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Comment by awesomeMilou | Hacker News Reader

I grew up close to Kalkar and visited the theme park that is now located at the power plant a few times as a kid.

If you read the timeline, you can see that the protests started before the Chernobyl disaster. At that point, no government entity wanted the reactor to go online.

Some of my family members went to protest there when they were younger. Our physics teachers discussed the plant with us on several occasions as part of the mandatory curriculum. I can just say, Germany's relationship to nuclear is and was always characterized by strange concerns about environmental issues and a drive just to oppose something for vague political associations. It's hard to describe, but feels very similar to virtue signaling.

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I can confirm that the protests were already hot before 1986. Chernobyl was just the final nail in the coffin. But this is often forgotten.

Another thing that is often forgotten and at least partially contributed to the outcome of Kalkar never going online, is a substantial change in the political climate regarding the question of nuclear proliferation.

It might seem strange now, but 40 years after WW II Germany was probably closer to getting its own nuclear inventory than today. While it was far from uncontroversial at the time it was not a heretic idea either and widely discussed.

A fast breeder like Kalkar would have been an important step in that direction, as would have been the heavy-water reactor in Niederaichbach, which only ran for about a year.

To complete the nuclear fuel cycle and to produce the plutonium for Kalkar a reprocessing plant would have been necessary which again had enabled Germany to produce weapons-grade nuclear material. The planned and partially completed facilities in Wackersdorf were abandoned in the 80s too.

I am sure the Russians spent much energy and money to shape the public opinion in Germany to serve their interests.

Not sure if they sold much gas to Germany during the Soviet times. I really don't know if they did, but it was cold war times then after all.

I don't know how much gas they actually sold at the time, but some major oil/gas pipelines were built during the 1960s, 1970s and early 80s. So the intention was clearly there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_...

That's interesting. Even if the volume was low, perhaps the Russians were nevertheless interested in sowing dissent in the German public opinion. In particular, making sure the energy sector is always dependent on some foreign source.

That plus well developed civilian nuclear power gives the means to developing atomic bombs, and Russia has every reason to fear a nuclear-armed Germany

I doubt that this was a major concern as US nuclear weapons have been stationed in Germany since 1960. They remain under US control but the German army is trained to use them in the event of a war. And of course Soviet nuclear weapons used to be stationed in East Germany during the cold war. So for practical purposes Germany was already nuclear-armed.

But who knows. This was 15 years after the end of WW2. It wouldn't be too surprising if there had been lingering fears in Russia about what Germany might be up to outside of NATO.

Even aside from WW2 history just simply having more potential threats is bad.

Deja Vu: I wrote a comment here some days ago arguing that while Russian/Soviet influence certainly exists public opinion is majorly homegrown:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331523

People from the anglosphere often seem to think that Russian and now Qatari gas is a replacement for the nuclear power, which is rather wrong: The vast majority of Germany's natural gas usage is residential for heating and in industry.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...

Gas is hard to replace ad hoc with electricity because you'd have to replace boilers in millions of homes and apartments, a multi-decade infrastructure project.

I have no doubt that the German public is full of true believers. That does not exclude Soviet/Russian influence. I don’t have any solid evidence but the Soviets/Russians had several motives, means and opportunities to spread anti-nuclear influence.

Not only would a (West) Germany with abundant cheap nuclear power have energy to compete industrially, they would have the ability to enrich plutonium which might lead to the development of a home-grown nuclear strike capacity within a short range from Moscow. That is, assuming such an idea was politically possible.

All energy is fungible. Certainly the cost of switching is not free, but the time to begin doing that was decades ago.

> Gas is hard to replace ad hoc with electricity because you'd have to replace boilers in millions of homes and apartments, a multi-decade infrastructure project

The best time to start a multi-decade infrastructure project was multiple decades ago. The second best time is now.

Boilers need replacing anyways, so this could have been very gracefully over time.

I am sure the Americans spent much energy and money to shape the public opinion in Germany to serve their interests.

Russians and companies interested in perpetuating the dependency on fossil fuels.

E.g. Greenpeace Germany had weirdly close links to Gazprom, and was even at one point selling natural gas as "green" and "renewable". Greenpeace Belgium was lobbying for the closing of nuclear power plants and replacing them with gas ones. I find it hard to believe that even Greenpeace could be that blind without external help.

When?

