For Germany it may have been the better decision to run the NPPs a little longer. Given the relatively good safety level / record (execpt for the high temperature thorium one) it would have made more sense to shut down the NPPs in Belgium and keep the better ones in Germany running. Still the difference to coal is not that big and ideally, without the war in the Ukrain it would have been gas and not coal to provide a little more power. Neither nuclear nor coal are desireable, they are best avoided both.
Indeed; the story for both nuclear and fossil fuels is ending, and good riddance. Investing in those in the long run in 2000's has bad endings.
Case study Finland:
In 2002-2003, when the rest of the world is moving away from building new nuclear since the golden age in 1960-1980, we decide it would be an
excellent idea to build another (edit:
partially) state-owned plant; and that it has to be a novel construction which has been never built before. The thing that was supposed to finish in 2009, finished in 2023, after being postponed by 22 times, and 165% overbudget. At 8.5 billion EUR, it became the most expensive construction project known to human kind.
In 2017,
during the freaking war in Ukraine (reminder: which did not start in 2022 but 8 years earlier), Finnish government decided, against
all expert advice including the board of Uniper itself, that it would be an
excellent idea to invest our taxpayer money in Russia's gas pipe to German customers. Think about the business opportunities! So our state-owned energy company Fortum bought the completely zero-worth German gas company, Uniper, for 8 billion EUR. As it was obviously falling apart, we kept pumping more money in just to finally hear in 2022 that Germany is going to nationalize this zero-worth business. I lost the count of exact sum of money we finally subsidized German gas bills with as it become pretty complicated, but I guess it's in the range of 20 billion EUR. Which is a lot for a country with capita of 5 million.
I don't blame the politicians who decided on the nuclear in 2002. Wrong choice in hindsight, but renewables did not have any track record back then. It is easy to say now that this 8.5 billion would have been better spent by not doing anything until 2012 and then building a shitload of wind power with even half of that money. But this is in hindsight. However, investing massively in fossil fuels; and specifically on Putin's fossil fuels, during wartime, cannot be explained away.
With all of this tragedy of extremely poor political choices, all that was left was getting more in debt, enjoy cocaine, implement better media control, party like no tomorrow, and get massively more in debt. Finally this year, many would agree with the media that our healthcare system has basically collapsed.
Most of the attention has been in extremely poor financial policy by said cocaine party government and the massive amount of debt they signed into; but their consequences will be seen in the future; one can't blame them alone; they walked into a broken system which they just were unable to fix. What was almost dismissed was the cost of poor energy choices, namely trusting nuclear and fossil fuel sources. It is sad to see some people seem to think the problem is in renewable energy, when it's really fossil fuels that let us down again. And nuclear's not much better.
Everything except renewable energy is failing. Those who said it already 20 years ago were right, no matter how hard it is to admit this.