Per this article electricity in France is 139.07 vs 214.89 Euros in Germany. France is largely non polluting nuclear.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_result.jsp?country1=Germany&country2=FranceIt is smart for the French to import cheap power and export expensive nuclear power to Germany. I guess both Germany and France have non polluting forms of energy.
Sorry - I didn't see how to translate the link from Deutsch.
"or example, for Tschernobyl only 50 "liquidators" died from direct radiation. But estimates are that about 50'000 died from later damage (give or take a factor of 3 depending on whom you ask)."
I don't think they've died yet. Give it another 20 years from 1986 and then blame it on the radiation. Per the following, the numbers are all over the board depending on whose estimate you use. They figure maybe 4,000 died, but it is hard to isolate these deaths from other environmental exposure. Smoking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disasterIt was a bad thing, but again learn from it and move on.
"And then there is the radiation that was spread around. Even today in some areas of Germany you are advised to not eat (more than a few) mushrooms you take from the woods, because of that radiation. "
Have you ever questioned that maybe, just maybe, they are being ultra-conservative in their warnings? Have you ever heard of hormesis?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HormesisA little bit of sunshine is good. Too much bad. Some people have tried to show that just a little radiation may actually be good for you, but have been silenced. I wonder what the actual dose you would receive from those mushrooms and how many mushrooms would you have to eat for how many years before there was even a measurable effect. Maybe, there is a greater risk of mercury from those coal plant emissions than from those mushrooms.
"But even with that nuclear power plants are already more expensive than regenerative energies, even if you add storage costs - as long as you also add the real cost of nuclear waste handling etc. That is the main reason why nearly no new reactors are build. "
It's kind of odd. They built a lot of them in the 1960s and early 1970s and they were not so expensive to build then. Perhaps onerous requirements have been applied. Perhaps expertise has been lost. They seem to be able to build them in China but not in the West. The Finns have had trouble completing one, the French are having difficulties (same bad design) and there are 4 units in the American South that are having difficulties.
Storage costs are currently not too much in the US as the fuel is stored in casks outside the plants. Money has been paid by the plants for many years to the government for permanent storage, but politics has prevented this. Billions of dollars were spent on a facility in Nevada, but it was cancelled. I suspect that the fuel will be recycled in future years rather than stored. There is great energy remaining in spent fuel.
In the US we have cheap natural gas and nuclear cannot compete with the construction or operating costs. However, natural gas contributes to greenhouse warming. New nukes could be used as renewable backup / replacement from wind / solar rather than natural gas to alleviate further greenhouse gas emissions.
This greenhouse gas stuff is frightening. Germany is doing a lot. The US is doing much less. How was the Energiewende sold to the German people?