For a long time, the environmental movement fought primarily against nuclear power instead of taking the climate crisis seriously. Our author has been reporting on this since the 1970s and is now asking himself, shortly before the last nuclear power plants are shut down: why?
From
Nicholas Piper
I encountered a nuclear power plant for the first time in my stamp collection. On the occasion of its tenth anniversary in 1959, the GDR published a series with highlights of socialist development such as tractors, ships and airplanes. On the most expensive stamp – face value one mark – you could see a somewhat enigmatic structure, which was described in small letters as “the first nuclear reactor in the GDR”. The part of the word “atom” caused me to shudder, after all we all feared the Russian bomb back in the 1960s, a feeling that one or the other can probably relate to today.