Germans were once dead set against nuclear energy. But high energy costs are forcing them to rethink. The latest casualty of the rising cost of energy is one of Europe's most persistent political taboos: Germany's striking aversion to nuclear power. Nowhere else did the opposition to atomic energy become as deeply embedded in the cultural and political DNA of a nation. Many citizens now in their 40s and 50s came of age protesting nuclear power in the 1970s and '80s. A generation of Green and Social Democrat (SPD) politicians built careers out of their total opposition to nukes