It makes sense to shut down older power plants - even if those in Germany are considered quite safe.
Not because I fear they may blow up the next few hours... it's more that I think if you get rid of old things you leave place for development of something better.
But I agree what we currently see in Germany is mostly an election thingy. CDU fears to lose elections in Baden Württemberg after the Stuttgart21 revolts and the pro nuclear energy statements of the meanwhile pretty unpopular minister president Mappus.
Nuclear energy is often considered clean, as it has next to no CO2 emission... but...
I seriously ask how clean nuclear energy really can be if it produces waste which has to be sealed away and remains toxic for 100000 years and more?
How good is it to rely on a system which can easily pollute an area with 30km radius for over 100000 years?
How far can we trust into this system which scars people whenever they here there is "some problem" with the plant?
What I want to say: Nuclear power plants deliver cheap and good energy, they run mostly stable, but whenever something goes very very very wrong - in a way things usually do not go wrong because it simply is unrealistic - then we should think about what we are doing there. We should recognize that we may have 99.999999% of the time the full control over what is happening with the reactor, but there is an unrealistic of maybe 0.000001% (just numbers, I did not look them up) chance the thing gets out of control. You know, if things go wrong it's not just "ouch, that was expensive", it's a lot more.
And everybody knows Murphy, and Japan will hate him from now on.
Lot of text, short conclusion: If we find good alternatives, we should make use of them - even if they are more expensive.
Currently however, it simply is not possible to get full energy supply without nuclear power plants.
German documentation about Tschernobyl everybody should have seen before arguing about nuclear power. It helped me to find a more stable opinion on this topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TgczLGbZSA&playnext=1&list=PL575CD8CEA9A63CE810 parts, over 90 minutes of video - worth every minute.
