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.
FFS, people are stupid.
There was a huge hysteria about nuclear when Fukushima happened. A clear majority was for immediate action. Merkel’s coalition government would have ended if she hadn’t done a 180 on nuclear and decided to shut down nuclear as soon as possible, which was 2023. I was against shutting it down back then but I thought you can’t go against the whole population, so I get why they did it. People didn’t change their mind until 2022. Nobody talked about reversing that decision in all these years when there was actually time to reverse the decision.
Now, that the last reactor is shut down, the same people that were up in arms in 2011 are now up in arms that we don’t have nuclear. Building new plants will cost billions and take decades and nuclear doesn’t work well with renewables because of its inflexibility. It makes no sense at all. It was a long-term decision we can’t just back away from. What’s done is done.
nuclear doesn’t work well with renewables because of its inflexibility
Uuuuh, why wouldn’t it? Nuclear can provide a steady base load for the grid while the renewables are providing the rest, filling up storages for spike times if there is an excess. Don’t really see how this is a big issue.
Cost. You do not need much storage for a 95% renewable grid. For the last 5% nuclear baseload is still way too expensive.
I suspect that we will utilize a gas peaker plants for the last 5% for a long time; i couldn’t think of a much better option.
Irs batteries. Today’s car batteries become tomorrow’s grid storage feed stock. Also battery tech is getting a cost decline through scaling so every year a nuclear plant isn’t built the math gets better for grid storage. Also adding more batteries to existing sites is way easier.
Nuclear works well with renewables. It provides reliable base load while the renewables and batteries can be used on top of that. Plus the fuel can be sourced from friendly nations like Canada.
Also worth noting that 15 years is a long time. SMRs are starting to be built and France is planning to build a bunch of nuclear capacity in the near future which might mean the possiblity to import cheap energy or leverage the human resources from those builds.
Nuclear works well with fucking nothing because it doesn’t work… because it’s just too fucking expensive, has to be shut down when it’s too hot and is so dangerous you can’t even find insurance. Base load can be provided by hydro, gas (which can be sourced sustainably) or batteries, all of which is cheaper, less dangerous and more easily available than nuclear.
Well its going to get more expensive relative as well as oil prices fall globally due to recession. But then we will hit another energy shortage and it will become cheaper, which is why France started building nuclear in the 1970s to begin with.
It seems to me nuclear takes you off the ebb and flow of global energy prices, I’d prefer spending on nuclear rather than carbon capture which seems to be the existing plan of many countries to combat climate change.
I like that you mention the point, Merkel’s coalition made a full 180 turnaround. Which was an error. They could have just made a plan for phasing out the reactors until maybe 2040 or 2050. No, they had to stop them right away and now the existing plants are so gutted that they are not feasible to be rebuilt again.
Anyway, building new power plants takes centuries in Germany. So we should just focus on renewables *and storage solutions now.
Right away being over a decade later at pretty much the end of life of those plantd without refurbishment.
in retrospect, i understand France’s long-held stance around 2000 that it wants to rely mostly on nuclear. it wasn’t clear, back then, how long fossil fuels would be available (it was predicted they would last another 40 years) so they thought “oh well, uranium will be available for a longer time”. renewable energy wasn’t an (economic) possibility at that time. now that we have cheap solar energy, i suspect the last nuclear power plant worldwide will be shut down sometime around 2040.
2040 huh?
My prediction is a record number of new plants going online in 2040.
Especially as there are literal factories being built to specifically crank out Small Modular Reactors.
We’re looking at a future where every small town can have their own reactor, providing enough power for that town but not large enough to ever melt down.
FFS, people are stupid.
Proceeds to be pro nuclear.
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
— some pro nuclear guy
I was against shutting down already written off power plants early while coal power plants were still running. I was in favor of shutting down coal first, yes.
And the funny thing is that coal power plants are actually more radioactive to the environment than nuclear power. Sure, accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima change the statistics by quite a lot, but for the absolute majority of nuclear plants they are way less radioactive to the environment than any given coal plant around.
Also there’s not that many severe nuclear disasters in the history. Coal and other organic fuel plants cause far more casualties globally than nuclear ever did. But maybe it’s easier to accept slow death of a lot of people due to cancer and whatever caused by organic fuel power plant emissions than single large spike when nuclear power (very, very rarely) goes wrong.
