If you like Kraftwerk and you're not aware of this book, I recommend it:
"Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany", by Uwe Schütte. It's packed with details of albums, songs, tours, equipment, and people.
The anti-nuclear message in "Radio-Activity" certainly came later and was repeatedly updated, right into the Fukushima era [2011], but this was not the original sentiment [1976]. From the book:
"At the time, Billboard magazine featured the most-played singles by the large network of radio stations under the heading 'Radio Action'. The band seemed to have misread or misremembered this as 'Radio-Activity'. 'Suddenly,' remembers Wolfgang Flür, 'there was a theme in the air, the activity of radio stations, and the title of 'Radioactivity is in the Air for You and Me' was born. All we needed was the music to go with it. ... The ambiguity of the theme didn't come until later.' Radio-Activity was intended to celebrate radio broadcasting as a convenient, easy and democratic means to listen to music and news."
I love Kraftwerk, but contributing to anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany hasn't been a major success. If only more European countries had followed the French example and developed substantial nuclear fleets.
Nuclear power has been killed off by economic forces; there’s no turning back.
Solar and wind power generate cheap electricity in abundance, and midday electricity prices in Europe regularly dip into negative territory (as low as minus €500 (sic!) on May 1!).
Modern grids do not require high-risk investments in ultra-inert baseload power that ultimately fails to find a market; instead, they require low-risk investments in highly flexible power sources, such as batteries or pumped-storage facilities and transmission upgrades, that can capture surplus electricity at low cost (sometimes negativ) and sell it hours later at favorable prices.
The 2036 electricity futures price for Germany is €70/MWh. The break-even point for France’s EDF for old nuclear power plants that had long since been written off financially was at roughly the same level in 2020. Due to rising labor costs, their break-even point is now significantly higher. There were solid economic reasons why EDF was recently nationalized 100%. New nuclear power plant construction in France is a foreseeable economic disaster. Private investors would have fled long ago.
I'm not sure why subsidies are per se bad. But also almost all infrastructure is subsidized regardless: roads, trains (cargo as well), ports, nuclear, coal, etc...
because they're really important? both for the planet but also for strategic energy independance (no gas from russia, no oil from hormuz or america, light from the sun and wind from the air is all thats needed)
Nuclear power has been amazing for my native country Sweden and I do not believe for a nanosecond that there were “economic forces” that shut down many of our operational nuclear plants.
It was political lunacy, in Sweden and Germany and many other countries.
I take a center position on this: every year new nuclear looks worse economically, but that's not a good reason to shut down already operating plants.
The safety issues .. I think the combination of low probability (unknown) and potentially huge cost (Chernobyl affected almost the entirety of Europe!) make it exceptionally prone to toxic discourse. You just can't assign reliable numbers to it. There's a risk of ending up with a Space Shuttle situation, where because a disaster would be so bad everyone in the chain downplays the risk until an O-ring explodes.
Maybe we can try SMRs once they're actually in production, but somewhere else can try them first on their own expense.
Like most backward looking judgements these days, such things require understanding the culture and zeitgeist of the mid 70s.
I'm pro-nuclear as well, but understand that for many decades the "smart" thing to do was to oppose it. I wouldn't expect a musical artist to have a more nuanced opinion than most of their contemporaries.
I think Chernobyl was a big factor in European sentiment towards nuclear power too, in the 80s / 90s.
I grew up in the 90s and didn't even fully understand what it was, but I remember the fear around it. I remember people in Ireland worrying about Sellafield nuclear power plant in the UK and talking about things like wind direction if there was an incident. And the government posting out iodine tablets to homes.
Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany was entirely manufactured; it was the product of Gerhard Schröder and similar robots who enriched themselves on Russian oil and gas.
Ironically, it is also where the so-called Green Party began.
This is historical revisionism. Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is rooted in the peace movement and environmentalism, with the majority of public discourse starting in the 1970s.
The debate has always been about what to do with the waste. Our government misrepresented the "Asse" as a solved solution for a final repository, even though it was always only a test repository for low and intermediate-level radioactive waste. But hubris or corruption led to one scandal after another, forever tainting the discussion about nuclear waste in Germany.
Everything that follows is just a reaction.
My counterclaim to your unsubstantiated take: Pro-nuclear sentiment is what has been manufactured. Anti-nuclear is grassroots.
It's kind of all of the above. State and non-state actors have leveraged pretty much every movement there is to their own ends: civil rights, anti-nuclear, pro-nuclear, anti-Iranian government sentiment, pro-Iranian government sentiment, even jazz tours in Europe which were assisted by US intelligence orgs in the 20th century.
It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.
Indeed. Also Asse was a political decision, against the scientist who found better places to put the waste, but Asse II was close to east Germany. And West German politicians wanted to give a big "screw you" to East Germany, because they also did something similar.
I'm still against nuclear in Germany. I'm fine with Finland doing it.
It had nothing to do with for example chernobyl, where children were not allowed to be outside on the playground for weeks and where you had to pay attention where your food came from and it also has nothing to do that you still have to have the meat of wild boars checked and be careful with eating mushrooms. Totally unrelated.
Seriously, the anti nuclear crowd might have not been rational from the start and still is dogmatic, but it formed exactly, because people did not trust the manufactured state's sentiment of nuclear will provide cheap and clean energy without risk.
Because it is not a clean energy, it is incredibly dirty and dangerous. And those dangers can be handled, if companies and regulators act responsible. But people simply do not trust that they are. And they do have some data.
