If you work in the insurance industry or grid management today, you already know the joke: ‘stationarity is dead’. We are currently watching 1-in-100-year weather events batter the European continent with seasonal regularity.
Another great piece and very illuminating analogy with late Roman Britain but I would qualify the point about Germany's aversion to nuclear power by saying that it went significantly beyond the Green Party with a few personal experiences:
1) I was studying German at Trier University in 1987, and Trier is about as far west in Germany as you can get. Nonetheless, even though Trier is a long way from Ukraine, one year after the Chernobyl disaster the paranoia about the radiation fallout was still enormous and there were more than a few students on campus with their own Geiger counters wandering around checking safety levels.
2) Many years later, in 2007, when Germany was in the middle of a tortured debate about closing its nuclear power plants and I was a utility analyst at Deutsche Bank, I visited a fund manager in Frankfurt to discuss a report I had just published about how Germany should extend the lifetime of its nuclear power plants and put a windfall tax on the profits of doing this while hypothecating the proceeds of this tax to fund renewable investments. The fund manager -- a very conservative chap managing the largest DAX fund in Germany -- listened patiently to my arguments and then said: "I can't dispute the logic of your argument as it makes perfect sense but my heart is against it. And if you can't convince me, how are you going to convince the broader mass of the German political establishment?"
3) Four years later, in 2011, after the Fukushima accident when Angela Merkel's government set up a commission to decide on the future of Germany's nuclear plants, I made a visit to BASF to discuss energy policy with senior executives. One of them said to me over an agreeable lunch in the company canteen: "The thing is, if the ancient Egyptians had had nuclear power, the spent fuel would still be radioactive today. It is an unsafe technology."
4) The man appointed to be in charge of that commission, Klaus Töpfer, had been the German Environment Minister in the 1990s, and one of Merkel's mentors. At this time, in 2011, while leading this commission, he was also an adviser to Deutsche Bank on climate change, and as a carbon and energy analyst I would meet with him frequently. And he said to me once when I asked why the German Government was considering phasing out all of Germany's nukes: "The thing you need to understand is that in politics emotions are facts, and in Germany emotions run very high against nuclear power."
The point, I suppose, is that there was a consensus in German society that nuclear power was not safe and no longer needed, and while the epistemological basis for that view varied across different groups -- and certainly, as you say, there was a strong romantic/aesthetic aversion across a large part of society -- it nonetheless extended way beyond the Green movement.
All of that being said, I have never really understood why the aversion to nuclear power was so much stronger in Germany than in other countries closer to Chernobyl, and have never seen a good explanation of that.
Mark, what a fantastic and deeply illuminating comment. Thank you for taking the time to share these first hand accounts. Your experiences from the trenches of German utility analysis add a crucial layer of institutional reality to the theoretical physics of the problem.
Klaus Töpfer’s remark that "emotions are facts" is arguably the most concise definition I’ve ever heard of a structurally rigid Ideological Superstructure. When the psychological mass of a society becomes that dense, thermodynamic logic and biophysical math simply bounce off it.
I was particularly struck by the BASF executive’s "ancient Egyptian" analogy. He was absolutely right about the deep-time entropic debt! It is exactly the "Roman Bath" problem of leaving a 10,000-year liability for our descendants. But the tragedy is the conclusion they drew from it. They correctly identified the danger of the open nuclear cycle, but rather than demanding the necessary capital to close the cycle and consume the waste, they chose to simply vapourise the embedded exergy of the reactors while still leaving the existing waste unresolved.
As you noted regarding your 2007 Deutsche Bank report, the financial architecture simply won't tolerate the capital necessary to close that loop. There are technical solutions to the waste, but a closed-cycle (K-Strategy) infrastructure requires a level of institutional patience and long-term state subsidy that hyper-financialised markets loathe. The UK attempted this with Sellafield, and France manages it to an extent, but it requires a very different political economy.
Your final point—"Why Germany?"—is the most fascinating question of all. Why was the paranoia so much stronger in Trier than in Warsaw or Paris?
If I were to hypothesise, I suspect it is a collision of geopolitics and historical trauma.
Firstly, during the 1980s, West Germany was the designated nuclear battlefield of the Cold War. The stationing of Pershing II missiles and the constant threat of the Fulda Gap meant that for Germans, 'the atom' wasn't just a distant power source; it represented the literal, localised annihilation of their nation.