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.
There’s a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover.
And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
Fukushima is a bit different
Yeah. And what’s stopping other stuff to be “a bit different”?
And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.
Japan got damn lucky the wind blew everything seawards. If the fallout had hit Tokyo, this would have been a very different story.
replacing their energy output with coal
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?
And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
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.
“they replaced nuclear with coal”
Go read yourself:
A 2020 study found that lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately €3 to €8 billion annually, mostly from the eleven hundred additional deaths associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.
And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it’s also radioactive.
Let’s not see which one’s marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that’s actually good for the planet?
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.
Killing nuclear energy in Germany was the greatest success of FSB up to the point of planting an asset right in the middle of the Oval Office.
Due to an absolutely comical amount of disinformation on the topic. People are absolutely clueless about the potential costs in time and money.
That was mostly when they were rushing to shut down nuclear plants. Getting them operational again will be insane cost opposed to them keep on running like before.
Even before nuclear power was the most expensive type in the energy mix iirc.
yes even coal is “cheaper” than nuclear once you disregard polution
once you disregard polution
Including radioactive waste, which coal produces significantly more of than fission power.
Who cares when the commoners living next to the coal plant breathe radioactive dust? Its cheaper to run for the industrialists short term, less capital investment to build, educate personell and maintain them is required. /s
Building, running, maintaining and decommissioning fission plants is so unfathomably expensive on the taxpayer its not even believable. They are also super prone to war issues because they are so centralized. With a few attacks you can take out most of the energy supply of a country relying heavily on nuclear power. Good luck trying to take out all the island capable solar installations and every wind turbine.
If someone attacks Germany’s nuclear power plants the world as we know it won’t exist because nuclear weapons will launch ravaging most of the world.
Also you don’t need to attack every single solar panel, just the power distribution centers
As you can see in Ukraine, there is still absolutely potential for non nuclear weapon based war in Europe.
Arguably that makes nuclear plants safer, because attacking nations won’t want to bomb them and risk escalating to a nuclear war. They have no problem bombing power stations and oil refineries, though.
that’s a very whacky argument though
That’s not any way to argue or refute an argument.
getting back in to nuclear would be as foolish as dropping it in the first place. i swear i hate my government sometimes. a history of bad decisions.
lacht in nuklearabfall der in der asse das grundwasser verseucht!!
55% is a small majority. But nothing to turn a train around. Things are set in motion.
55% is a small majority
Laughs in Brexit
Southern countries (Spain and Portugal) have a lot of wind and hydro (and soon solar) power to spare. But somehow some “actors” are cutting them off from the rest of the European power grid. Looking at you France, your greedy bastards!
Germany shot itself in the foot when it turned away from nuclear…
Been saying this for years.
The problem is the power grid essentially being divided by north and south, it’s a mess. They needed to fix that before taking nuclear off-grid.
No. Take a good look at France and their nuclear strategy. Both maintaining old reactors and building new ones is extremely costly. Building times are to be measured in decades. Nuclear power is not economically viable nor is it a solution to the climate catastrophe.
Returning to nuclear power in Germany is nothing but a pointless waste of tax money.
Keep looking at things from a money perspective and the solution become obvious : kill everyone and be done with it.
Today, nuclear energy is a reasonably safe, efficient source of energy. Is it the energy of the future ? Probably not. But is it an efficient option for smoothing the grid while planting renewable all around it? It’s definitely better than the other alternatives. Does it cost money to develop? Sure. Everything costs money. But there are benefits that won’t show up in an accounting book that can’t be brushed aside.
Power to gas, water pumps, heat storage and battery storage are viable alternatives. There are many days already where we over produce green energy. Why sink hundreds of billions into nuclear plants when we could use the energy we already produce instead?
Nuclear power is all but efficient.
You keep seeing these as “alternatives”, despite the shortcomings.
I say they are complimentary, and as far as providing power to address these shortcomings, nuclear power is a good solution. How can you look at something that can single-handedly address all power requirements in some area, while providing supports to other, and say “nah”, seriously.
