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.
Germany shot itself in the foot when it turned away from nuclear…
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.
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.
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.
One way or another you need grid-scale turbines to maintain grid frequency. Solar power can’t set frequency and wind power is too variable, so power grids use some sort of turbine to do it.
Nuclear reactors are also necessary to generate things like medical isotopes and tritium for industrial processes, and fusion research. Someone, somewhere on Earth needs to keep their fission reactors going.
Should probably have invested more into developing their knowledge and experience then. Just have a look at China.
Littering vast spaces of land for wind and sun power generation is hardly a better long term solution.
Even China builds more renewable than nuclear. And I’d rather not look at authoritarian dictatorships for tips on how to handle building regulations.
Unlike china, Germany has a lot of environmental and safety standards it has to meet before it can operate any large plant, and it cannot just give the contract to the lowest bidder who mixes rubbish and toxic waste into the cement als filler material…
Yes, I’m sure reopening coal plants and displacing villages to mine coal is a better environmental policy.
And are you suggesting that the West wouldn’t be able to build cheaper and faster nuclear power plants even if we had actually invested in the technology for all these years? Is nuclear technology some unicorn that can’t be improved with experience and research?
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.