> My impression was it was a little more political and complicated than that Not really. The shutdown plan was done in 2000 together with the industry. They kn

> My impression was it was a little more political and complicated than that Not really. The shutdown plan was done in 2000 together with the industry. They knew what would happen. But the industry did not believe that this will happen, because they thought there was still enough political support for nuclear power and once the opposition (the conservatives) will be back in power, the nuclear exit would be reversed. That exactly happened then: The conservatives reversed the exit even though there was much ongoing public protest and the nuclear industry was happy. Then Fukushima happened and conservatives basically went back to the nuclear exit, because they feared widespread public protests. Merkel was clever: if one can't win, then join the other side. The oldest and most problematic reactors were closed very fast then. But it was already clear in 2000 that they eventually would go offline before the rest. A few reactors even did not need to be closed, they happened to be already shutdown temporarily because of various problems and regulators then just refused them to be activated again. Example: AKW Krümmel near Hamburg. Problem: I would not believe that a profit oriented company without being forced puts billions aside for a clean-up. I would also not believe that the money put aside is actually sufficient - given that many costs are probably not calculated into it. Every commercial company will try everything to calculate future costs then as low as possible. Especially multi-billion Euro/Dollar sized monopolists which are a save haven for former politicians.