The minster asked the nuclear operators whether they could operate the plants longer, and the operators said (paraphrasing) "we'd need more fuel, and even if we were to order fuel today it wouldn't be delivered in time" and that was the end of the story. Two years later, "fraud!" Amazing.
They actually wrote and I'm paraphrasing as well:"It's not a problem and it would also lower the overall power prices as the cheaper nuclear power would push the gas plants out of the merit order system." But this was never communicated to Habeck (Minister for economic affairs) [1]
And in the department of the environment a report was completely altered from "can run for years" to "is impossible to use them at all" by a single person that shares the ideology... [2][3]
Interesting how official documents that have been made available clearly show how experts have been ignored and their reports have been altered to fit a political and ideological scheme.
Apart from the other replies… I find the use of phrasing quite clever, and interesting in a way.
There were reasons to not extend the lifetime by a few weeks/months (e.g. contracts had been terminated, and calling vendors back for one month would be unreasonable). There were also reasons to not extend the lifetime by much more (e.g. fuel rod availability). The two sets of reasons were largely disjoint.
But by deemphasising how long the extended operation would last, extension is made to look much more reasonable. The reasons against a long-term extension clearly don't apply (to a short-term extension) etc. Rhetorically quite clever.
Ref [1] says that extending the use of the plants until March 31. could help reduce prices by the Merit-order effect. This extension is exactly what Habeck did: The life time was extended! So this is complete bullshit and already debunked completely by more serious German media.
What makes this rather obvious bad-faith attack targeted at the gullible idiots is that the nuclear exist was decided years ago by conservative government (Merkel after Fukushima). Now to pretend that finally shutting down the last three plants as planned by others a long time ago was some evil doing of the new minister (after all other plants were shut down a long time ago and the remaining operators said it makes no sense form them to continue at this time because it is too late to change course) makes no sense and this should make it obvious that there is no scandal here.
What truth exactly? As far as I can remember Haback was willing to extend the run time of two reactors and the chancellor then decided for all three for the interest of piece.
Refresh your memory. The German chancellor had to enforce the extension.
And the real bad-faith attack here is to make it look like there weren't any new circumstances that made it necessary to reconsider the runtime of the plants.
Seeing how three public servants modified a document to change its meaning from 'possible' to 'not possible' so that it looks to Habeck like there is no other option available is highly alarming.
When you alter a document to reflect your ideological views instead of going with its content and by this going against the public/greater good of the German people with intent to present false information to Habeck then this could be considered nothing short of treason.
