I don't think "unaffected" is the right term. Yes, DACH didn't get much radiation in median, but in some areas (mostly Bavaria[1] and Austria[2]) there was quit

I don't think "unaffected" is the right term. Yes, DACH didn't get much radiation in median, but in some areas (mostly Bavaria[1] and Austria[2]) there was quite a bit of radioactive rain. For example, its still not allowed to eat wild boars / deers in parts of Bavaria, because they accumulated too much (> 10k Bq/Kg) radiation, mostly Caesium 137 from the Tschernobyl incident. Also, Austria did reject nuclear power in the 70s, before Tschernobyl, with one power plant (Zwentendorf[3]) already built but not yet running, via a very close referendum. So the anti-nuclear sentiment was already partly there (in Austria more than in Germany), but its very probable that Tschernobyl (and Fukushima) pushed enough people "over the edge" to give the anti-nuclear sentiment a comfy political majority across almost all political parties. Why the other countries did not follow this trend, I don't know. They'll have their reasons :-) [1] https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Bilder/BfS/DE/ion/notfallschutz/tschernobyl-bodenkontamination-d.jpg?__blob=poster&v=4 https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Bilder/BfS/DE/ion/notfallschut... [2] https://science.orf.at/stories/3206079/ https://science.orf.at/stories/3206079/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plan...