I quite enjoy the 1979 Dan Fogelberg song Face the Fire from a purely musical perspective, despite it being an anti-nuclear-power anthem written in the wake of three mile island. There's no reason to expect that Kraftwork's poltical ideas are good ones or were good ones at the time, even if it resulted in some good music.
I grew in the area most hit by Chernobyl fallout in Europe. The disfigured newborn kids who didn't make it would probably not share your view.
My girlfriends first older brother was one of those babies, the second one survived but is disfigured and needs serious care to live. I had three such kids in my first class at school, four different ones in my second and a sizeable number of parents whose kids didn't survive childbirth. Not being allowed to eat certain mushrooms or digging in the woods was the easier part.
So this may be a bit more tangible for some people than for others.
There are a number of pro-nuclear advocates on this page who can’t just engage in good faith but instead dismiss and deride their interlocutors as “crazy”, “paranoid”, “fear mongers“. It’s infuriating because the origins of anti-nuclear sentiments are often plain and perfectly understandable, as your poignant anecdotes illustrate.
It was largely our own governments wanting to scare us of nukes so we'd be scared of the Soviets, like in America with the schoolchildren doing duck and cover drills.
Having enemies the population is afraid of is good for politicians and they'll take any enemies they can find, and they'll do so indiscriminately regardless of the real nuance of the issues.
Immigrants, abortion, this religion or that, rock music, jazz music, alcohol, marijuana, global warming, windmills, books... just whatever as hard as they can regardless of if it's reasonable or not.
I think it came from peaceniks and hippies mostly. You're talking about the equivalent of modern anti-vax liberals. Anti-science and given to conspiracies and mysticism.
There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s. The world was quite a different place back then. The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking, and Communism was much more expansionary.
> There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s
Yes, but I think if you asked which country was more likely to "push the button" in the 50s-70s it would have been the US, and the extent to which the US continued invasions after the collapse of the USSR kind of vindicates that.
> The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking
I don't think this was ever true except in the least useful measure, raw headcount of conscripts.
hate to tell you this, but there's a whole contingent of "granola moms" who won't vax their children. They're the same people that subscribe to those teething stones that are really only a strangulation risk.
> Appeal to nature is something that definitely cuts across the political spectrum.
I wish this was true. How many right wing political parties support policies that improve the natural environment? Doing that is the domain of left wing parties, but I’d love to know of any exceptions.
Which directly followed the USA stationing Jupiter missiles in Turkey with the range to strike Moscow. As part of the mutual climb down from the missile crisis the USA removed the Jupiters, as both sides then understood the wisdom of avoiding hot brinkmanship
Not anymore than the US being able to strike worldwide to this very moment. They are the only country that has used nuclear bombs against civilians.
The big problem is having one country be able to do it without deterrents and with impunity. MAD is a good thing, if anyone will have those things at all.
Objectively, nukes have killed 0 American school children and their teachers while legal constitutional American gun owners have killed thousands every year.
The main natural predator of Americans is other Americans.
coal kills more people, this is a fact. so with blocking nuclear lead to coal, so they indirectly supportered killing thousands, incredible stats really.
who said art can't be bad for the public?
A hidden danger of coal is ironically the radioactivity of its waste, which gets put into concrete products and contribute to indoor air quality issues.
The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War. The oddest part is why not use safer reactor designs; water reactors make sense for the US Navy and not on land.
It’s only irrelevant to you as long as it doesn’t leak into your ground water supply after a few decades down the line, when we discover the containment didn’t resist corrosion as well as we thought. The danger of nuclear waste does not correspond to the amount at all.
As opposed to brown coal? Because that's what we got instead, and it's much more deadly, much more radioactive, and the toxic waste it produces is not properly controlled like for nuclear.
Of course pollution looks bad when you have to barrel it, instead of just shitting it out into the environment (atmosphere, etc) and saying "we'll stop doing this in a couple decades, don't worry".
I understand that brown coal isn't what people had in mind when they opposed nuclear; they would rather have wind power, solar power, maybe magical fairy dust, but they didn't consider that, practically, we will stick with brown coal.
Brown coal power kills that many people in a good year directly, not mentioning the long term health effects of exposure to brown coal smoke (even if filtered).
It's a fact that Germany turned off nuclear and subsequently extended the lifetime of brown coal power plants (they still run). Germany has plenty of renewable energy, but that is not a replacement for a steady base supply of power yet.
And perhaps meaningfully contributed to a reduction in the quantity of radioactive waste products requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
I always find this sentiment curious for 2 reasons:
1. Radioactive waste gets less toxic over time unlike many toxins like mercury, lead, and cyanide. People seem to emphasize the duration of toxicity for radiation while apparently giving 'forever toxins' a total pass.
2. Short-lived radiation is what's really dangerous. When atoms are decaying fast, they're shooting out energy that can cause real damage fast. Longer-lived radioactive stuff with billion-year half-lives like natural uranium can be held in a gloved hand, no problem. In the extreme, and infinite half life means something is stable and totally safe (radiologically at least).
Yet people still want to emphasize that radioactive byproducts of nuclear power have long half lives. I don't really get it.
I don't trust the coal industry to manage forever chemicals over the long term, and I don't trust the nuclear industry to manage spent nuclear fuel over the long term.
The question that matters for both industries is what bad things happen when their stewardship inevitably lapses and the happy path dead-ends.
I don't like either answer, so that heightens the urgency of pursuing alternatives with fewer long-lived hazardous byproducts. Neither coal nor nuclear is an acceptable long term solution.
Coal power produces more radiation waste into the environment than nuclear power. That's because nuclear power has this amazing quality where all the waste is neatly packaged whereas burning coal just releases it into the air.
> requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
This is fearmongering. Casing waste in big concrete casks is enough. It's so incredibly overblown that we're willing to burn coal and kill people over it.
I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades.
Will it actually get encased successfully, will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move, will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale. Tragedies of the commons are the rule and eventually all of that waste will be go through periods of mishandling at one time or another.
> I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades.
Nuclear power plants have been extremely safe for many decades! Fuck, even the worst disasters related to nuclear power plants have killed less people than coal or oil disasters, even including Chernobyl which was a fuck up beyond comparison.
> Will it actually get encased successfully
Yes, this is literally done and has been done for many decades.
> will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move
What does that mean? You can live 1 feet away from a cask and receive less radiation than you do from the sun.
> will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
This is a bad argument because all of society relies on our grandchildren upholding present commitments. What happens if our grandchildren stop upholding the electricity grid? They die. What happens if they stop large scale agriculture? They die. And on and on and on.
> The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale.
It's quite literally something society has been doing very successfully for 50+ years.
Belarus had markedly increased general cancer rate post-1986. At the time most of that was fatal. None of that naturally is included in site personnel and firefighter fatalities that IAEA recognises as the only casualties.
When I was a student I met a Chernobyl liquidator in his 30s on a local train. He said he was dying of leukaemia and looked like it. As a thought experiment, how would you argue to him that his death is unrelated?
Western part of USSR had also an explosion of thyroid cancers and tumors among children. Fortunately it was very treatabe. Because it was screened as a known consequence of the fallout my brother in law had an intervention early.
You argue it is safe. When it is not (Chernobyl, Fukushima) then you argue it kills less people. That is before considering the possibility of these sites being attacked during war (see Zaporizhia in Ukraine) and how centralized they are vs solar.
Rectang explained it very well, and all their points stand imo.
Because of anti-nuclear sentiments we are right now currently storing used nuclear waste in its most dangerous form in the most open and uncontained and open storage lots. Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me. If humans blast themselves back to the neolithic era and 5,000 years from now some dudes die from walking into some old facility die, who cares? There are masses of people dieing right now because we are still relying on fossil fuels, many of them from cancer from breathing the radioactive fallout that is downstream of every coal plant.
Seems to me that pro-nuclear sentiments have at least as much to do with ongoing accumulation of nuclear waste as anti-nuclear sentiments.
> Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me.
Blithe minimization of the problem of storing nuclear waste over millenia feels like "Peak HN". :)
("Peak HN" jabs are a cheap shot, though — so let me engage more seriously...)
First, "coal vs nuclear" is a false dichotomy. Everybody I see advocating for nuclear power in this thread is advocating for it as a permanent solution rather than an interim solution — in which case there are other competitors.
Second, if nuclear waste is too dangerous for less-than-ideal storage conditions, that speaks negatively to the viability of nuclear power — because over the long term less-than-ideal storage is guaranteed by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
> by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
Simply untrue. Finland‘s Onkalo is exactly that-a storage solution engineered to require zero stewardship. It is possible and now we know we can do it right. Storage is the weakest argument against nuclear.
By the way, Solar panels and wind turbines contain heavy metals with no decay path, e.g. Cadmium. Nuclear waste at least decays after apprx. 1000 years with spent fuel roughly as radioactive as the uranium ore originally mined for it.
The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me. Especially since nuclear and renewables actually complement each other really well. We can use nuclear for baseload and renewables filling in on top when sun and wind are available.
Onkalo is the best approximation so far of of a memory hole for nuclear waste — but Finland has not agreed to accept all the world’s nuclear waste, similar sites are not available for all countries, and in practice storage remains a major point of contention as a wander through this discussion will show.
> The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me.
I sometimes feel similarly about pro-nuclear cheer mongering.
Brazil nuts and bananas are radioactive too, compared to other foods — but do not pose risks compared to coal ash.
Similarly, while coal ash is nasty stuff that kills lots of people, it lacks many of the qualities that make spent nuclear fuel especially difficult to manage even in small amounts.
For example, a “dirty bomb” made by packing coal ash around conventional explosives would be far less effective than one made from spent nuclear fuel.
The original version is quite different from the version performed today. The original lyrics refer to the pun of "radioactivity" versus "radio activity", meaning, activity on the radio.
The new live version refers almost exclusively to the former meaning, and adds "stop" to turn it into a protest song.
I've seen Kraftwerk live twice, at London's Albert Hall and Berkeley's Greek Theater, both times absolutely amazing. Highly recommended.
I've often thought they would be the ideal band to perform inside the "Sphere" in Las Vegas.
Just saw Kraftwerk live exactly a week ago, 2026-05-06, in Hong Kong on their Asia tour. They played Radioactivität, among their other hits. Recommended indeed. There might not be another tour, Ralf Hütter is 79!
Lots of brown coal, which famously emits more radioactivity than any nuclear power plant ever did. The anti nuclear movement is a fucking joke, and the people I know personally here in Germany who oppose(d) nuclear still think the danger is an atomic bomb level explosion, or generational crippling mutations, or losing their house.
that would be an odd criticism because we never generated any meaningful amount of electricity from oil (and started importing Russian fossil resources 30 years before we turned nuclear power plants off). The chief source for energy in Germany was coal. Gas is primarily an industry and heating input rather than a source of power generation, gas plants have only become more popular in recent years.
What replaced all other fossil fuel sources are renewables, which at 50% are now by far the single largest source of energy.
