I didn't downvote, but I expect you got downvoted for a misleading bifurcation. You might well be interpreted as saying "the alternative to nuclear power is more coal" which sounds sort of plausible until you think about it. Or "every time we close a nuclear plant we need to open a new coal-fired electricity plant to replace it". New coal plants isn't what's replacing the nuclear plants that are being closed, so your bifurcation is just misleading rhetoric.
I don't know about Japan, but I live in Germany, and what's happening here isn't a shift back to carbon, it's short-term contracts. The operators of some carbon plants get short-term contracts, so existing plants can be operated at a higher percentage of capacity than they would if nuclear weren't being phased out. But follow the money: Noone's investing in new plants. The current contracts aren't encouraging enough to invest in new plants. And even the operators of some old plants are complaining about underuse.
There's a carbon-based plant near where I live that has never been permitted to produce power. It was one of the last carbon power plants built nearby, and eight years after being connected to the grid, it still hasn't produced power. They turn it on for a few hours now and then to test, that's all. Its neighbour ceased production five years ago, after only two years of production.
The key here is that the new power plants being built are wind and sun. Your wording could be interpreted as saying said that the shift is was only from nuclear to carbon, and when none of the new plants being built are carbon-fired, then you might well get downvoted for that.
Do you have stats on that? I'm not German, so perhaps I'm ill informed, but this report indicates that actual new coal plants have opened up in the past decade.
Both extensions and new coal plants are there. I'll translate the key column: "plans declared invalid", "planning paused", "application submitted", "planning stopped", "being planned, blocked on (a kind of lawsuit)" and finally "being planned, building uncertain due to questions about profit".
The most interesting one is perhaps the first, which is an extension that started construction in 2007. It still isn't done and its license to operate is dependent on two lawsuits. From the public documents it's somewhat uncertain to me whether the license to operate is real. It might be a true yes, or it might be a complicated no: "you may use the new plant, but it has to emit less mercury than you possibly can achieve." I'm not sure. Either way, the owners don't seem to have spent much money on completing the building in the past year. They clearly have a license to build it and are spending money on lawyers and on removing some things that were leakily built, but AFAICT they aren't spending real money on progressing the building.
The energycentral page says new plants are needed and will be built, but it doesn't name any. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_fossil-thermischen_K... names them. The list is a bit difficult to read. Following up on the recent ones, it seems that only one of the <10yo coal plants is both operating and planned to continue operating as a coal plant. I might have overlooked a detail or two, but not a trend.
