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Merkel made some pretty stupid mistakes. Dependency on Russian gas was one, and closing the nuclear plants at the worst possible time was another.
I bet that those 2 are part in why the German economy is currently slowing down.
Closing nukes was a knee jerk move by Germans who shat their pants after Fukushima. People wanted that.
One of the few good decisions of this stupid party was closing the nuclear plants. If only they would have invested in a better power grid and renewable energy at the same time.. But they actively sabotaged it and relied completly on fossil energy.
Absolutely no, closing the plants made the energy crisis way worse when Russia closed for supplies.
The mistake was ignoring renewable energy, not closing nuclear plants.
The effects of the energy crisis were also noticeable for uranium oxide which also reached its 11 year peak during the crisis. More than doubling in price.
What didn't increase its cost during the crisis? Renewables. As @Aufgehtsabgehts@feddit.org said investing in those would have reduced the effects of the crisis noticeably. An example for this is Denmark. Also note that cooling reactors becomes more difficult/expensive with climate change. See energy prices in France in the summer.
Also in Ukraine you can right now see another disadvantage of atomic plants: They are huge strategic targets.
Absolutely, but you shouldn't replace nuclear with coal, you should build the renewable infrastructure FIRST, and not help create a completely unnecessary shortage that has to be filled in a panic. Closing the nuclear plants was replaced with coal not renewables, except slowly as that capacity is being built.
It was also a double standard, as import of French electricity from nuclear power was still imported.
It was such a shit show, although I agree we should definitely invest in renewables going forward.
In 2022 Germany exported 15.3 TWh to France.
Of course there have been days where imports were made, as the power flow varies widely depending on a huge number of circumstances, but all in all the often repeated claim that Germany relies on nuclear power from France is plain wrong. Correct is that France was very reliant on other countries to get trough the hot summer due to their plants failing.
You can see the full data here: https://www.smard.de/page/en/topic-article/207552/209668/the-electricity-market-in-2022
No Idea where you get that I support lignite use. As I said, renewables should be the choice.
And no, there is no excuse "We had to replace the reactors with coal!".
By current prices building renewable energy which generates X per year costs about as much as importing/mining fossil raw materials to produce X for 5 years. If you factor in storage you get 10 years. Thats very short time for amortization. Fasten than a nuclear plant can even be built. And this does not even include all the costs fossil fuels produce otherwise (upkeep of plants, environmental impact, ...)