I can say that because we neither have the time nor the money to sink it into nuclear plants. We have green tech. It’s cheap, we’re building capacity like crazy.
And you’re just gonna ignore all the shortcomings and hope they evaporate, I suppose. Nice plan you got there.
The whole point is that this alone is a risk for the short-medium term that could have been mitigated if not for blind and outdated policies. Look at what a single nuclear power plant could produce continuously, with little variation related to time of day or weather. Saying “we can do without that” today is just foolishness, ignorance, or wilful degradation.
What do you mean? The cost of an old nuclear reactors’ MWh is 40-50€, that’s really competitive.
And unlike solar and wind, it produces anytime. As a French person, not only do I think we were right to build them in the first place, I’m annoyed we stopped in the 2000s after the Chernobyl scare campaign, it’s safer than Germany’s coal, which also produces radioactive waste and isn’t properly regulated, unlike nuclear.
Look at the desaster that is Flamanville 3, for instance.
The cour de comptes is pretty clear about it, too: https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2025-01/20250114-La-filiere-EPR -une-dynamique-nouvelle-des-risques-persistants_0.pdf
I agree that coal is important to phase out, even moreso than nuclear power. Germany was wrong to leave nuclear before coal.
But building new reactors is an utter waste of time and money.I have two answers to give you.
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Flamanville is a new generation of reactor that we are testing out after regretfully stopping the large-scale production of reactors in France. Therefore the welding sector had been lacking work for 20 years, many retiring. The same issue goes for many other highly-specialized skills in the field. Americans had to be brought in to fill in for these positions, at high cost. So the left hadn’t been corrupted by Russia into being against nuclear power in the first place, Flamanville would like gone about as well as developing a fundamentally different design can. I will grant you, however, that this isn’t the design I would have liked to see deployed: France used to be developing the Phoénix and SuperPhénix fast neutron reactors until protesters made them stop. These kinds of reactors are cleaner, more fuel-efficient (by several orders of magnitude!), some variants can even consume previous nuclear waste, although I don’t think these two French designs could. These would have been wonderful to have access to. Russia and China have already developed these designs, in large parts with our researchers when they lost their jobs, and we’ll eventually just buy them from them again. Nice plan.
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What would you replace these with? Batteries? Once again? Coal? Renewables? How would you deal when, all over Europe, every winter, there are weeks on end with next to no wind nor sun? Should we create new mountain ranges and rivers to store more energy hydraulically? Shift demand? Nuclear is the worst system except for all the others.
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There’s nothing more to come. Nuclear power is slow and uneconomical.
Joe Kaeser, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Siemens Energy: “There isn’t a single nuclear power plant in the world that makes economic sense,” he said on the ARD program Maischberger on November 27, 2024.
https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/farbebekennen-weidel-faktencheck-100.html?at_medium=mastodon
A fact check by the Fraunhofer Institute on nuclear energy states: “For example, around €2.5 billion would have to be raised to cover the nuclear waste generated. Overall, considerable short-term investments would be required.” (for the construction of a new power plant)
Also the time it would take to build new power plants and get them to run would be something lile 20-25 years. We dont have that much time to get a grip on climate change so it doesnt matter annyways. Either we get 100% renewables untill then or we are fucked annyways.
I wonder how the answers would be if following conditions are added:
- The permanent waste storage facility is built within 10 km of your place of living.
- In order to finance the significantly more expensive nuclear power you have to pay an extra income tax of 5% for the next 50 years.
- Between June and September you will not be provided running water, but have to buy bottled water, so cooling capacities for the reactors are insured even in 37°C+ weather.
- During the transition period until the reactors are ready your electricity price is doubled in order to finance importing electricity from other countries, rather than building cheaper renewables.
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10 km which direction? If it’s buried 1km down, you can stick it directly below my home for all I care.
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not sure who told you that nuclear reactors cost half a trillion dollars to build, or are you thinking they would be building 30+ reactors?
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closed loop cooling of reactors is a thing. There’s zero reason to ever have drinking water restrictions.
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this doesn’t make sense. Why would the price of electricity double to maintain the status quo? I thought you were paying for the reactors out of income taxes?
Long story short, there’s plenty of valid reasons to argue against nuclear power. Use those reasons, not made up bullshit.
