no new coal plants to replace anything. That statement is straight up misleading. The old plants were kept running, yes, and they kept emitting, yes. And that’s always the thing that’s being brought up, “they could have taken the coal plants offline sooner had they just kept the nuke plants running a little longer”. But that’s an entirely different thing than “they replaced nuclear with coal”. Nobody did that. Had they not tanked the German market for renewables, the coal plants would have been taken offline earlier, too, but for some reason that’s never the sob story. Instead, people keep bringing up nuke plants time and time again, which is just weird. Yeah, coal and nuclear both destroy the planet. Let’s not see which one’s marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that’s actually good for the planet?
Here’s a list of one type of that kind of disasters where, despite of insurance, various kinds of environmental damage has been left behind which may or may not completely heal, or at least it takes a long, long time.
Here’s a pretty public different kind of disaster which I guarantee was not 100% covered by insurance either. Here’s another. I’m not building a comprehensive list, there’s just too many and their impacts vary wildly.
Then there’s the waste management in poorer countries which also cause immeasurable damage to the environment all the time by using a nearby river as a sewage for everything. Here’s one example which made into the headlines back then. And here’s a list of similar examples.
Go read yourself:
And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it’s also radioactive.
That would be really nice. We just don’t have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet. Here in Finland, on a good day, renewables produce more than nuclear, but those are exceptions. Feel free to look up the data in finngrid service. There’s currently over 7000MW worth of turbines around but it’s pretty common to have even less than 200MW of wind power in the grid and that unreliability needs to be stabilized with something else.