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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?