There are several reasons: Those reactors were planned for a runtime of 30-40 years. And you can’t prolong those runtimes by “proper maintenance” due to some hard facts introduced by the radioactivity. The steel in the containment & pressure vessel will get radiation damage with time. That is something you can monitor - but the pressure vessel is the reactor and if that is damaged, you can’t simply replace it. So there is a hard limit on runtime. You might get a few years more out of them, you might be lucky, but that really is not a safe way to run a reactor.

You can take a look at what that actually means when you look at France: They have build nearly all of their reactors between 1977 and 1994 and that means that most of their reactors have reached those 40 years they were designed for. France totally failed to start building replacement reactors - Flamanville III is not enough and was extremely expensive and way late. And they need to run those reactors - if there are problems with too many reactors, they have not enough capacity. We already saw that a while ago when too many of those old reactors developed cracks. So if there is a big issue, french politics need to ensure that there is enough electricity generation. And that political pressure is something that is not compatible with a safe way of running nuclear reactors, esp. when you’re running old reactors.

I still am kind of shocked how this is going:

• Kids unter 15 can’t afford their own smartphones or computers. Parents are buying those. Parents are also providing the internet access as no provider accept you if you’re that underage. So parents are giving their kids unsupervised internet access without monitoring what they are doing?
• There’s no way to enforce this without rolling out ID requirements for everybody. So parents not parenting their kids are leading to me having to upload my ID to fucking Facebook or even Lemmy? That is not ok and not a good way to do this
• If those kids are getting 15, they are free to post on Elon Musk child porn-generating platform X? Why not force those companies to provide a safe space for everyone without a child-porn generator, without predators grooming children and without those platforms causing depression and suicides? Why should that be ok for 16 year old kids or even adults?

Let’s be honest here: The last nuclear plants in Germany (and most of the western world!) were build in the 70s and 80s. The last german nuclear plant was finished in 1989 and switched off in 2023 after 34 years. Every other reactor was even older. Even if other countries are running reactors that are old as fuck, that is not safe. So there was no way to keep them running into the 2030s or 2040s.

(and I know that other countries are running their old reactors and that is also not safe)

I disagree here - there are a lot of people around here who are not posting comments and that is a totally normal behavior. We know from every forum around there that there are a lot of lurkers who are only reading. There are fewer people who are only liking/upvoting. And then there are fewer people participating and some of them are just submitting links. That’s normal. So let’s not assume that everybody who is just submitting some links into a community is a bot.

(And it is quite easy in the age of LLMs to build a bot that is also posting some random comments like “Great article, thank you”. Account age will also not help as a bad actor can easily create some accounts and let them “age” by simply not using them for a month or so)

Let’s be clear here: It is not Grok. Grok is a software developed by employees of Elon Musk that is capable of generating child porn and deep fakes of ordinary people. That software doesn’t have the saveguards to prevent this and was released to the public. Elon Musk, the whole leadership of X.com and their employees there were made aware that this is happening and did nothing for several days. So let’s not pretend that some “Grok” was doing it.

TVs are cheap. Just get a used one from Kleinanzeigen.