Fun fact, these "radicals" were behind one of the longest running copyright lawsuits in European history, one that started in 1997 and ended this year https://ra.co/news/85004
Saw them last year in Seattle. One of those bands I never thought I'd get the chance to see (I'm 54), but thanks to them they are still touring and making great music.
I have been extremely lucky to get an invitation to their concert in Kiev, Ukraine, many years ago. Three of the original members still alive and kicking. It was incredibly awesome.
The concert itself was a gift from Victor Pinchuk, one of the Ukrainian oligarchs and renowned patron, to the city. Previously he also sponsored a full-blown Elton John concert on the main city square which I also attended.
One of the things whose non-existence I'm mildly surprised by: a mash-up between Kraftwerk's Radioactivity and Imagine Dragons Radioactive. Sure, they're extremely different songs melody-wise but that never stopped people from successfully mashing up songs before, and the underlying beat is almost the same but reversed, which is kinda interesting[0][1].
Also, has anyone ever compared the cultural context and zeitgeist of both songs? Probably would be a fun high school assignment, haha. Kraftwerk's song came out in the same decade that the Club of Rome published its Limits To Growth report[2], so when fears about humanity's future really started to become A Thing that was impossible to ignore. Later versions of the song turning it into a protest song encapsulate Cold War fears for a nuclear apocalypse of the time (presumably, I wasn't really around yet back then).
The main audience for the Imagine Dragons song was a generation fully born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One that grew up playing the Fall Out games. It also came out in 2012, right after the 2008 crisis kick-started the "oh the previous generation will leave us with nothing huh?" Doomer mentality among millennials and Gen Z kids. Remember the media going nuts over the "Ok, Boomer" expression for a while? (which still feels like the media intentionally dividing a community to stop it from actually fixing things me, tbh, but let's not get too side-tracked)
In that context, when put side by side the ID song almost feels like a Doomer generation follow-up and implicit critique of how nothing seems to have actually be done about to prevent the impending apocalypse that the Kraftwerk song's generation was supposedly so worried about, turned into a fantasy about living in that post-apocalyptic planet.
It's "vibe" is weirdly hopeful too, especially compared to the Kraftwerk song as well. Instead of fearing an apocalypse, it's set after one and embraces living within it.
At least, that's how the two songs come across to me, which probably says more about me than anything else. Apparently Dan Reynolds, main singer on ID and one of writers of the song, has said that in retrospect after almost a decade, he had realized that it was actually about him "not giving up hope after losing faith in Mormonism."[3]. Which makes sense as a personal experience of going through feeling doomed and figuring out how to survive and embrace living on in a "post-apocalyptic" world on a personal, social level.
I think that's what annoys me about the Kraftwerk song's status as a protest song, and a lot of other music from the same era: it doesn't feel like it's insisting on a better future. It's passive late 70s, early 80s pessimism.
If you like Kraftwerk and you're not aware of this book, I recommend it:
"Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany", by Uwe Schütte. It's packed with details of albums, songs, tours, equipment, and people.
The anti-nuclear message in "Radio-Activity" certainly came later and was repeatedly updated, right into the Fukushima era [2011], but this was not the original sentiment [1976]. From the book:
"At the time, Billboard magazine featured the most-played singles by the large network of radio stations under the heading 'Radio Action'. The band seemed to have misread or misremembered this as 'Radio-Activity'. 'Suddenly,' remembers Wolfgang Flür, 'there was a theme in the air, the activity of radio stations, and the title of 'Radioactivity is in the Air for You and Me' was born. All we needed was the music to go with it. ... The ambiguity of the theme didn't come until later.' Radio-Activity was intended to celebrate radio broadcasting as a convenient, easy and democratic means to listen to music and news."
Great story. Had no idea. Still love the name Uwe. One of those German names that doesn’t have an English equivalent unlike, say, Pieter.
Pieter is Dutch. German version of it is Peter.
I was told once Hugh is the nearest equivalent to Uwe, but i can't tell if thats correct.
Currently reading it and I’d agree!
I love Kraftwerk, but contributing to anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany hasn't been a major success. If only more European countries had followed the French example and developed substantial nuclear fleets.
Nuclear power has been killed off by economic forces; there’s no turning back. Solar and wind power generate cheap electricity in abundance, and midday electricity prices in Europe regularly dip into negative territory (as low as minus €500 (sic!) on May 1!).
Modern grids do not require high-risk investments in ultra-inert baseload power that ultimately fails to find a market; instead, they require low-risk investments in highly flexible power sources, such as batteries or pumped-storage facilities and transmission upgrades, that can capture surplus electricity at low cost (sometimes negativ) and sell it hours later at favorable prices.
The 2036 electricity futures price for Germany is €70/MWh. The break-even point for France’s EDF for old nuclear power plants that had long since been written off financially was at roughly the same level in 2020. Due to rising labor costs, their break-even point is now significantly higher. There were solid economic reasons why EDF was recently nationalized 100%. New nuclear power plant construction in France is a foreseeable economic disaster. Private investors would have fled long ago.
Solar and wind are still heavily subsidized are they not? If they're so economically amazing why are they subsidized?
I'm not sure why subsidies are per se bad. But also almost all infrastructure is subsidized regardless: roads, trains (cargo as well), ports, nuclear, coal, etc...
because they're really important? both for the planet but also for strategic energy independance (no gas from russia, no oil from hormuz or america, light from the sun and wind from the air is all thats needed)
Nuclear power has been amazing for my native country Sweden and I do not believe for a nanosecond that there were “economic forces” that shut down many of our operational nuclear plants.
