It's strange to see Germany so against nuclear, but happily buying all that clean nuclear energy from it's neighbour. Nuclear accidents don't care about borders, you'd think if they really meant what they preached they'd boycott their closest nuclear plants aswell
In bavaria, chernobyl was an event my parents generation fully experienced.
It was very clear (especially when you watch the old reports, i did a presentation about this in school) people didn't know a lot about nuclear and how to act upon an accident. Kids were not allowed to play on playgrounds, food had to be washed etc.
Even today if you shoot a dear, you have to check it for radiation!
its not strange.
And another reason why politics are stupid: Bavaria is reigned by the CSU. They have the majority for a very long time and the partner CDU was in power for over 16 years. None of them made any long term nuclear power strategy ever.
No one cared to plan longterm enough at all. Building nuclear is not easy and its a lot harder in a country like germany were we want to be extra save.
Even the newest europeon nuclear power plants take very long time. The last one took i think 18 years instead of 10?
Backed by batteries is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Batteries required to make them viable are never included in the LCOEs for renewable, because it'd make them ridiculously more expensive than nuclear. The problem is we need power now, all the time. It's much easier to develop new technologies when the lights are still on.
Even backed by batteries renewables are still winning. How good things look depends on how much battery you decide to include, but fortunately we don't need that much battery, especially while we still have some legacy dispatchable generation.
It "helps" that nuclear is just so slow and expensive to get going that everything else just ends up looking pretty good. If it were cheap, fast and safe that would have been great, though.
The difference being nuclear only needs something to cover the peak, whilst renewable needs capacity to cover 100% of production because of wild variability.
