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If humanity continues its current path of not caring or actively worsening the problem (such as Brazil is doing), more likely than not nature will dictate and send us into extinction - which is why the German Constitutional Court required our previous government to produce scientifically sound plans for CO² reductions in a landmark ruling [1]. The reasoning was that if nothing or not enough is being done today, the freedom of future generations is automatically restricted, to the point that there may be no choices left.

[1] https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...



Did the German court include funding nuclear power?


No, for a number of reasons:

1) Even if we would order a new plant now, it would only be ready in 10-15 years. Building the equivalent amount in wind, solar and battery for storage would be ready faster and cheaper overall.

2) We don't have a permanent, safe place to dump the waste - the "old" reactors might be grandfathered in, but I can't imagine the BVerfG to let anything new pass that would expose future generations to the liability of dealing with the waste.

3) We don't have the cooling capacity - even back when we had more nuclear plants, they had to be regularly limited in power output in the summer because the rivers would get too hot otherwise.


Surely nuclear waste is a non-issue - a fully fueled nuclear reactor runs for decades! The volume of generated waste is miniscule.


I’m not unaware of the problem but there are other solutions besides “let’s have a dictatorship.”


As the BVerfG noted: the less we do today, the more likely it is that our children end up in a dictatorship... just with nature itself as the dictator, which is even worse since you can't putsch away nature.




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