It was political lunacy, in Sweden and Germany and many other countries.
I take a center position on this: every year new nuclear looks worse economically, but that's not a good reason to shut down already operating plants.
The safety issues .. I think the combination of low probability (unknown) and potentially huge cost (Chernobyl affected almost the entirety of Europe!) make it exceptionally prone to toxic discourse. You just can't assign reliable numbers to it. There's a risk of ending up with a Space Shuttle situation, where because a disaster would be so bad everyone in the chain downplays the risk until an O-ring explodes.
Maybe we can try SMRs once they're actually in production, but somewhere else can try them first on their own expense.
Like most backward looking judgements these days, such things require understanding the culture and zeitgeist of the mid 70s.
I'm pro-nuclear as well, but understand that for many decades the "smart" thing to do was to oppose it. I wouldn't expect a musical artist to have a more nuanced opinion than most of their contemporaries.
I think Chernobyl was a big factor in European sentiment towards nuclear power too, in the 80s / 90s.
I grew up in the 90s and didn't even fully understand what it was, but I remember the fear around it. I remember people in Ireland worrying about Sellafield nuclear power plant in the UK and talking about things like wind direction if there was an incident. And the government posting out iodine tablets to homes.
More like the robot thing to do.
Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany was entirely manufactured; it was the product of Gerhard Schröder and similar robots who enriched themselves on Russian oil and gas.
Ironically, it is also where the so-called Green Party began.
This is historical revisionism. Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is rooted in the peace movement and environmentalism, with the majority of public discourse starting in the 1970s.
The debate has always been about what to do with the waste. Our government misrepresented the "Asse" as a solved solution for a final repository, even though it was always only a test repository for low and intermediate-level radioactive waste. But hubris or corruption led to one scandal after another, forever tainting the discussion about nuclear waste in Germany.
Everything that follows is just a reaction.
My counterclaim to your unsubstantiated take: Pro-nuclear sentiment is what has been manufactured. Anti-nuclear is grassroots.
It's kind of all of the above. State and non-state actors have leveraged pretty much every movement there is to their own ends: civil rights, anti-nuclear, pro-nuclear, anti-Iranian government sentiment, pro-Iranian government sentiment, even jazz tours in Europe which were assisted by US intelligence orgs in the 20th century.
It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.
Indeed. Also Asse was a political decision, against the scientist who found better places to put the waste, but Asse II was close to east Germany. And West German politicians wanted to give a big "screw you" to East Germany, because they also did something similar.
I'm still against nuclear in Germany. I'm fine with Finland doing it.
Sure, it was all Schröders fault.
It had nothing to do with for example chernobyl, where children were not allowed to be outside on the playground for weeks and where you had to pay attention where your food came from and it also has nothing to do that you still have to have the meat of wild boars checked and be careful with eating mushrooms. Totally unrelated.
Seriously, the anti nuclear crowd might have not been rational from the start and still is dogmatic, but it formed exactly, because people did not trust the manufactured state's sentiment of nuclear will provide cheap and clean energy without risk.
Because it is not a clean energy, it is incredibly dirty and dangerous. And those dangers can be handled, if companies and regulators act responsible. But people simply do not trust that they are. And they do have some data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accid...
You still can't eat Mushrooms and wild Boar meet has to be tested in certain places in Germany. That was before Schröder.
Combine that with political decision to put waste into Asse II. Not because it was a good place, just screw with East Germany.
Big demonstration like Brokdorf where around 81. Schroeder begun being a Ministerpräsident in 1990, and 1998 Bundeskanzler.
Not at all, we look into Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples of what actual happens when things don't go as the advocates sell it.
And naturally the radio waste is fine as long as we store it into other countries.
There’s not actually that much high level waste… thing the UK has a couple swimming pools worth after 50 years of operating reactors
I quite enjoy the 1979 Dan Fogelberg song Face the Fire from a purely musical perspective, despite it being an anti-nuclear-power anthem written in the wake of three mile island. There's no reason to expect that Kraftwork's poltical ideas are good ones or were good ones at the time, even if it resulted in some good music.
No it was never the smart thing, always an uninformed emotional reaction based on fear.
I grew in the area most hit by Chernobyl fallout in Europe. The disfigured newborn kids who didn't make it would probably not share your view.
My girlfriends first older brother was one of those babies, the second one survived but is disfigured and needs serious care to live. I had three such kids in my first class at school, four different ones in my second and a sizeable number of parents whose kids didn't survive childbirth. Not being allowed to eat certain mushrooms or digging in the woods was the easier part.
So this may be a bit more tangible for some people than for others.
There are a number of pro-nuclear advocates on this page who can’t just engage in good faith but instead dismiss and deride their interlocutors as “crazy”, “paranoid”, “fear mongers“. It’s infuriating because the origins of anti-nuclear sentiments are often plain and perfectly understandable, as your poignant anecdotes illustrate.
I rather not have another Fukushima or Chernobyl in Europe.
It was largely our own governments wanting to scare us of nukes so we'd be scared of the Soviets, like in America with the schoolchildren doing duck and cover drills.
Having enemies the population is afraid of is good for politicians and they'll take any enemies they can find, and they'll do so indiscriminately regardless of the real nuance of the issues.
Immigrants, abortion, this religion or that, rock music, jazz music, alcohol, marijuana, global warming, windmills, books... just whatever as hard as they can regardless of if it's reasonable or not.
I think it came from peaceniks and hippies mostly. You're talking about the equivalent of modern anti-vax liberals. Anti-science and given to conspiracies and mysticism.
