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Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

It was part emotional response to Chernobyl, part is was full on Russian propaganda infiltrating parliaments in Europe.

The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.

It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Business... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer#Business_activ...

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Chernobyl did deposit radioactive material over Germany. Fukushima also happened, btw., and that led to an acceleration of the exit then.

Yep, it did. And (brown)coal kills much more people and the dependence on Russian gas made the geopolitics much worse than any nuclear reactor ever would.

The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.

It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.

I think we can agree that people are not in general making purely statistical decisions when it comes to what risks are acceptable and which ones are not.

German TV had local experts who could tell the audience in real time that the authorities in Fukishsima were lying about the unfolding disaster.

A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.

You do realize that those "experts" were widely criticized by scientists and engineers for their lack of knowledge of the plant, many, many scientific inaccuracies and for basic fear mongering right? Most of the things they said weren't accurate. What was accurate is that the Tsunami took out the power lines around the plant and its cooling pond had a hydrogen explosion. Their backup power was down (which was the design flaw in the plant) because it was flooded. This required the pumping of seawater into the reactor to keep it cool. It never melted down in any way and the death toll was either 0 or 1 depending on how you count. Just in case you actually wanted to deal in facts on this one.

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