Why are the German greens so ardently anti nuclear and pro coal?
Because they get money from people owning coal mines, presumably. German has a TON of coal.
Somewhat off-topic, but ...
Not really ... most black coal mines are closed, and not necessarily for the environmental reasons you think. In the state I come from, they were closed because the resulting earth quakes from collapsing tunnels almost killed a group of school children (a large part of a church tower fell down and missed them by not much) and caused much property damage. Also, digging for blackcoal is expensive and only possible with massive government subsidies ... to create a job paying a miner 60k, the government had to spend something like 150k in subsidies ... total insanity.
Brown coal surface digging still happens, but has been reduced by more than a factor of three since 1990, and will continue to decrease.
Most anti-nuclear arguments I know are
- There currently exists no solution to the problem of storing the waste beyond "bury it, forget about it and pray it does not leak and kill people too quickly, at least not before I am no longer responsible"
- While the chance for a catastrophic accident is very low, having one would leave significant densely inhabited parts of Germany uninhabitable
- The CO2 emission of nuclear power usually is severely underestimated, by an order of magnitude, by leaving out the costs for mining the ore, refining it, dismantling the power plant at the end of the cycle (with radioactive concrete), and the longterm storage of the spent fuel. Including all this using ore grades required to run nuclear for 90+ years, the CO2 costs are higher than for natural gas, which would make it only 15% or so cheaper than coal.
- The costs in $ per kWh for nuclear is not really competitive with other sources of energy, and will get worse in the future due to using up the higher grade ore first, requiring more refining. There are serious studies calling nuclear power "not economically viable"
- Russia is a significant source for nuclear fuel, so exchanging gas with nuclear will still not change the supplier
I don't know of any German who actually is "pro coal". Most are "pro regenerative sources". Some smaller parties are actually pro nuclear, funnily enough the same ones that are also pro russia and deny Covid.
"Funny" side note: A coal plant creates more radioactive pollution (from radioactive traces in the coal) than a nuclear power plant in normal operation.