There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s. The world was quite a different place back then. The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking, and Communism was much more expansionary.
> There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s
Yes, but I think if you asked which country was more likely to "push the button" in the 50s-70s it would have been the US, and the extent to which the US continued invasions after the collapse of the USSR kind of vindicates that.
> The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking
I don't think this was ever true except in the least useful measure, raw headcount of conscripts.
> anti-vax liberals
Just a small correction, but the anti-vax arguments are very conservative, not liberal.
hate to tell you this, but there's a whole contingent of "granola moms" who won't vax their children. They're the same people that subscribe to those teething stones that are really only a strangulation risk.
Yep, and a lot of what they say is deeply conspiratorial conservative rhetoric.
They may be self described liberal, but their actions certainly aren't.
There are both liberal and conservative strains of anti-vaccination sentiment that have been more or less prominent at various times.
There is undeniably a middle class anti vax wellness leftist movement whether it was originally conservative or not, unfortunately.
> wellness leftist movement
Hang on, are we talking about liberal or leftist now?
Because a lot of these hoax "wellness" movements are conservative. Distrusting science and things you don't understand is a conservative mindset.
Appeal to nature is something that definitely cuts across the political spectrum.
> Appeal to nature is something that definitely cuts across the political spectrum.
I wish this was true. How many right wing political parties support policies that improve the natural environment? Doing that is the domain of left wing parties, but I’d love to know of any exceptions.
The Soviets were parking nukes in Cuba in striking distance of the White House. If that's not legitimately terrifying to you, I just don't know.
Which directly followed the USA stationing Jupiter missiles in Turkey with the range to strike Moscow. As part of the mutual climb down from the missile crisis the USA removed the Jupiters, as both sides then understood the wisdom of avoiding hot brinkmanship
It's genuinely amazing how few people in the USA appear to be aware of what you have written.
It'd be nice to put jingoism aside for a change.
Not anymore than the US being able to strike worldwide to this very moment. They are the only country that has used nuclear bombs against civilians.
The big problem is having one country be able to do it without deterrents and with impunity. MAD is a good thing, if anyone will have those things at all.
One of those things is scarier to American school children and their teachers than the other.
Objectively, nukes have killed 0 American school children and their teachers while legal constitutional American gun owners have killed thousands every year.
The main natural predator of Americans is other Americans.
School children aren’t easily scared by boogie men, but maybe they should be. The Iranian girls found this out.
scariest thing for American School children and their teachers is the way that the second amendment is administered.
Their nukes are still within striking distance.
nuclear is only cheap, if taxpayers pay for it, if all costs would be considered, nuclear is not cheap
coal kills more people, this is a fact. so with blocking nuclear lead to coal, so they indirectly supportered killing thousands, incredible stats really. who said art can't be bad for the public?
A hidden danger of coal is ironically the radioactivity of its waste, which gets put into concrete products and contribute to indoor air quality issues.
The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War. The oddest part is why not use safer reactor designs; water reactors make sense for the US Navy and not on land.
None of you ever manages to answer the waste storage question. That was, and still is, one of the deciding factors in Germany, for example.
Because its an irrelevant problem. The amount of waste nuclear produces is miniscule.
It’s only irrelevant to you as long as it doesn’t leak into your ground water supply after a few decades down the line, when we discover the containment didn’t resist corrosion as well as we thought. The danger of nuclear waste does not correspond to the amount at all.
> The amount of waste nuclear produces is miniscule.
And yet people worry about it and the OP claims it led to the situation in Germany.
Maybe addressing the issue needs to occur, rather than dismissing it?
> The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War
And Chernobyl. And Fukushima. Nuclear is great but it has some very real risks
Don't forget Windscale and Three Mile Island
I just saw the Fukushima documentary over the weekend, no thanks.
As opposed to brown coal? Because that's what we got instead, and it's much more deadly, much more radioactive, and the toxic waste it produces is not properly controlled like for nuclear.
Of course pollution looks bad when you have to barrel it, instead of just shitting it out into the environment (atmosphere, etc) and saying "we'll stop doing this in a couple decades, don't worry".
I understand that brown coal isn't what people had in mind when they opposed nuclear; they would rather have wind power, solar power, maybe magical fairy dust, but they didn't consider that, practically, we will stick with brown coal.
No worries, paper straws will save the day.
We could start by actually having a DB that works, instead of forcing people to use cars if they want to actually reach their destination on time.
And bus connections that drive more often per villages and small towns than once per hour.
Fukushima only killed one person https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
"No one died directly from the disaster. However, 40 to 50 people were injured as a result of physical injury from the blast, or radiation burns."
Selective view of the victims?
Brown coal power kills that many people in a good year directly, not mentioning the long term health effects of exposure to brown coal smoke (even if filtered).
Yeah people are sniffing lines of coal. /s
Kraftwerk killed nuclear power (Radio-Activity) and promoted petroleum consumption (Autobahn), like the true factory-idol industrialists they are ...
What do you mean by "nuclear fleets"??
This is often used within the industry to mean many dozens of commercial nuclear power plants.
Being against nuclear only kept the world on coal longer.
only if renewable resources are not considered an option.
It's a fact that Germany turned off nuclear and subsequently extended the lifetime of brown coal power plants (they still run). Germany has plenty of renewable energy, but that is not a replacement for a steady base supply of power yet.
And perhaps meaningfully contributed to a reduction in the quantity of radioactive waste products requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
I always find this sentiment curious for 2 reasons:
1. Radioactive waste gets less toxic over time unlike many toxins like mercury, lead, and cyanide. People seem to emphasize the duration of toxicity for radiation while apparently giving 'forever toxins' a total pass.