Secondly, there is the deep German Romantik tradition—a profound cultural reverence for the forest and nature (Waldsterben panic in the 80s was huge)—colliding with the immense psychological trauma and guilt of WWII. Post-war Germany built a magnificent industrial machine, but perhaps it also developed a deep, almost subconscious cultural neurosis around 'playing God' with world-ending, Faustian technologies. The Green Party didn't create that aversion; they just successfully weaponised a trauma that was already deeply embedded in the German psyche.
I'll update the draft with your feedback and these insights in mind. Thanks again!
Thanks for your very thoughtful reply, Steven, and I think your explanation as to why Germany became so much more anti-nuclear than the other countries around it is very plausible, particularly your point about post-war Germany being the epicentre of the Cold War.
And yes, that Töpfer quote is priceless, I think about it almost every day as it has only become more relevant with the passage of time and the rise of populism (Brexit, Trump, culture wars, etc).
This exchange has actually given me some important insights which I have incorporated into SETE 2.0: I've introduced "Alarmism Fatigue (γ) and Signal Occlusion, demonstrating how successful interventions in past crises render the system algorithmically blind to future threats." This was a missing piece.
great article. I am loving the work. Nuclear’s problem has been not so much the safety record but what can go wrong. It is difficult to convince people to look for the long term benefits when they worry about making their locale uninhabitable. The USSR did coercively. The French made safe reactors. Only the latter works in a pluralistic society.
Another cultural issue in Germany, around the pro environmental feelings, might also come from the historical guilt about being the birthplace of industrial chemistry. This is an aspect of pollution not nearly as prominent as the combustion CO2 issue. But arguably more insidious and damaging to life. Generating energy is one thing. The entirety of the Petro chemical and industrial chemistry web of infiltration through the web of life is, when most of us think about it, enough to give us the shivers. All the Microplastik inside our bodies and spread across the planet.
Repentance for that kind of perceived responsibility is not easy to find or receive. Add in the WW2 situation and the self flagellation becomes understandable, I think. Not constructive. But at the same time, more honorable than the denial of those who refuse to bite the hand that, on the face of it, has provided so much advancement and so many cool gadgets and things.
We have known about the problem for quite a while now and we have been arguing and bickering about what to do about the situation. After, at least, thirty years, of talks and pilot schemes and political wrangling we have had limited success. And so, now we are approaching the Seneca drop/cliff.
Will a twenty percent drop in energy supply translate, one for one, into a a twenty percent drop in population? Or will the flow on effects cascade? Will everything settle down with the sudden discovery of anti-gravity tech and actual hoverboards as well as easy access to space? Or something equally trajectory changing like the chemical fertilizer revolution that resolved the Malthusian malice (and was Malthus calculations partly responsible for the outbreak of Nazis, similar to how the current exegy shortage is driving the US to become a psychopathic monster?)
We are living in interesting times, as the Chinese saying taunts.
"I have never really understood why the aversion to nuclear power was so much stronger in Germany than in other countries closer to Chernobyl, and have never seen a good explanation of that."
I think we shouldn't overlook the role of the Soviets and the way they were able to exploit the anti-nuclear movement in Western Europe, and particularly in Germany during the 60's and 70's....
(Ironically, this was precisely at a time when nuclear power was regarded in the USSR as the ultimate energy source of the future that would allow communism to achieve supremacy.)
After reading the comments, I have an observation/query? I haven't heard of an assuredly safe, in the long term, way for nuclear generation systems to be decommisioned. Many just are a version of "bury in the most stable rock formations and padlock it in, then walk away and forget". And that's just for the civilian systems. What about the military's use of nuclear? Never mentioned.
How are we going to communicate the dangers to our descendants alive in, say, 5,000 yrs? Can we imagine their language even? Languages alter, pronounciation too.
Seems we just rely on simple pictograms!. Seems we're stuffed.
It's about the Finnish definitive nuclear waste storage facility and all the problems that this can cause. Including the difficulty of making its existence disappear from memory so that even a society capable of uncovering them and understanding their nature could not find them.
This approach is the opposite of the French one, which is based on the assumption that waste must remain accessible in the (unlikely) event that a better way to dispose of it is found...
As for the long-term nuclear legacy and its danger, you can read this excellent and thought-provoking short story by Don Hayward that conclude his 'After the Last Day' trilogy : https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/547855
I would like to add another facet to German picture.
