this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
185 points (98.9% liked)

World News

39102 readers
2256 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Germany got out of nuclear because it’s simply not economically viable.

Factually incorrect. Germany began the process of shuttering all their nuclear plants as a knee-jerk response to the Fukushima disaster in 2011..

" The nuclear disaster in Fukushima on 11 March 2011 was the cause for the vote in the German Bundestag - and the subsequent decision to phase out nuclear power. "

They had no renewables replacement plan in place when they made this decision- they mostly just bought power from the euro grid as a stop gap (and france's nuclear reactors, lmfao) until they built their own gas plants.

They replaced it with natural gas fired combined cycle plants that - conveniently! - were fuelled with Russian gas. Gas that they were desperately dependent on, and gas that instantly disappeared when flows were cut off in 2022 due to Ukraine's invasion. Extremely short sighted decision at best, actively stupid and likely sponsored by Russia at worst.

I am glad they are building out renewable capacity, but it's only under duress and explicitly in reaction to a huge energy and economic crisis of their own making by being stupidly shortsighted.

[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 24 points 2 months ago

It's a bit more complicated. We were already planning to get out of nuclear because our plants were aging and new ones weren't economical. Then the government decided to freeze those plans for the time being. (IIRC one reason was that they wanted to close some of our terrible coal power plants first.) Then Fukushima happened and the Greens got everyone to panic.

We could've gone with a measured response but a combination of the Greens believing that nuclear power is infinitely bad and plenty of old people still having vivid memories of fallout-related health warnings from Chernobyl was enough to drive most of the country into an antinuclear frenzy. It's almost a miracle they didn't force all of the plants to scram immediately.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

Yeah, the conservatives really fucked that one up, like everything they touch. But that doesn't change the fact that it was the right decision. The end of nuclear had already been decided years before and then the CDU government went back on that. Then after Fukushima they reversed the reversal. And of course they had also slowed down the build-out of renewables before which landed us in the mess where fossil fuel usage went up. But that was just bad policy not an argument to keep the outdated and ever more creaky nuclear reactors running.