There's a simple reason Germany is moving away from nuclear and it has nothing to do with safety: cost. It's stupidly expensive to build new plants. It's, by far, the most expensive option in the market. Building new nuclear plants makes no sense from a cost perspective. So, combined with its unpopularity for environmental reasons (nuclear waste basically), which is a deeply ingrained in Germany, shutting down the handful of remaining nuclear plants was a foregone conclusion. It was a popular and uncontroversial decision and a likely concession by conservative parties so they could keep their brown coal plants open a bit longer. Which is something the new government looks to be fixing anyway.

I live in Berlin. Unpopular decisions cause people to protest. They protest for/against just about anything you can name. Germans love protesting. Berliners doubly so. It's a good way to gauge how they feel about things. As far as I can recall, nobody took to the streets to prevent a nuclear shutdown. That did not happen. Protests against coal and for the environment on the other hand are very frequent. And lately there have been a lot of anti-vaxers out with the inevitable counter protests happening as well. And of course the Ukraine brings out the crowds. Nuclear, not so much. The only nuclear related protests would have been against it. There are a few people in the press arguing it. Politically, it's been a dead topic. Politicians don't like to associate themselves with unpopular topics and they distanced themselves from nuclear years ago. There are exceptions of course but by and large even conservative parties stopped pushing that agenda.

They could have delayed shutting down plants of course. But they've added more renewable capacity in the last few years than they ever had nuclear capacity. And of course they just doubled down on investing in more renewable energy until 2030. There's 200 billion allocated for that. Compared to that the remaining 8GW of nuclear simply does not matter.

Contrary to the popular belief, gas based generation barely grew in Germany after the nuclear shut down started happening more than a decade ago. Neither did coal. Coal has actually been declining; except for lignite/brown coal.

Fraunhofer has some numbers for 2021: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/news/2022/publi...

Wind production was actually down due to poor performance of wind turbines that year apparently (weather basically). The slack was mostly picked up by brown coal.

An issue with wind is actually the lack of cable capacity in Germany. A lot of coal production in the south is needed because they lack the ability to import cheaper wind from the north. A lot of the times when the wind mills are not spinning, they are not broken but deliberately turned off. Over capacity is a problem if you can't move power to where it is needed.

Another issue is that rooftop solar is hard to measure in these statistics. That's very popular in Germany and domestic setups of course feed into the local grid. However, how do you account for that? One thing is certain, rooftop solar continues to be very popular and is growing rapidly. Same for batteries. Both effectively remove demand from the grid. Hard to measure but it must be having some effect. The bit of solar showing up in these statistics would be solar plants; not rooftop solar.

A likely outcome of the Ukrainian conflict is an accelerated move away from gas based heating and power generation. You can see some early signs that governments are starting to think about that. Regardless of whether the Russians go back to something resembling peace, I think many countries have gotten the message that they simply can't be depended on loud and clear. At cop26 last year, countries were talking about 2040-2060 time frames for going carbon neutral. Gas was a big part of those plans. I think Russia single-handedly accelerated the ambition level by about 10-15 years in the last month.

Until a few months ago, the German plan basically was to switch from coal (also exported by Russia) to (Russian) gas by 2030. The remaining nuclear (2 or 3 plants) capacity is not enough to matter here. Restarting already decommissioned plants is unlikely to happen and probably would require a sizable investment as well in addition to probably being not popular. Besides, it would not be enough. But you could argue that keeping the few remaining plants going for a few years is not going to hurt anyone in the grander scheme of things. Either way, the Germans need a plan and nuclear is extremely unlikely to be any part of that plan. Building new gas plants is now a lot less likely. The only real alternative is more renewables. Hence the announced 200 billion budget for that.