It’s just more FUD trying to keep away from it. We’re still a ways off of 100% renewables and nuclear can very much help fill in that gap without reliance on foreign oil or fossil fuels.
Nuclear can’t be built fast enough to fill the gap. It’s likely better long-term to invest in additional renewables + gas plants instead, until the gas can be phased out as well. It’s still fossil for a bit, but since nuclear nearly always is over time and well beyond budget, it’s likely to be a net greener option. Gas is pretty cheap and above all very flexible, making it more suitable for baseline power than nuclear.
Which is why they should never have been decommissioned in the first place.
Those plants were very old and already had their lifespan extended a couple times (for a lot of money). Ultimately they were decommissioned before the next end-of-life date, which perhaps was a bit early, but keeping them open indefinitely just wasn’t feasible.
Consider the downtime if they had decommissioned with the idea of building a new plant in the future. The future would look much less uncertain when it comes to energy needs.
So we made a mistake, and to make up for it, we should make another one?
We made a mistake, and to make up for it, we should right the mistake. Unbelievable the way people’s brains just switch off when it comes to nuclear power.
Yeah, people just think “nuclear = good” without considering the time to build new reactors, the economic efficiency, and similar factors.
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There’s no good reason to be against nuclear power. It’s green, it’s safe, it’s incredibly efficient, the fuel is virtually infinite, and the waste can be processed in a million different ways to make it not dangerous.
It’s more expensive than the alternatives, and comes with additional downsides. There is no good reason to be pro nuclear, unless you need a lot of power for a long time in a tight space. So a ship or a space station for example.
NGL, I dig the idea of Sodium plants:
Not sure how practical they are outside the general idea, but it looks promising.
Considering the current political climate I don’t think the world would look at Germany building breeder reactors (thats what these are, even if they desperately try to avoid that term) and just say “Great idea!” ;).
Jokes aside, breeders need at least one more generation of research/demo plants to be really commercially viable. Afaik all breeders so far had less than 50% uptime and none could avoid sodium fires. They would solve quite a few fuel problems tho conisering you can “burn” recycled U238 in them.
Personally I would prefer Thorium cycle plants, but those are even further off.
For Germany right now I don’t see much sense in building new current tech reactors. For the same tax money we would need to subsidize these plants, we could build so much more renewable (and storage) capacity which would result in a faster reduction of ghg emissions.
I’m not the kind to hate on nuclear power itself, but let’s not assume it’s perfect either. There are good reasons against nuclear power, its just not the usual reasons raised by people.
The cost and time effort needed for building one plant is one drawback.
The fact that you can’t say “let’s turn off the nuclear reactor now that we have enough renewables and later today we start it again when the sunlight is over”. It’s a terrible energy source to supply for extra demand needed without perfect planning.
Nowadays, nuclear is not so worth it in general, not because of fearmongering about the dangers (an old plant badly upkept is a danger, independent of what energy source you use, but specially for nuclear plants). Ideally a combination of different renewables would be best, with some energy storage to be used as backup, plus proper sharing of the resources between different places. There’s always sun somewhere, there’s always wind somewhere, …
It’s really sad to see that evidently more than half of the german population have an opinion on something which they have little to no understanding of. It’s frustrating what misinformation can achieve.
Nuclear power might work for some nations, but there is just no way it makes sense in germany. All previous plants are in dire need of renovation and will be hugely expensive to bring back up and running, and a new one is just as overly optimistic, as major construction projects routinely go far over budget here, and nuclear energy is already not price competitive with renewables. Nobody wants waste storage, let alone a power plant near them, and it would take years until a plant is even producing energy. By that time, it might already be redundant, because renewables and energy storage will be cheaper and more ubiquitous. there is just no way nuclear power makes sense for germany.
just not true.innofact can f off. if you keep asking the old people, you will get old people answers.
when confronting the asked ppl with the numbers it costs to build a new one they all dont want a new one. not to mention the insurance for a plant. and from ukraine war we all learned nuclear ia stupid.
or go ask any of those fuckwits if we can store the waste where they live. numbers prove that around the plants the number of kids with cancer did indeed exceed all expections.
NOBODY wants a plant or the waste anywhere close to where they live.
