Request for Startup: Nuclear power data + Comms

What’s up with Germany?

We at Coral have long attempted to not let this become a political blog. It’s surprisingly difficult at times. The central problem of climate change is that of energy abundance; The world population continues to grow rapidly, energy demands are increasing, and the power has to come from somewhere. The question of ‘where' is profoundly political, and we confidently predict that lawmakers will be fighting over this issue until approximately forever. 

Case in point, Germany. You may have seens the news, almost a year ago, that Germany closed its final remaining nuclear power generation capabilities, thereby switching dependence entirely to wind, solar, and fossil fuels. This was actually an extension, as the German government pushed back the phaseout by a year following the start of Russia’s heinous invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent doubts around the availability of natural gas. 

If it seems patently insane for one of the world’s most developed, technologically advanced economies to shut down carbon-free energy while next-door to a war started by the primary exporter of natural gas to Europe then, well, we agree. 

Let’s look at the history of the German phaseout, nuclear power as a whole, and how tech can help stop this from happening elsewhere. 

Germany

The German government operates on a coalition system with numerous small parties, meaning that disparate political groups will generally need to come to compromises on their political platforms in order to form a governing-majority quorum. 

Occasionally, this means that single-issue small parties will get to wedge their governing philosophy into actual, codified policy. That’s precisely what happened in 1990, when a larger party needed the holdout vote of The Greens in order to take power. The Greens were the answer to “what if Greenpeace cosplayed as lawmakers?” Essentially, a pack of unserious clowns who are utterly incapable of second-order thinking, thinking in general, or doing much beyond throwing tantrums. 

The Greens forced a series of resolutions, studies, and evaluations on the phaseout of nuclear power into the gears of government. While all of this was disregarded when actual adults resumed authority shortly thereafter, it did set a precedent that nuclear power was a potentially effective political wedge issue, and worthy of further study. 

Fast forward; Germany spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s standing up renewable fuel infrastructure, mostly in the form of massive government subsidies to wind and solar generation. While this was wise in principle (Germany was never going to be fully nuclear-powered, and fossil fuels suck), the government overspent, resulting in consumers paying some of the highest energy prices in the developed world. Even today, German citizens pay 3-4X the prices of their neighbors in France, which is… 70% nuclear. 

Fast forward again, to 2011. Following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, which we’ll discuss much more in a minute, long-time nuclear advocate Angela Merkel did an abrupt pivot, and came out strongly against the technology for what she said were reasons of safety. In short, the argument boiled down to “The Japanese couldn’t figure out how to do this safely, which means we can’t, so let’s shut it all down.” Never mind that the Japanese meltdown was caused by a generational earthquake, that the attributable death-toll from that incident was less than are killed by breathing in fossil-fuel emissions every six hours, and that Dr. Merkel has a degree in quantum chemistry and can’t possibly believe that crap. 

What this looks like, instead, is a more subtle form of coalition building. A deft politician, under fire from the far right, giving on a wedge issue while also preparing to build popularity by driving down energy prices. But, we digress. 

Nuclear

It’s worth asking whether any of the safety concerns about nuclear power are born out by the data. They are not. Nuclear energy has been operating for seven decades worldwide, with only three major safety incidents, about 40 direct deaths, and a few hundred more from radiation exposure. There were 42 deaths in US coal mining in 2023 alone, with around 800,000 deaths per year attributable to breathing in emissions. 

It’s the safest form of energy generation yet invented (we don’t count the nascent fusion), by a wide margin. 

So why the bad rap? Three things; 

1. The disasters, while exceedingly rare, are high-profile and endlessly documented in the media. Chernobyl, especially, has been dramatized in pop culture until the popular narrative around the event has almost no resemblance to reality. This reminds us of the safety narrative around driving and flying; Flying is safer by every conceivable measure, yet receives vastly more regulatory oversight and news coverage for every incident. Why? Because plane crashes drive clicks, and car crashes do not. 

2. Big, mysterious machines are inherently scary. One of your writers went to highschool about 20 miles from a large nuclear power plant, and has spent time with a few of the former engineers at the facility. They universally describe their jobs as having all the risk and excitement of a standard white-collar worker typing into a computer. The technology is a solved and scalable problem, requiring enormous competence but no magic to operate. More normalization always helps. 

3. Wedge issues. And here’s where we return to politics. Extremist politicians have long been skilled at finding and creating issues that a small group of people care deeply about, and using their advocacy of the same to lock in a block of votes. Whether or not they actually accomplish anything is incidental, and in many cases undesirable. See the current dog-catches-car dynamic playing out around abortion rights in the United States for the highest-profile recent example. Much the same is true regarding nuclear power. It seems obvious that the average German citizen would be best served by having cheap, carbon-free, flawlessly reliable energy on hand. The dog caught the car. 

Politics, Tech, and Climate

Modern politics is the practice of carefully attuning public positions based on data, and using targeted messaging in order to carefully shift swing voters. While we do see climate sensitivity becoming a more significant part of public and political narratives (google “climate panic” for examples), it’s unformed, unfocused, and more a creepy feeling of dread than anything useful. 

We see a need for a startup; Polished, resonant short-form communications about the benefit of adopting modern nuclear policies to run on YouTube and everywhere else, data capture to measure engagement on the same and find election-significant voters who resonate with these issues, and lobbying efforts to make sure that specific, actionable, climate-focused questions are included on ballots at every level of government. 

Start in Germany, which has an educated, tech-friendly, high-income electorate, figure out the playbook, and scale everywhere with local offices. 

Is this the most exciting company we’ve ever proposed? Nah, but one of the most important. We’ve written extensively about the need for public-private partnership, which is only structurally possible in the context of elected officials who actually give a shit. Let’s start giving them a nudge. 

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