2. Short-lived radiation is what's really dangerous. When atoms are decaying fast, they're shooting out energy that can cause real damage fast. Longer-lived radioactive stuff with billion-year half-lives like natural uranium can be held in a gloved hand, no problem. In the extreme, and infinite half life means something is stable and totally safe (radiologically at least).
Yet people still want to emphasize that radioactive byproducts of nuclear power have long half lives. I don't really get it.
I don't trust the coal industry to manage forever chemicals over the long term, and I don't trust the nuclear industry to manage spent nuclear fuel over the long term.
The question that matters for both industries is what bad things happen when their stewardship inevitably lapses and the happy path dead-ends.
I don't like either answer, so that heightens the urgency of pursuing alternatives with fewer long-lived hazardous byproducts. Neither coal nor nuclear is an acceptable long term solution.
There were also big proliferation concerns out of 70s era designs.
Coal power produces more radiation waste into the environment than nuclear power. That's because nuclear power has this amazing quality where all the waste is neatly packaged whereas burning coal just releases it into the air.
> requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
This is fearmongering. Casing waste in big concrete casks is enough. It's so incredibly overblown that we're willing to burn coal and kill people over it.
I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades.
Will it actually get encased successfully, will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move, will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale. Tragedies of the commons are the rule and eventually all of that waste will be go through periods of mishandling at one time or another.
> I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades.
Nuclear power plants have been extremely safe for many decades! Fuck, even the worst disasters related to nuclear power plants have killed less people than coal or oil disasters, even including Chernobyl which was a fuck up beyond comparison.
> Will it actually get encased successfully
Yes, this is literally done and has been done for many decades.
> will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move
What does that mean? You can live 1 feet away from a cask and receive less radiation than you do from the sun.
> will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
This is a bad argument because all of society relies on our grandchildren upholding present commitments. What happens if our grandchildren stop upholding the electricity grid? They die. What happens if they stop large scale agriculture? They die. And on and on and on.
> The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale.
It's quite literally something society has been doing very successfully for 50+ years.
Belarus had markedly increased general cancer rate post-1986. At the time most of that was fatal. None of that naturally is included in site personnel and firefighter fatalities that IAEA recognises as the only casualties.
When I was a student I met a Chernobyl liquidator in his 30s on a local train. He said he was dying of leukaemia and looked like it. As a thought experiment, how would you argue to him that his death is unrelated?
Western part of USSR had also an explosion of thyroid cancers and tumors among children. Fortunately it was very treatabe. Because it was screened as a known consequence of the fallout my brother in law had an intervention early.
You argue it is safe. When it is not (Chernobyl, Fukushima) then you argue it kills less people. That is before considering the possibility of these sites being attacked during war (see Zaporizhia in Ukraine) and how centralized they are vs solar.
Rectang explained it very well, and all their points stand imo.
Because of anti-nuclear sentiments we are right now currently storing used nuclear waste in its most dangerous form in the most open and uncontained and open storage lots. Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me. If humans blast themselves back to the neolithic era and 5,000 years from now some dudes die from walking into some old facility die, who cares? There are masses of people dieing right now because we are still relying on fossil fuels, many of them from cancer from breathing the radioactive fallout that is downstream of every coal plant.
Seems to me that pro-nuclear sentiments have at least as much to do with ongoing accumulation of nuclear waste as anti-nuclear sentiments.
> Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me.
Blithe minimization of the problem of storing nuclear waste over millenia feels like "Peak HN". :)
("Peak HN" jabs are a cheap shot, though — so let me engage more seriously...)
First, "coal vs nuclear" is a false dichotomy. Everybody I see advocating for nuclear power in this thread is advocating for it as a permanent solution rather than an interim solution — in which case there are other competitors.
Second, if nuclear waste is too dangerous for less-than-ideal storage conditions, that speaks negatively to the viability of nuclear power — because over the long term less-than-ideal storage is guaranteed by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
> by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
Simply untrue. Finland‘s Onkalo is exactly that-a storage solution engineered to require zero stewardship. It is possible and now we know we can do it right. Storage is the weakest argument against nuclear.
By the way, Solar panels and wind turbines contain heavy metals with no decay path, e.g. Cadmium. Nuclear waste at least decays after apprx. 1000 years with spent fuel roughly as radioactive as the uranium ore originally mined for it.
The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me. Especially since nuclear and renewables actually complement each other really well. We can use nuclear for baseload and renewables filling in on top when sun and wind are available.
Onkalo is the best approximation so far of of a memory hole for nuclear waste — but Finland has not agreed to accept all the world’s nuclear waste, similar sites are not available for all countries, and in practice storage remains a major point of contention as a wander through this discussion will show.
> The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me.
I sometimes feel similarly about pro-nuclear cheer mongering.
Coal also produces radioactive byproducts. They just release them into the air.
Brazil nuts and bananas are radioactive too, compared to other foods — but do not pose risks compared to coal ash.
Similarly, while coal ash is nasty stuff that kills lots of people, it lacks many of the qualities that make spent nuclear fuel especially difficult to manage even in small amounts.
For example, a “dirty bomb” made by packing coal ash around conventional explosives would be far less effective than one made from spent nuclear fuel.
I, for one, am glad we don‘t have yet another 2600 square kilometers exclusion zone in densely populated Germany, like the one around Chernobyl.
I'm glad we don't have exclusion zones like that one in France either.
