When I was at school in Germany, I read both "The Cloud" and "The Last Children of Schewenborn". At the time (I'm young), I was also reading the ".ausgestrahlt" (a quarterly anti-nuclear magazine) right around the time the Fukushima disaster happened.
As is obvious, I was anti-nuclear myself (and still am, to a degree, but not related to fear of radiation). Looking back, it's clear to me, that there was little scientific understanding, but much fear, of the danger of radiation in the anti-nuclear movement. The books catastrophizing nuclear meltdowns and nuclear war certainly didn't help. The interesting aspect, to me, is, that the effects of radiation are correctly and quite graphically described in the books, but overly exaggerated in proportion and scale.
Being against nuclear power provides a shared identity, a sense of righteousness and there are other strong groupthink effects. Putting things into context gets really hard when everybody is either constantly reinforcing your biases or, alternatively, obviously shilling for the nuclear industry (which I also did see a lot of!).
It seems to me that the anti-nuclear movement is currently dying off. The recent protests against transports of used-up nuclear fuel have been rather small. Since Germany decided to phase out nuclear energy, there hasn't been much of a reason to protest against it and attention has shifted to other matters.
I wonder how different things would have been if Germany had increased rather than decreased the reliance on nuclear energy.
After all so much of Germany’s energy now comes from natural gas which is bad for climate change and, in the case of Germany, the natural gas comes from Russia. Helps feed the war machine, etc.
Germany, and the rest of Europe, nowadays would have been less reliant on Russia and have contributed less to climate change if they had used more nuclear energy.
> Being against nuclear power provides a shared identity, a sense of righteousness and there are other strong groupthink effects. Putting things into context gets really hard when everybody is either constantly reinforcing your biases or, alternatively, obviously shilling for the nuclear industry (which I also did see a lot of!).
As is obvious, I was anti-nuclear myself (and still am, to a degree, but not related to fear of radiation). Looking back, it's clear to me, that there was little scientific understanding, but much fear, of the danger of radiation in the anti-nuclear movement. The books catastrophizing nuclear meltdowns and nuclear war certainly didn't help. The interesting aspect, to me, is, that the effects of radiation are correctly and quite graphically described in the books, but overly exaggerated in proportion and scale.
Being against nuclear power provides a shared identity, a sense of righteousness and there are other strong groupthink effects. Putting things into context gets really hard when everybody is either constantly reinforcing your biases or, alternatively, obviously shilling for the nuclear industry (which I also did see a lot of!).
It seems to me that the anti-nuclear movement is currently dying off. The recent protests against transports of used-up nuclear fuel have been rather small. Since Germany decided to phase out nuclear energy, there hasn't been much of a reason to protest against it and attention has shifted to other matters.