First of all: Is it a political decision with glancing at the next elections?
Yes, definitely. More than three quarters of the German population are against nuclear power. But despite the effort, the ruling CDU/FDP coalition cannot take any profit from it. The move is percieved as opportunism, the clear winner so far has been the Green Party, which was actually founded by the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970's and early 80's. I'm not sure, though, if it's a good idea. Politics shouldn't be dominated by ideologies.
I admit we Germans have a bit of a radiation phobia. Not only were we the last to introduce microwaves in households, because people didn't trust in it, we also are afraid of "Elektro-Smog" from mobile phones and everything else that is electrical.
Other countries have other phobias instead. Japan has a germ phobia, America has a nudity phobia
The decision to abandon nuclear power isn't a completely irrational one, though. Chancellor Angela Merkel's original profession is physicist and as a scientist she has to know what she is doing. And correct me if I'm wrong but I think no other current political leader of the First World has a scientific background.
I tend to think that it somehow made "click" in her mind after Fukushima and that not all of what happened since then, is just political calculation.
What are the facts?
The main fact that everybody in the world agrees on, is that nuclear energy was never meant to be a final solution but only a bridge technology, until something better has been invented.
Fact is also, that in the 1970's it was said, that statistically a serious nuclear accident would happen only every 100,000 years. Boy, how time flies...
Problem is: Most of the world has become so content with this convenient "bridge technology", that they have simply given up thinking about serious alternatives. The consensus is something like
"Yes, we have to get rid of it but it's too early now".
So when is the right time, hm?
Maybe the next accident happens in the middle of Europe, who knows? Or in the USA. Or in China. Or Russia (again). Maybe then is the right time to start considering the alternatives?
If it seems to be too early to abandon nuclear power, then only because we should have started seriously developing the alternatives 30 years ago but couldn't move our lazy asses.
The problem here is accommodativeness or rather slackness. Someone has to act as a motivator, starting an incentive. Without that, nothing will ever happen.
I also think that the deadline 2022 is ambitious. Maybe too ambitious. So what? At least now we
have a deadline.
Everybody now has a goal. There is pressure now. There wasn't pressure before. I don't know, if we will succeed but this is a wakeup call for all creative minds. And say what you want but technically creative minds are Germany's major resource, so it makes sense to let them loose.
I believe it is possible to get rid of nuclear power until 2022 without buying electricity from outside and without deteriorating the CO2 balance and yet keeping our standard of living and our industry alive.
But it's not going to be easy. It has to be a concentrated effort with widely spread measures and with involving all possibilities. Producing energy has to be diversified, regionalized, decentralized, maybe even privatised and a huge part must go into the effort of saving energy in the first place. It's estimated that one third of the energy we produce, is wasted!!!
The more this is going its way, the more companies will realize, that there is a lot of money to earn with future energy production and all that is directly or indirectly connected with that.
I'm quite sure that loads of money have to be invested at first and that energy might become considerably more expensive at first but on the long run, I think, energy cost will drop again.
I expressed my deep mistrust in nuclear energy several times here and probably many have rolled their eyes about my writings. But don't get me wrong: I'm not against nuclear energy, because I hate the technology. I am against nuclear energy, because I seriously doubt the capability of the human race to control and use it safely and responsibly.
The accident at Fukushima didn't happen, because of the forces of nature. How can nature be guilty of destroying something humans built? That's where I roll my eyes. No, the failure at Fukushima was human failure, beginning with constructing those power plants there in the first place, then neglecting the possibililty, that a 6 m high protection wall couldn't be enough (despite millenia of experience with earthquakes and tsunamis) and finally the whole management of the disaster.
In Japan the trigger was an earthquake but the cause was human failure. Somewhere else something completely different can be the trigger. God knows what but I guarantee you, that there will still be the same human failure in handling it. Maybe in 10 years, maybe in 20 years, maybe in 30 or maybe in one year, who knows? Nuclear power plants are man-made machines. Machines get older. First they develop peculiarities, then there are incidents and finally accidents happen. And all the while people are unable or unwilling to see the danger, because
"until now everything was running save and fine".
Also consider this: At some point a nuclear power plant
has to go out of operation. But it will take decades and will cost billions to dismantle existing nuclear power plants, because you cannot simply call a wrecking ball and tear it down. So why is it a good idea to build new ones, when it costs even more time and money to dismantle them some day?
And then there is the unsolved problem of nuclear waste disposal. It has to be safe for tenth of thousands of generations. Nobody can guarantee that. Today we need archeologists to discover how people lived 2000 years ago. Who can say we will be able to warn people in 2000 years about the danger of our nuclear waste and tell them not to dig a hole there?
The ancient Egyptians made everything from stone. We make everything from plastic. I don't think it's going to last as long.
So the sooner we put an end to this, the better. And if Germany has to be the one to provide the wake-up call, the motivator, the kick in the ass, fine with me. Even if the schedule is too ambitious, it will defenitely create new technologies, new solutions and -- maybe most important of all -- new thinking.
Some of the argumentation I read here, reminds me of the reactions hundreds of years ago, when someone suggested to use metal instead of wood to make ships. And to show him, how crazy his idea was, they took an anvil and threw it into the harbor, laughing. Old thinking always looks very ridiculous in hindsight...
What we need, is a better alternative. The faster, the better. I don't want to believe, that we actually have to wait until the uranium runs out. Instead I want to believe there are better alternatives.
As one very clever man once said: The stone age didn't end because of a lack of stones.
So let's move. Even the longest journey must begin with one single step.