Germany spent about 150 Billion Euro to subsidize Nuclear power, and the Government estimates another 150 Billion to clean up its nuclear endeavor. Germany is a densely populated country. There is no Nevada desert. No place has been found where to terminally store the nuclear waste. Just the maintenance of the current "intermediate" storage costs over a billion a year.
Germany used an old salt mine (Asse) in the seventies. However, it is now unstable due to inflowing water and impending ceiling collapse. The barrels are rusting. Although plans are underway to retrieve the waste due to long-term safety risks nobody knows how.
The government has postponed the nuclear waste solution to 2070(!). We know that in our age of decline there won't be any resources. This is criminal. Make you pay your grand-grand parents utility bills and you don't have the money?
I wonder what the French are doing. Ah, yes don't they have some remote colonies?
I understand your point about a preserving that bridge but I question whether it would have been burned anyway via waste if those nuclear plants hadnt been decommissioned. At least here in America, every advance in fuel efficiency or renewables just results in bigger, more powerful, more wasteful vehicles, homes data centersetc. Here in Portland have gas space heaters so you can sit outside a perfectly cozy bar, restaurant, or living room on a cold wet winter night chatting about IPAs or backyard chickens.
IMHO We need to solve the deathwish posing as a bipartisan crisis of stupidity before we can solve anything else.
Am I the only reader experiencing severe cognitive dissonance?
What I'm reading says, "excessive complexity requires vast amounts of non-renewable resources, therefore we must preserve it so we can transition to simplicity."
Sounds like fückîng for virginity to me!
If every German took personal responsibility for producing as much of their own food as they could, they wouldn't need either nuclear nor coal power!
Jan, thank you for this. You are absolutely not the only one experiencing cognitive dissonance! But that dissonance isn't a bug in the argument; it is the defining, inescapable tragedy of our current thermodynamic predicament.
You are entirely correct that excessive complexity requires vast, unsustainable resources. The 'Collapse now and avoid the rush' ethos (to borrow John Michael Greer's excellent phrase) is incredibly tempting. If we were just talking about office blocks and fiat currency, I would agree: just walk away and start farming.
But here is the physical trap, and why nuclear power is the ultimate double-edged sword: de-complexifying a society is itself a highly energy-intensive process. To your point about every German producing their own food: transitioning 80 million people from a hyper-financialised, globalised supply chain into a localised, agrarian, bioregional model requires building a massive amount of new, low-tech infrastructure. You have to physically build the 'lifeboats'. That requires an immense, upfront expenditure of gross exergy.
But more terrifyingly, we have the decommissioning problem. You cannot simply 'collapse now' and walk away from a generation-III nuclear reactor. If the German population or any other country with nuclear infrastructure just abandons the industrial grid to go grow potatoes, the active cooling systems on the spent-fuel pools fail. The water boils off, the zirconium fires start, and the very land you are trying to farm becomes a radioactive wasteland for 10,000 years.
Safely decommissioning a nuclear plant and managing its waste requires decades of hyper-complex, energy-dense, highly specialised industrial maintenance. We desperately needed the embedded exergy of those functioning nuclear plants to power our own controlled descent—to keep the lights on while we safely dismantle the most dangerous parts of the old world and build the localised infrastructure of the new one.
By vapourising that clean baseload power before we had safely transitioned or dealt with the waste, the Greens didn't hasten a return to the garden; they just forced the system to burn millions of tonnes of lignite dirt to keep the cooling pools running and the grid from shattering prematurely.
We are trapped in a phase-space where we must use the last of our high-density exergy to survive the descent. The dissonance you feel is simply the physical reality of being caught inside a collapsing Roman hypocaust that we don't have the energy to safely turn off.
The *only* reason cooling ponds require active cooling is because there is no long-term storage solution, and so they keep packing the spent fuel rods closer and closer.
The "German method" first spreads out liquid storage so that it doesn't require pumping, then vitrifies it and transports it to dry storage — which doesn't require active cooling.
It is only if you continue generating new waste that the "cooling pond problem" even exists.
If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.
I cannot support continued nuclear power under present assumptions.
The United States committed an act of war on germany when the Americans blew up NS2 and the german response was that bad slaves deserve their beatings.
Another great piece and very illuminating analogy with late Roman Britain but I would qualify the point about Germany's aversion to nuclear power by saying that it went significantly beyond the Green Party with a few personal experiences:
1) I was studying German at Trier University in 1987, and Trier is about as far west in Germany as you can get. Nonetheless, even though Trier is a long way from Ukraine, one year after the Chernobyl disaster the paranoia about the radiation fallout was still enormous and there were more than a few students on campus with their own Geiger counters wandering around checking safety levels.
