I grew up in the 90s and didn't even fully understand what it was, but I remember the fear around it. I remember people in Ireland worrying about Sellafield nuclear power plant in the UK and talking about things like wind direction if there was an incident. And the government posting out iodine tablets to homes.
Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany was entirely manufactured; it was the product of Gerhard Schröder and similar robots who enriched themselves on Russian oil and gas.
Ironically, it is also where the so-called Green Party began.
The debate has always been about what to do with the waste. Our government misrepresented the "Asse" as a solved solution for a final repository, even though it was always only a test repository for low and intermediate-level radioactive waste. But hubris or corruption led to one scandal after another, forever tainting the discussion about nuclear waste in Germany.
Everything that follows is just a reaction.
My counterclaim to your unsubstantiated take: Pro-nuclear sentiment is what has been manufactured. Anti-nuclear is grassroots.
Where is the peace movement and so-called environmentalism rooted?
Pro-nuclear is pro-environment.
The alternatives are fossil fuels and renewables, which are both extremely anti-environment: water power require large artificial reservoirs and create flood risks, wind power kills/drives away wildlife and is almost useless without efficient large—scale energy storage and other methods of power generation, while solar also requires storage and other power generation but also requires mining of rare earth metals.
Of course we could just stop all of our industries to save power. No more production, no more consumption, no more pollution.
Show us some evidence based and peer reviewed studies for your claims. Repeating the same old and scientifically unproved claims doesn’t help.
It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.
Nuclear IS a green energy solution.
I'm still against nuclear in Germany. I'm fine with Finland doing it.
Just like that Red Army Faction group whose name in hindsight was much closer to the truth than anyone really assumed at the time. At least at some point it clearly was a KGB operation (visits to a certain Dresden office are documented, and yes, guess who was also stationed in Dresden at the time), likely not from the start but quickly co-opted. KGB, as in the service that was built on the experience of how Germany solved their eastern front in WWI through organizing passage from Zurich for a certain dissident.
Yes, those movements were genuine. But they were also directed to some extent. The fictional Tischbier character in Deutschland 83 comes somewhat close to illustrating that ambiguity.
It had nothing to do with for example chernobyl, where children were not allowed to be outside on the playground for weeks and where you had to pay attention where your food came from and it also has nothing to do that you still have to have the meat of wild boars checked and be careful with eating mushrooms. Totally unrelated.
Seriously, the anti nuclear crowd might have not been rational from the start and still is dogmatic, but it formed exactly, because people did not trust the manufactured state's sentiment of nuclear will provide cheap and clean energy without risk.
Because it is not a clean energy, it is incredibly dirty and dangerous. And those dangers can be handled, if companies and regulators act responsible. But people simply do not trust that they are. And they do have some data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accid...
As further proof of how well that works, Fukushima arrived in 2011: https://www.scribd.com/document/819988755/Examining-Regulato...
Combine that with political decision to put waste into Asse II. Not because it was a good place, just screw with East Germany.
Big demonstration like Brokdorf where around 81. Schroeder begun being a Ministerpräsident in 1990, and 1998 Bundeskanzler.
And naturally the radio waste is fine as long as we store it into other countries.
That’s a catastrophic failure rate under 0.5 percent. Sure, the effects of a failure spread widely and can be a hazard for a long time, but personally I would want to see the same risk-averse sentiment applied to production and use of perfluorinated compounds and fossil fuels, since both of those can spread much farther and cause more of a hazard.
The cherry on top: coal power plants spread significant amounts of radionuclides into the environment.
If we’re talking risk aversion, we can address both the major certain risk of climate change and the lesser but still valid risks of nuclear while saving a ton of money and probably getting results quickly. The reason so much fossil fuel money goes into pushing nuclear power is that it guarantees fossil fuel usage continues unchecked for decades before possibly going down, and we don’t have decades any more.
Batteries are one solution, but the power storage requirements far surpass the world’s capacity for battery production, and come with the same caveats: rare earth metals, which need mining. Mining is a huge source of air pollution, as mining equipment is usually diesel powered, and far worse for the environment due to pollution of natural surface and ground water reservoirs.
Uranium mines have the same issues for sure, the scale is just very different.
My girlfriends first older brother was one of those babies, the second one survived but is disfigured and needs serious care to live. I had three such kids in my first class at school, four different ones in my second and a sizeable number of parents whose kids didn't survive childbirth. Not being allowed to eat certain mushrooms or digging in the woods was the easier part.
So this may be a bit more tangible for some people than for others.
Having enemies the population is afraid of is good for politicians and they'll take any enemies they can find, and they'll do so indiscriminately regardless of the real nuance of the issues.
Immigrants, abortion, this religion or that, rock music, jazz music, alcohol, marijuana, global warming, windmills, books... just whatever as hard as they can regardless of if it's reasonable or not.
There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s. The world was quite a different place back then. The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking, and Communism was much more expansionary.
Yes, but I think if you asked which country was more likely to "push the button" in the 50s-70s it would have been the US, and the extent to which the US continued invasions after the collapse of the USSR kind of vindicates that.
> The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking
I don't think this was ever true except in the least useful measure, raw headcount of conscripts.
In 2026 this is decidedly a more conservative stance. They installed RFK Jr., who aside from Wakefield is the antivax guy. MAHA specifically (can’t believe they actually stuck with that acronym) is overwhelmingly Republican dominated/supported.
Just a small correction, but the anti-vax arguments are very conservative, not liberal.
They may be self described liberal, but their actions certainly aren't.
Anti-Vax people are/were seen the leftist idiots who were anti-capitalist, anti-corpo who would rather have died of preventable diseases than perpetuate the medical industry and its capitalist schemes trying to keep us sick to sell drugs and also ban weed.
It's so funny to watch the political sides swap and the doublethink take all of a few days to propogate.
I wish this was true. How many right wing political parties support policies that improve the natural environment? Doing that is the domain of left wing parties, but I’d love to know of any exceptions.
Hang on, are we talking about liberal or leftist now?
Because a lot of these hoax "wellness" movements are conservative. Distrusting science and things you don't understand is a conservative mindset.
It'd be nice to put jingoism aside for a change.
The big problem is having one country be able to do it without deterrents and with impunity. MAD is a good thing, if anyone will have those things at all.
The main natural predator of Americans is other Americans.