Comment by 01100011
12 hours ago
Like most backward looking judgements these days, such things require understanding the culture and zeitgeist of the mid 70s.
I'm pro-nuclear as well, but understand that for many decades the "smart" thing to do was to oppose it. I wouldn't expect a musical artist to have a more nuanced opinion than most of their contemporaries.
I think Chernobyl was a big factor in European sentiment towards nuclear power too, in the 80s / 90s.
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.
More like the robot thing to do.
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.
This is historical revisionism. Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is rooted in the peace movement and environmentalism, with the majority of public discourse starting in the 1970s.
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.
Revisionism it is not. It was Schröder’s administration that shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants.
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.
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It's kind of all of the above. State and non-state actors have leveraged pretty much every movement there is to their own ends: civil rights, anti-nuclear, pro-nuclear, anti-Iranian government sentiment, pro-Iranian government sentiment, even jazz tours in Europe which were assisted by US intelligence orgs in the 20th century.
It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.
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Indeed. Also Asse was a political decision, against the scientist who found better places to put the waste, but Asse II was close to east Germany. And West German politicians wanted to give a big "screw you" to East Germany, because they also did something similar.
I'm still against nuclear in Germany. I'm fine with Finland doing it.
We don't know what to what fraction that peace movement ran on being propped up by KGB. Those things are not mutually exclusive, genuine protest and getting propped up by a foreign power just for destabilization and giggles.
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.
Sure, it was all Schröders fault.
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...
> And those dangers can be handled, if companies and regulators act responsible.
As further proof of how well that works, Fukushima arrived in 2011: https://www.scribd.com/document/819988755/Examining-Regulato...
What makes you think the Chernobyl accident was not embraced to influence European policy?
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You still can't eat Mushrooms and wild Boar meet has to be tested in certain places in Germany. That was before Schröder.
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.
Not at all, we look into Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples of what actual happens when things don't go as the advocates sell it.
And naturally the radio waste is fine as long as we store it into other countries.
In the last 70 years, 600-700 nuclear reactors have been in operation worldwide, and three of them have had major accidents. You already mentioned two of them, the third is Three Mile Island.
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.
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Fukushima hit hard in (West) Germany: Chernobyl was mostly explained away with "because Soviet", it wasn't that hard to convince people that much safer nuclear was possible. But Japan, of all countries, not being able to safely run a reactor? The country of trains running on time and of Toyotas making domestic cars look laughably unreliable in ADAC statistics?
There’s not actually that much high level waste… thing the UK has a couple swimming pools worth after 50 years of operating reactors
I quite enjoy the 1979 Dan Fogelberg song Face the Fire from a purely musical perspective, despite it being an anti-nuclear-power anthem written in the wake of three mile island. There's no reason to expect that Kraftwork's poltical ideas are good ones or were good ones at the time, even if it resulted in some good music.
No it was never the smart thing, always an uninformed emotional reaction based on fear.
I grew in the area most hit by Chernobyl fallout in Europe. The disfigured newborn kids who didn't make it would probably not share your view.
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.
There are a number of pro-nuclear advocates on this page who can’t just engage in good faith but instead dismiss and deride their interlocutors as “crazy”, “paranoid”, “fear mongers“. It’s infuriating because the origins of anti-nuclear sentiments are often plain and perfectly understandable, as your poignant anecdotes illustrate.
I rather not have another Fukushima or Chernobyl in Europe.
It was largely our own governments wanting to scare us of nukes so we'd be scared of the Soviets, like in America with the schoolchildren doing duck and cover drills.
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.
I think it came from peaceniks and hippies mostly. You're talking about the equivalent of modern anti-vax liberals. Anti-science and given to conspiracies and mysticism.
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.
> There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s
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.
> anti-vax liberals
Just a small correction, but the anti-vax arguments are very conservative, not liberal.
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> You're talking about the equivalent of modern anti-vax liberals. Anti-science and given to conspiracies and mysticism
In 2026 this is decidedly a more conservative stance. They installed RFK Jr., who in addition to Wakefield, is the antivax guy. MAHA specifically (can’t believe they actually stuck with that acronym) is overwhelmingly Republican dominated/supported.
The Soviets were parking nukes in Cuba in striking distance of the White House. If that's not legitimately terrifying to you, I just don't know.
Which directly followed the USA stationing Jupiter missiles in Turkey with the range to strike Moscow. As part of the mutual climb down from the missile crisis the USA removed the Jupiters, as both sides then understood the wisdom of avoiding hot brinkmanship
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Not anymore than the US being able to strike worldwide to this very moment. They are the only country that has used nuclear bombs against civilians.
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.
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Their nukes are still within striking distance.