The original version is quite different from the version performed today. The original lyrics refer to the pun of "radioactivity" versus "radio activity", meaning, activity on the radio.
The new live version refers almost exclusively to the former meaning, and adds "stop" to turn it into a protest song.
I've seen Kraftwerk live twice, at London's Albert Hall and Berkeley's Greek Theater, both times absolutely amazing. Highly recommended.
I've often thought they would be the ideal band to perform inside the "Sphere" in Las Vegas.
Just saw Kraftwerk live exactly a week ago, 2026-05-06, in Hong Kong on their Asia tour. They played Radioactivität, among their other hits. Recommended indeed. There might not be another tour, Ralf Hütter is 79!
Over the next month, they will play in Ireland and UK, then Eastern Europe. https://kraftwerk.com/concerts/index-concerts.html
If the suggested political impact of this music is to be believed, the music might be one of the biggest environmental disasters of all time.
Germany has been pretty widely criticized for decommissioning it's nuclear power program, only to replace it with Russian oil.
Lots of brown coal, which famously emits more radioactivity than any nuclear power plant ever did. The anti nuclear movement is a fucking joke, and the people I know personally here in Germany who oppose(d) nuclear still think the danger is an atomic bomb level explosion, or generational crippling mutations, or losing their house.
>> only to replace it with Russian oil
with Russian gas.
s/Russian/American/
Either way, Germany has perfected the efficient foot bullet, at least.
I could imagine Kraftwerk devising a stonkin’ “Fußkugel” track, actually ..
Check your facts, please: Germans figuratively shoot themselves in the knee, not the foot ;)
that would be an odd criticism because we never generated any meaningful amount of electricity from oil (and started importing Russian fossil resources 30 years before we turned nuclear power plants off). The chief source for energy in Germany was coal. Gas is primarily an industry and heating input rather than a source of power generation, gas plants have only become more popular in recent years.
What replaced all other fossil fuel sources are renewables, which at 50% are now by far the single largest source of energy.
Fun fact, these "radicals" were behind one of the longest running copyright lawsuits in European history, one that started in 1997 and ended this year https://ra.co/news/85004
Ruckzuck is way more interesting and ahead of its time (1970).
https://youtu.be/yUFc5QoMG1E
P.S
Also check out Ashra - Deep Distance (1976).
https://youtu.be/BJZ9PVvu9OA
Saw them last year in Seattle. One of those bands I never thought I'd get the chance to see (I'm 54), but thanks to them they are still touring and making great music.
It was an amazing show, and incredible night.
Only related in awesomeness but whenever I see VLC’s icon I think of Kraftwerk.
Kraftwerk sounds novel even today, I can’t imagine how it must have sounded 50 years ago.
It’s a shame they were so anti-nuclear. Best song on that album was Ohm Sweet Ohm.
I have been extremely lucky to get an invitation to their concert in Kiev, Ukraine, many years ago. Three of the original members still alive and kicking. It was incredibly awesome.
The concert itself was a gift from Victor Pinchuk, one of the Ukrainian oligarchs and renowned patron, to the city. Previously he also sponsored a full-blown Elton John concert on the main city square which I also attended.
IMHO Autobahn is still their best.
The Electronic Harpsichord, same year. must have been an interesting time.
Totally Rad.
One of the things whose non-existence I'm mildly surprised by: a mash-up between Kraftwerk's Radioactivity and Imagine Dragons Radioactive. Sure, they're extremely different songs melody-wise but that never stopped people from successfully mashing up songs before, and the underlying beat is almost the same but reversed, which is kinda interesting[0][1].
Also, has anyone ever compared the cultural context and zeitgeist of both songs? Probably would be a fun high school assignment, haha. Kraftwerk's song came out in the same decade that the Club of Rome published its Limits To Growth report[2], so when fears about humanity's future really started to become A Thing that was impossible to ignore. Later versions of the song turning it into a protest song encapsulate Cold War fears for a nuclear apocalypse of the time (presumably, I wasn't really around yet back then).
The main audience for the Imagine Dragons song was a generation fully born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One that grew up playing the Fall Out games. It also came out in 2012, right after the 2008 crisis kick-started the "oh the previous generation will leave us with nothing huh?" Doomer mentality among millennials and Gen Z kids. Remember the media going nuts over the "Ok, Boomer" expression for a while? (which still feels like the media intentionally dividing a community to stop it from actually fixing things me, tbh, but let's not get too side-tracked)
In that context, when put side by side the ID song almost feels like a Doomer generation follow-up and implicit critique of how nothing seems to have actually be done about to prevent the impending apocalypse that the Kraftwerk song's generation was supposedly so worried about, turned into a fantasy about living in that post-apocalyptic planet.
It's "vibe" is weirdly hopeful too, especially compared to the Kraftwerk song as well. Instead of fearing an apocalypse, it's set after one and embraces living within it.
At least, that's how the two songs come across to me, which probably says more about me than anything else. Apparently Dan Reynolds, main singer on ID and one of writers of the song, has said that in retrospect after almost a decade, he had realized that it was actually about him "not giving up hope after losing faith in Mormonism."[3]. Which makes sense as a personal experience of going through feeling doomed and figuring out how to survive and embrace living on in a "post-apocalyptic" world on a personal, social level.
I think that's what annoys me about the Kraftwerk song's status as a protest song, and a lot of other music from the same era: it doesn't feel like it's insisting on a better future. It's passive late 70s, early 80s pessimism.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3viBe2Q0P8
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyXeJZJUFHE
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_%28Imagine_Dragons...
saving you a click: it's Radioactivity
There is a bit more in the article than that.