2) Many years later, in 2007, when Germany was in the middle of a tortured debate about closing its nuclear power plants and I was a utility analyst at Deutsche Bank, I visited a fund manager in Frankfurt to discuss a report I had just published about how Germany should extend the lifetime of its nuclear power plants and put a windfall tax on the profits of doing this while hypothecating the proceeds of this tax to fund renewable investments. The fund manager -- a very conservative chap managing the largest DAX fund in Germany -- listened patiently to my arguments and then said: "I can't dispute the logic of your argument as it makes perfect sense but my heart is against it. And if you can't convince me, how are you going to convince the broader mass of the German political establishment?"
3) Four years later, in 2011, after the Fukushima accident when Angela Merkel's government set up a commission to decide on the future of Germany's nuclear plants, I made a visit to BASF to discuss energy policy with senior executives. One of them said to me over an agreeable lunch in the company canteen: "The thing is, if the ancient Egyptians had had nuclear power, the spent fuel would still be radioactive today. It is an unsafe technology."
4) The man appointed to be in charge of that commission, Klaus Töpfer, had been the German Environment Minister in the 1990s, and one of Merkel's mentors. At this time, in 2011, while leading this commission, he was also an adviser to Deutsche Bank on climate change, and as a carbon and energy analyst I would meet with him frequently. And he said to me once when I asked why the German Government was considering phasing out all of Germany's nukes: "The thing you need to understand is that in politics emotions are facts, and in Germany emotions run very high against nuclear power."
The point, I suppose, is that there was a consensus in German society that nuclear power was not safe and no longer needed, and while the epistemological basis for that view varied across different groups -- and certainly, as you say, there was a strong romantic/aesthetic aversion across a large part of society -- it nonetheless extended way beyond the Green movement.
All of that being said, I have never really understood why the aversion to nuclear power was so much stronger in Germany than in other countries closer to Chernobyl, and have never seen a good explanation of that.
Anyway, thanks for another great piece.
Mark, what a fantastic and deeply illuminating comment. Thank you for taking the time to share these first hand accounts. Your experiences from the trenches of German utility analysis add a crucial layer of institutional reality to the theoretical physics of the problem.
Klaus Töpfer’s remark that "emotions are facts" is arguably the most concise definition I’ve ever heard of a structurally rigid Ideological Superstructure. When the psychological mass of a society becomes that dense, thermodynamic logic and biophysical math simply bounce off it.
I was particularly struck by the BASF executive’s "ancient Egyptian" analogy. He was absolutely right about the deep-time entropic debt! It is exactly the "Roman Bath" problem of leaving a 10,000-year liability for our descendants. But the tragedy is the conclusion they drew from it. They correctly identified the danger of the open nuclear cycle, but rather than demanding the necessary capital to close the cycle and consume the waste, they chose to simply vapourise the embedded exergy of the reactors while still leaving the existing waste unresolved.
As you noted regarding your 2007 Deutsche Bank report, the financial architecture simply won't tolerate the capital necessary to close that loop. There are technical solutions to the waste, but a closed-cycle (K-Strategy) infrastructure requires a level of institutional patience and long-term state subsidy that hyper-financialised markets loathe. The UK attempted this with Sellafield, and France manages it to an extent, but it requires a very different political economy.
Your final point—"Why Germany?"—is the most fascinating question of all. Why was the paranoia so much stronger in Trier than in Warsaw or Paris?
If I were to hypothesise, I suspect it is a collision of geopolitics and historical trauma.
Firstly, during the 1980s, West Germany was the designated nuclear battlefield of the Cold War. The stationing of Pershing II missiles and the constant threat of the Fulda Gap meant that for Germans, 'the atom' wasn't just a distant power source; it represented the literal, localised annihilation of their nation.
Secondly, there is the deep German Romantik tradition—a profound cultural reverence for the forest and nature (Waldsterben panic in the 80s was huge)—colliding with the immense psychological trauma and guilt of WWII. Post-war Germany built a magnificent industrial machine, but perhaps it also developed a deep, almost subconscious cultural neurosis around 'playing God' with world-ending, Faustian technologies. The Green Party didn't create that aversion; they just successfully weaponised a trauma that was already deeply embedded in the German psyche.
I'll update the draft with your feedback and these insights in mind. Thanks again!