I think the timeline matters here. While the effect of CO2 emission on global warming are known (to some extent) for more than a century already, in the eighties and early nineties, it was not a chief concern of the general populace in Europe, while the (perceived or actual) dangers of nuclear energy certainly was.

I went to primary school (1-4 grade) in the mid 1990s in a small post-communist country. Fossil fuel burning producing emissions bad for your health and harming the planet was something that was a part of the curriculum in like the second or third grade (I remember it vividly because the teacher asked why are trolleybuses better than bused, I was sure it was something to do with the engine, but didn't want to risk embarrassing myself; I was right, and I told myself I should be more confident in myself).

If it managed to get into the curriculum of a small post-communist country in the mid-1990s, "green" organisations should have been aware of the impacts of emissions and CO2. And for what it's worth, Greenpeace up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine made it infeasible, was pushing for closing of actively running and already amortised nuclear power plants and replacing them with gas.

It's hilariously ironic how one of the most iconic green movements actually ended up causing more damage to the planet on the planetary scale than helping. Sucks for us all that have to live with it though, just because a bunch of blind idiots couldn't be bothered to think.

If you cannot think for yourself then often someone else will think for you…

Greenpeace was so rabidly anti-nuclear that they were blind to everything else, especially to the fact that nuclear energy != nuclear weapons.

Probably didn't help that for much of the cold war Germany was a likely candidate for "ground zero" of a nuclear exchange. I think living under that might reasonably influence people's attitudes.

Conflation between weapons and generators was weird then - and it is fossil idiocy at this point. There was a grain of truth at the time when all civilian nuclear programs were the flipside of military programs, but even then the imagery of mushroom clouds over power plants was either ignorant or dishonest.

Yes, I agree, I think a large part of it came from people not understanding the physics.

Even in my physics class in high school, when we spoke about the reactor in Kalkar and watched several documentaries about Chernobyl, our teachers made it seem like explosions from nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons would be the same in yield. Which is an outright lie, given a nuclear reactor usually explodes from a steam or hydrogen explosion.

To me, the opinion about nuclear power kind of feels like the subject of homeopathy in Germany. It feels like in the general population there is a whole that can only be filled by non-science and quackery. The most reasonable people that usually believe in science just get emotional and ignore facts in favor of a vague feeling of defending their beliefs no matter what.

Yes, indeed. But there are still parts of Germany where you should not pick wild mushrooms because of Chernobyl. And the whole Asse II we still have to fix.

Which is a bit more tangable.

Sounds like an overblown myth. I've never heard of any places where you can't pick mushrooms because of Chernobyl in Poland

If I remember correctly that was a result how the fallout was transported via the jetstream - and if it did rain, hence a rather non-uniform distribution. The first fallout cloud went from Ukraine over Poland to Scandinavia but it did not rain down. A second cloud went westwards over then Czechoslovakia and then southern Germany, hence the impact. The German Agency for Radation Protection has this map of Caesium ground contamination in 1986:

https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Bilder/BfS/DE/ion/notfallschut...

The mushroom thing is because of bioaccumulation: Mushrooms seem to ingest the particles from its surrounding ground/ground water, hence a higher concentration of radioactive material in a smaller volume. And then wild boars eat those mushrooms, concentrating it even further. Caesium 137 has a rather short half life of only 30 years, but through the process of accumulation/concentration still today meat from wild boars shot in that region gets tested and is often over the allowable limit to eat.

In Bavaria testing of venison is mandatory and consumers have the right to see the measurement protocol for every piece of sold meat.

Because the contamination varies greatly, depending on where it rained during a short timespan in 1986, the amount of usable meat also varies, but is usually between 50% and 70%. The rest, which is not safe to eat is bought by the state.[1]

People are always quick to call Germans crazy because of their attitude towards nuclear energy, but Chernobyl had real world implications to our daily lives and to a degree still has to this day.

[1] https://www.jagd-bayern.de/jagd-wild-wald/jagdpraxis/rcm-mes...

I recall people talk about that in Sweden too. There did however seems to be a bit confusion around since copper, silver and iron mining tend to release a lot of radioactive radon dust in a fairly large area. The recommendation to be careful with wild mushrooms or wild meat never made a distinction between the two sources.

It's so amusing to see that German anti nuclear policy can be essentially summarized as different eras of 'Russia bad'.

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