This is one of the worst takes on Germany’s energy market.

The decision to close the three NPPs everyone seems to talk about was taken over ten years ago. The operators of said NPPs were already preparing for closure and haven’t invested anything for a future certification process. The preparation for the certification process would take years to complete and an astronomical amount of money (because making up for half a decade of neglect actually costs a lot, and the costs are going up exponentially by each year). And only then they could go for the certification process, without any guarantees that they would even run for another twenty years. We’re talking about old reactors here. You can’t simply just pop up out of nowhere and demand these operators to run their reactors for one more decade when they’ve been preparing for closure all these years without any kind of investments in maintenance/repairs to sustain future prolonged operations.

Building new reactors takes at least ten years. And billions over billions in funding. These are huge infrastructure projects. And we all know how huge infrastructure projects tend to usually go way over budget and stretch their timeline by at least half a decade. In the same time you can build renewables with triple the capacity and a third of the price. AND they are decentralized and don’t even need highly educated operators to run. And… don’t produce waste that needs storing for thousands of years. And they’re cheaper.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for small, modularised nuclear reactors, but this NPP mentality straight out of the 60s is no longer going to cut it in the future. France, while producing the vast majority of their energy using NPPs has been importing energy from Germany every summer for two/three years in a row now. Their NPPs are either too old and need constant maintenance and repairs, or the water levels in their rivers are too low (because of climate change/droughts) to provide cooling for the reactors so they need to shut them down, or the disastruous privatization they went through with their energy infrastructure that they had to reverse it (lol), and so on, thus they’ve been dependant on the German energy market everyone seems to criticize so much. Other countries aren’t even doing much better.

I’m all against the coal power plants, and Germany is in a bit of a pickle, but everyone seems to think that nuclear is this magic silver bullet here that could’ve saved Germany. People seem to imply that everyone in Germany took this decision without even looking at the numbers and that they’re the enlightened ones. Germany has more than enough exprets in this field. The numbers simply do not support large NPPs at this point.