I suspect it is partly a political move, partly economical.
For me, the biggest drawback for nuclear power is that it is expensive. Nuclear fuel is cheap but building, maintaining and decommissioning power plants is not.
It is especially apparent as power plants approach their end of life. The choice is to either decommission it, an expensive and unproductive process, or to extend its life. Unlike what many people think, there is nothing wrong with the second option, however, maintenance costs increase exponentially, so passed a certain point, it is no longer viable.
I suspect Germany moved away from nuclear because of a combination of several factors : public perception of nuclear power following Fukushima accidents, power plants approaching end of life and sufficient coal reserves. Their policy seem to be a mix of highly variable solar+wind backed up by on-demand coal plants, and nuclear, while ideal for baseline, doesn't seem to fit this policy.
Germany had been moving away from nuclear power for a long time before Fukushima: The plans for shutdowns were made in 2000, with the last reactors closing in 2015-2020 (there were no fixed dates, but rather remaining production capacities assigned, so e.g. stopping a reactor for a few months of maintenance wouldn't have meant a loss for the operator). A anti-nuclear movement had existed for decades before that, growing more and more in popularity the more people lost trust in the plant operators and the agencies supposed to oversee them: operators failing to report incidents, regular failures in temporary storage facilities (e.g. the "Asse", an old salt mine in which nuclear waste is stored and which started to flood), a never-completed search for an actual long-term storage facility, questions about why the government was paying for so much of that work, ...
Late 2010 the then-current government decided to weaken this and added run-time extensions, against popular opinion which wanted to stay with the 2000 plans. Fukushima pushed this back up to public attention, which caused the government to turn 180 degrees, force the worst reactors offline temporarily and re-implement the 2000 plans.
I agree that building and decomissioning are expensive. But the rational response to that is: don't build more. How is early decomissioning going to help both of these issues?
For me, the biggest drawback for nuclear power is that it is expensive. Nuclear fuel is cheap but building, maintaining and decommissioning power plants is not.
It is especially apparent as power plants approach their end of life. The choice is to either decommission it, an expensive and unproductive process, or to extend its life. Unlike what many people think, there is nothing wrong with the second option, however, maintenance costs increase exponentially, so passed a certain point, it is no longer viable.
I suspect Germany moved away from nuclear because of a combination of several factors : public perception of nuclear power following Fukushima accidents, power plants approaching end of life and sufficient coal reserves. Their policy seem to be a mix of highly variable solar+wind backed up by on-demand coal plants, and nuclear, while ideal for baseline, doesn't seem to fit this policy.