The Great German Energy Experiment 
Great article - upvoted. That it's inconceivable that the US or UK government could think about spending such an amount (~5% of GDP!) on a long-term science and engineering project speaks volumes about why the Germans are where they are, and why we're where we are, economically speaking.<p>From an engineering point of view I think it's foolish to turn off the nuke plants, but public opinion is what it is, and this causes the regulatory requirements to prevent nuclear from being economically viable.<p>The article does a good job of covering the risks, but personally I'd bet on the Germans here - even if the 'Energiewende' doesn't pay off per se, the rewards from the science and engineering knowhow will be huge. The only comparable project I can think of is the Apollo Program, though a quick google suggests that was never more than 1% of GDP, and the returns from the science on that were massive and lasted for decades. Likewise, CERN, which was about as blue-sky as things get, gave us the World Wide Web: completely tangential to its stated purpose, but what kind of rate of return did that give us?<p>So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run?<p>(On a side note, I <i>really</i> want to have a stickybeak around a 30MW AC/DC converter!)