Thanks for your very thoughtful reply, Steven, and I think your explanation as to why Germany became so much more anti-nuclear than the other countries around it is very plausible, particularly your point about post-war Germany being the epicentre of the Cold War.
And yes, that Töpfer quote is priceless, I think about it almost every day as it has only become more relevant with the passage of time and the rise of populism (Brexit, Trump, culture wars, etc).
This exchange has actually given me some important insights which I have incorporated into SETE 2.0: I've introduced "Alarmism Fatigue (γ) and Signal Occlusion, demonstrating how successful interventions in past crises render the system algorithmically blind to future threats." This was a missing piece.
That is great to hear, and I love the concept of Alarmism Fatigue. Look forward to seeing the revised SETE framework.
The latest version contains all the changes I've been working on. https://zenodo.org/records/19237584
Great stuff, look forward to tackling that over the weekend.
great article. I am loving the work. Nuclear’s problem has been not so much the safety record but what can go wrong. It is difficult to convince people to look for the long term benefits when they worry about making their locale uninhabitable. The USSR did coercively. The French made safe reactors. Only the latter works in a pluralistic society.
Another cultural issue in Germany, around the pro environmental feelings, might also come from the historical guilt about being the birthplace of industrial chemistry. This is an aspect of pollution not nearly as prominent as the combustion CO2 issue. But arguably more insidious and damaging to life. Generating energy is one thing. The entirety of the Petro chemical and industrial chemistry web of infiltration through the web of life is, when most of us think about it, enough to give us the shivers. All the Microplastik inside our bodies and spread across the planet.
Repentance for that kind of perceived responsibility is not easy to find or receive. Add in the WW2 situation and the self flagellation becomes understandable, I think. Not constructive. But at the same time, more honorable than the denial of those who refuse to bite the hand that, on the face of it, has provided so much advancement and so many cool gadgets and things.
We have known about the problem for quite a while now and we have been arguing and bickering about what to do about the situation. After, at least, thirty years, of talks and pilot schemes and political wrangling we have had limited success. And so, now we are approaching the Seneca drop/cliff.
Will a twenty percent drop in energy supply translate, one for one, into a a twenty percent drop in population? Or will the flow on effects cascade? Will everything settle down with the sudden discovery of anti-gravity tech and actual hoverboards as well as easy access to space? Or something equally trajectory changing like the chemical fertilizer revolution that resolved the Malthusian malice (and was Malthus calculations partly responsible for the outbreak of Nazis, similar to how the current exegy shortage is driving the US to become a psychopathic monster?)
We are living in interesting times, as the Chinese saying taunts.
"I have never really understood why the aversion to nuclear power was so much stronger in Germany than in other countries closer to Chernobyl, and have never seen a good explanation of that."
I think we shouldn't overlook the role of the Soviets and the way they were able to exploit the anti-nuclear movement in Western Europe, and particularly in Germany during the 60's and 70's....
(Ironically, this was precisely at a time when nuclear power was regarded in the USSR as the ultimate energy source of the future that would allow communism to achieve supremacy.)
After reading the comments, I have an observation/query? I haven't heard of an assuredly safe, in the long term, way for nuclear generation systems to be decommisioned. Many just are a version of "bury in the most stable rock formations and padlock it in, then walk away and forget". And that's just for the civilian systems. What about the military's use of nuclear? Never mentioned.
How are we going to communicate the dangers to our descendants alive in, say, 5,000 yrs? Can we imagine their language even? Languages alter, pronounciation too.
Seems we just rely on simple pictograms!. Seems we're stuffed.
Look for a documentary named 'Into Eternity'.
It's about the Finnish definitive nuclear waste storage facility and all the problems that this can cause. Including the difficulty of making its existence disappear from memory so that even a society capable of uncovering them and understanding their nature could not find them.
This approach is the opposite of the French one, which is based on the assumption that waste must remain accessible in the (unlikely) event that a better way to dispose of it is found...
As for the long-term nuclear legacy and its danger, you can read this excellent and thought-provoking short story by Don Hayward that conclude his 'After the Last Day' trilogy : https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/547855
I would like to add another facet to German picture.
Germany spent about 150 Billion Euro to subsidize Nuclear power, and the Government estimates another 150 Billion to clean up its nuclear endeavor. Germany is a densely populated country. There is no Nevada desert. No place has been found where to terminally store the nuclear waste. Just the maintenance of the current "intermediate" storage costs over a billion a year.