“would you like cheap clean nucular(!) energy”
or
“would you like a powerplant and final storage near you”?
fuck innofacts hate campaign.
numbers prove that around the plants the number of kids with cancer did indeed exceed all expections.
Do you have a source on this? Not to be contrarian, I’ve just never heard this to be the case.
Not sure how much I’ll get out of this, being that it’s in German, but I appreciate the follow up!
Edit: It gets worse. 60% solid cancers, 120% increase in leukemias among children living within 5 km of nuclear power stations. I’m actually really surprised 😬
from ukraine war we all learned nuclear ia stupid.
Isn’t that what prompted this - Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons, and then everyone needing an energy source that isn’t Putin?
“would you like a powerplant and final storage near you”?
Why would they put final storage near humans and not inside a mountain or something?
ask the dutch and the swiss who plan to out them next to the german border. dutch dont have mountains to be fair.
We have an almost indefinite source of energy below our feet and almost nobody talks about. Screw nuclear, go geothermal
I have been working in decomissioning npps in germany for over a decade now which is why I feel so strongly about the knee-jerk conservative BS. no, there are not -a million ways- to make waste from nuclear power plants safe. even material released from regulations (concrete from decomissioned buildings for example or soil from the ground) has some residual radioactive particles and just like alcohol in pregnancies: there is no safe amount of exposure to radiation, just a lower risk of provoking potentially fatal genetic mutation that european regulators deem acceptable. but that in and of itself is not really problematic. It is just that we cannot assume ideal conditions for running these plants. while relatively safe during a well monitored and maintained period in the power producing state of a npp that changes radically if things go south. Just look at what happened to the zhaporizhia powerplant in ukraine they actively attacked a nuclear site! And all the meticulous precautions go out the window if a bunch of rogues decide to be stupid - just because. and tbf whatever mess the release of large amounts of radioactive particles does to our environment, economy and society i would rather not find out. as others have laid out here, there are safer and better suiting alternatives that are not coal.
there is no safe amount of exposure to radiation,
Here’s how I know you’re a lying piece of shit.
There is literally a massive, unshielded nuclear reactor in the sky every single day.
We ARE nuclear waste.
Unshielded if you ignore around 149.000.000 km distance. And it’s still the largest cause of skin cancer which is one of the most widespread ones.
You stupid fuck should think for a second before you spout bullshit in such a vile and disrespectful manner.
I’m down for being critical on the internet but you should go back straight to Reddit as that is the cesspool that this type of behaviour deserves.
The sun pumps more radiation to you then any nuclear reactor will for anyone except the guys who fucked with the demon core.
And by your own argument, the sun kills thousands every year.
How many have died from nuclear reactors? Not counting the russians/soviets of course, who shouldn’t be allowed to play with the rounded scissors we got in preschool.
They are far, FAR safer than coal, which killed thousands a year, I was in China during the bad times, it was horrific.
You’re like an evangelical who believes a thing based on no proof.
Lol you contradicted yourself. First you implied that the sun is proof that there is a safe level of radiation and then you agree that the sun kills people. 🤡
It also gives us vitamin-d.
But hey, since nuclear is so bad, I guess you can never go to the beach, or outside, ever, because all radiation is evil.
No need for name calling. I am an engineer specialized in radiation protection. Hell i actively work at nuclear sites on a daily basis. why would i lie? the underlying principle of the ‘acceptable risk’ i am talking about is called ‘alara’ - as low as reasonably achievable.
on another note: i am convinced that Staying uneducated and even actively manipulating those who dont know better is ridiculously destructive to our society. Please don’t do that.
So as an engineer myself, airplanes are vastly more dangerous than nuclear power.
Cars even more so.
The issue is regulation, but the US has never had a nuclear accident that caused deaths in our history, and neither has France which is basically running half of Europe off its nuclear plants.
This is fear-mongering, plain and simple.
Russia obviously has killed many people, but they killed millions of people from not having food, they don’t consider death a risk, it’s just part of life.
The rest of the world? Engineers are easily capable of making the craziest things safe, again, see air-travel which has more risks by orders of magnitude.
Early planes crashed all the time, and early reactor designs were very dangerous.
That’s why us engineers are so absolutely awesome, we don’t stop making things better.
