German energy policy moves from expensive stuff that doesn't work well to stuff that doesn't exist.
Um, OK...
Germany’s Merz: Nuclear fusion to make wind power obsolete
The participants in this week’s North Sea Summit in Hamburg committed to building 15 GW of offshore wind per year over 2031-2040. Country leaders including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirmed the goal of 300 GW on the so-called North Seas by 2050. At the same time, he apparently believes that wind turbines will begin to be dismantled much sooner!
Wind power is a “transitional technology” and it will be around for “ten, twenty, maybe thirty years,” Merz claimed, as quoted by Bild. He expressed confidence that Germany would put the world’s first fusion reactor online and estimated it would make electricity so cheap that no other generation methods would be needed.
Merz said repeatedly that the nuclear exit was a mistake
The country abandoned investments in nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster and prompted early closure of all reactors. Causing much controversy, especially during the recent energy crisis, the phaseout was completed in 2023.
In the campaign before last year’s elections, Merz called wind turbines ugly, adding that he’d like if they could eventually be taken down. He recently said the nuclear exit was a “huge strategic mistake” that caused “the most expensive energy transition in the entire world...”
Nuclear fission works, is cleaner and safer than coal, on which Germany now depends, and far more reliable and sustainable than so called "renewable energy." There is no evidence that fusion ever will drive a power plant.
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As the German assholes have shown, definitively, a commitment to so called "renewable energy" is a commitment to fossil fuels, excessive mining, the destruction of wilderness, and, clearly, an effort to rob the poor to enrich the rich.
Germany is a coal dependent nation; coal plants kill people whenever they operate normally.
The aesthetics involved in calling industrial parks for wind turbines "sculptures" is right out of Ayn Randian contempt for the environment; I am personally appalled and offended by the marketing that shows vast stretches of once virgin wilderness with microplastic spewing unsustainable short lived industrial junk that will become landfill within 20 years.
The single nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon in California produces, far more reliably, more electricity, on a twelve acre footprint more energy than thousands of square miles of wind turbine industrial plants spread across thousands of square miles of once pristine desert ecosystems.
Electricity generation in California, by Source.
Anyone, and I do mean anyone who applauds this outcome in that coal dependent hellhole Germany, to my mind is not an environmentalist, but is merely an easily manipulated rote thinker.
I would add that anyone who is betting the future of one's country, and in fact, the future of the world on nuclear fusion - and to be clear I support plasma physics research - is demonstrating contempt for the future of humanity, and is clearly unfamiliar with even the basic tenets of industrial and academic science.
The result of this "renewable energy will save us" pro-mining, pro-development attitude is written in the planetary atmosphere, which is collapsing leaving the planet in flames.
In the 23 years I've been writing at DU listening to mindless antinukes pratting on about tearing the shit out of the planet for so called "renewable energy" the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide (not to mention the other heavy metal and carcinogenic particulates associated with fossil fuels) has risen, since the week beginning November 17, 2002, by 55.71 ppm as of this writing, from 369.74 ppm to (as of the week beginning January 25, 2026) to 428.39 ppm.
This has come at a cost of vast subsidy to the rich paid by the poor on a scale of trillions of dollars, this on a burning planet where around 1 billion people lack access to improved sanitation.
The myopic airheads in the fossil fuel coddling antinuke industry who praise so called "renewable energy" have such obscene indifference to reality as to actually complain about nuclear subsidies. They are obviously incapable of understanding economics, just as the can't compare the vast ongoing death toll associated with fossil fuels, about which they have never given a rat's ass.
IEA overview, Energy Investments.
The graphic is interactive at the link; one can calculate overall expenditures on what the IEA dubiously calls "clean energy."
The bourgeois poorly educated antinukes applauding this outcome, to my mind, lack even a trace of decency or even a trace of moral awareness.
The last best hope of humanity, capable of doing less and less while bourgeois brats pick lint out of their navels complaining about things they are incapable of understanding, chanting silly slogans, is nuclear fission energy. It's here; it works; and it saves human lives and in fact, vast stretches of increasingly disappearing wilderness, and slows the rate of the degradation of the planetary atmosphere.
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
The German nuclear phase out was not only an economic crime; it was a crime against humanity and, in fact, against the planet's ecosystems.
Clearly, it disgusts me.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.