Germany used an old salt mine (Asse) in the seventies. However, it is now unstable due to inflowing water and impending ceiling collapse. The barrels are rusting. Although plans are underway to retrieve the waste due to long-term safety risks nobody knows how.
The government has postponed the nuclear waste solution to 2070(!). We know that in our age of decline there won't be any resources. This is criminal. Make you pay your grand-grand parents utility bills and you don't have the money?
I wonder what the French are doing. Ah, yes don't they have some remote colonies?
I understand your point about a preserving that bridge but I question whether it would have been burned anyway via waste if those nuclear plants hadnt been decommissioned. At least here in America, every advance in fuel efficiency or renewables just results in bigger, more powerful, more wasteful vehicles, homes data centersetc. Here in Portland have gas space heaters so you can sit outside a perfectly cozy bar, restaurant, or living room on a cold wet winter night chatting about IPAs or backyard chickens.
IMHO We need to solve the deathwish posing as a bipartisan crisis of stupidity before we can solve anything else.
Am I the only reader experiencing severe cognitive dissonance?
What I'm reading says, "excessive complexity requires vast amounts of non-renewable resources, therefore we must preserve it so we can transition to simplicity."
Sounds like fückîng for virginity to me!
If every German took personal responsibility for producing as much of their own food as they could, they wouldn't need either nuclear nor coal power!
Collapse now! Avoid the rush!
Jan, thank you for this. You are absolutely not the only one experiencing cognitive dissonance! But that dissonance isn't a bug in the argument; it is the defining, inescapable tragedy of our current thermodynamic predicament.
You are entirely correct that excessive complexity requires vast, unsustainable resources. The 'Collapse now and avoid the rush' ethos (to borrow John Michael Greer's excellent phrase) is incredibly tempting. If we were just talking about office blocks and fiat currency, I would agree: just walk away and start farming.
But here is the physical trap, and why nuclear power is the ultimate double-edged sword: de-complexifying a society is itself a highly energy-intensive process. To your point about every German producing their own food: transitioning 80 million people from a hyper-financialised, globalised supply chain into a localised, agrarian, bioregional model requires building a massive amount of new, low-tech infrastructure. You have to physically build the 'lifeboats'. That requires an immense, upfront expenditure of gross exergy.
But more terrifyingly, we have the decommissioning problem. You cannot simply 'collapse now' and walk away from a generation-III nuclear reactor. If the German population or any other country with nuclear infrastructure just abandons the industrial grid to go grow potatoes, the active cooling systems on the spent-fuel pools fail. The water boils off, the zirconium fires start, and the very land you are trying to farm becomes a radioactive wasteland for 10,000 years.
Safely decommissioning a nuclear plant and managing its waste requires decades of hyper-complex, energy-dense, highly specialised industrial maintenance. We desperately needed the embedded exergy of those functioning nuclear plants to power our own controlled descent—to keep the lights on while we safely dismantle the most dangerous parts of the old world and build the localised infrastructure of the new one.
By vapourising that clean baseload power before we had safely transitioned or dealt with the waste, the Greens didn't hasten a return to the garden; they just forced the system to burn millions of tonnes of lignite dirt to keep the cooling pools running and the grid from shattering prematurely.
We are trapped in a phase-space where we must use the last of our high-density exergy to survive the descent. The dissonance you feel is simply the physical reality of being caught inside a collapsing Roman hypocaust that we don't have the energy to safely turn off.
From what I've determined, the German nuclear power sites have been passivized — they no longer require power for cooling.
"The dry storage of spent fuel and vitrified radioactive waste from reprocessing in transport and storage casks has proven effective. In Germany, there are sufficient storage capacities available for accommodating all spent fuel and vitrified radioactive waste from reprocessing." — https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/fileadmin/Daten_BMU/Download_PDF/Nukleare_Sicherheit/nationales_entsorgungsprogramm_2025_entwurf_en_bf.pdf , et. al.
The *only* reason cooling ponds require active cooling is because there is no long-term storage solution, and so they keep packing the spent fuel rods closer and closer.
The "German method" first spreads out liquid storage so that it doesn't require pumping, then vitrifies it and transports it to dry storage — which doesn't require active cooling.
It is only if you continue generating new waste that the "cooling pond problem" even exists.
If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.
I cannot support continued nuclear power under present assumptions.
The United States committed an act of war on germany when the Americans blew up NS2 and the german response was that bad slaves deserve their beatings.