Nuclear had been a problem for years. Every attempt to transport nuclear waste was paired with very disruptive protests to block those transports. That made an expensive solution even more expensive and it made politicians involved look bad too. Germany is a crowded place; NIMBYism can make or break a political career and this was a never ending PR nightmare for conservative politicians. It made them look bad. Just not worth the trouble given how small the nuclear proportion was in the German market. Just trying to emphasize here how completely and utterly uncontroversial this nuclear shutdown has been locally.
Up until Fukushima there were still new plants being considered/pondered/dreamed off (those plans looked increasingly less likely to ever happen). 2011 was the year when renewables became the one and only answer to future proofing Germany's energy needs.
Nuclear became part of the problem instead of the solution. No more new plants was an easy and extremely popular decision across the political spectrum. Which immediately raised the sensible question what to do with the remaining old ones. Which was promptly answered by "lets just get this over with and move on with renewables". There only was around 16GW of nuclear capacity at the time, 8 of which is gone by now. The rest is going in the next few years. It wasn't that big of a deal replacing one expensive source of energy with another that wasn't that cheap either (at the time).
Germany was not ready to do that with coal twelve years ago because at the time it was still most of its energy generation so it simply couldn't. That simply isn't true anymore. Renewables are now cheaper and coal is now the expensive option in the market. Once coal is gone, the next obvious target will be gas and oil plants (around 4% of the market).
Up until Fukushima there were still new plants being considered/pondered/dreamed off (those plans looked increasingly less likely to ever happen). 2011 was the year when renewables became the one and only answer to future proofing Germany's energy needs.
Nuclear became part of the problem instead of the solution. No more new plants was an easy and extremely popular decision across the political spectrum. Which immediately raised the sensible question what to do with the remaining old ones. Which was promptly answered by "lets just get this over with and move on with renewables". There only was around 16GW of nuclear capacity at the time, 8 of which is gone by now. The rest is going in the next few years. It wasn't that big of a deal replacing one expensive source of energy with another that wasn't that cheap either (at the time).
Germany was not ready to do that with coal twelve years ago because at the time it was still most of its energy generation so it simply couldn't. That simply isn't true anymore. Renewables are now cheaper and coal is now the expensive option in the market. Once coal is gone, the next obvious target will be gas and oil plants (around 4% of the market).