Antinuclear

The history of Germany’s move away from nuclear power

As we know, in fact,  nothing happened. Germany quickly adapted to the loss of the more-than-25% (but no much above that) of national power which nuclear electricity had provided

Germany’s Energiewende And The End Of Nuclear Power, The Market Oracle Nov 25, 2012  By: Andrew_McKillop  NUCLEAR SHOCK TREATMENT For Ukraine and Japan, learning to do without nuclear power needed shock treatment: the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The combined economic cost and losses due to these “unforeseen nuclear accidents” will probably exceed $500 billion over the years and the decades. Nuclear accidents are in a class apart, for long term damage capability.Above all, certainly since Fukushima they cannot be kept away from and out of public debate.

Like all revolutions, Germany’s Energiewende or energy transition – which took an intense new lease of life and renewed public interest following the Fukushima disaster – was set in motion by many factors. As several articles by myself on the subject have pointed out, the initial goals of Energiewende featured oil and gas saving, and action to limit CO2 emissions. The motivating policy goals were both economic and environmental but public interest and political commitment were initially low.

Along the way, and since 2011, something else happened: nuclear disaster in far away Japan, but reported in the world’s media with nothing like the desperate censorship and politically-correct, lying suppression of nuclear power’s real dangers and real costs that followed the Chernobyl catastrophe – the ultimate nuclear disaster, during which a reactor simply explodes and spews its radiological inventory equivalent to about 10 times the radiation release of the Hiroshima bomb to the four winds. Unlike seaboard Fukushima, Charnobyl is located hundreds of miles from the sea, in continental Europe, making sure the fallout would attain millions of people – including Germans.

Rather than bandy around death toll claims and counter-claims, suffice it to say that Chernobyl had a major enduring impact on German public opinion. Nuclear experts and promoters can sneer about this as they drive to work and earn a comfortable living on the back of the Friendly Atom – but in Germany the atom is not friendly, since at latest 1986.  To fully understand the Energiewende, and anticipate its twists and turns, it is essential to understand the role that Chernobyl played in shaping the German public’s view of nuclear power. This was above all political.
Early attempts by German authorities, in 1986, to “play French” and simply lie to the public and dismiss any possibility of fallout contamination, which Germany’s then interior minister, Friedrich Zimmerman tried for a few days following the April 26, 1986 disaster, were quite quickly abandoned. Radiation levels were sufficiently alarming – and sufficiently reported, not censored as they were in “nuclear friendly France” – for radical pubic health measures to be rapidly taken right across Germany.
Milk, wild fruits and mushrooms were early victims; soon, freshwater fish were added to the list; even bathing in lakes and rivers was heavily advised against. All salad greens and vegetables were to be carefully washed and rinsed, then dried, before consumption. Outdoor exercise and long walks, especially near the eastern borders of still-divided Germany (in 1986) were also no longer recommended. In Germany’s southern wine-growing region, strict precautions with large economic consequences were applied – unlike in France’s nearby Alsace, where “no nuclear fallout” had occurred. This was according to French state-controlled TV and radio and France’s anxious-to-please government friendly private media. The same media, today, occasionally allows itself to comment on the fantastic levels of pesticide in all French wine and spirits, although not as yet on France’s dirty, and cancerous diesel car fleets!

Long before Chernobyl nuclear power had a “bad image” in Germany. As early as 1975, residents of southern Germany’s grape-growing region had occupied the site of a planned nuclear power station, and successfully forced its cancellation. Eleven years later, when they were ordered to destroy their grape crops because of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, this only confirmed their already-majority views on the “unfriendly” atom. After Chernobyl, it had taken the German nuclear lobby and its friends inside government many years to push back the anti-nuclear tide. Through the 1990s, the nuclear industry and the ruling conservative and Christian democrat governments fought nuclear opponents to a standoff. No new plants were built, but no existing facilities were closed. Nuclear power was very, very modern and high-tech. How could any accidents happen? In several countries, especially nuclear-friendly France and UK, nuclear power was touted as “low CO2” and a precious aid in climate change mitigation.
POST 2000
In 2000, a new left wing-dominated coalition government passed the comprehensive legislation that later became Energiewende, and this included the gradual phase out of nuclear power. However, true to its right-wing credentials, the part of the energy program and laws that provided for a gradual phase-out of nuclear power was overturned, but only in 2010, by the center-right coalition of current chancellor Angela Merkel, who also extended the operating life of aging nuclear plants by up to 14 years.

Merkel’s decision triggered Germany’s largest antinuclear protests since Chernobyl. Repeated giant demonstrations of 200 000 persons or more, were held. In France, 50 000 persons marching against nuclear power was already an eye-opener – explained away by French government friendly media, with a sneer, as “ageing post-1968 hippies”.  Mass protests in Germany were however not enough, as French media gloatingly reported on a regular basis; the German public remained divided almost exactly 50/50 on the issue, and the fate of nuclear power remained undecided – until Fukushima.
Less than a week into the Fukushima crisis, Merkel’s in fact troubling neutrality on any issue, any cause, or any policy yet again stunned the nation. The lady Chancellor who had relatively aggressively defended the extension of operating lifetimes for Germany’s aging nuclear power plants, only a year previously, now abrubtly withdrew these extensions, and “temporarily” closed eight of Germany’s oldest reactors. As in Japan after Fukushima, stop-or-start decisions on these “temporarily closures” became heavily politicized and “temporary” was the politically correct term. First described as a “precaution” by Germany’s environment minister Norbert Roettgen, “pending a safety review”, the temporary closure of the last, eighth reactor  became permanently “delayed for refuelling”.

But on May 30, 2011 Merkel held a dramatic press conference in the Chancellery. Flanked by her cabinet and wearing one of her trademark red jumpsuits, she announced that henceforth all “temporary closures” were permanent. The reactors would not be refuelled. Adding to the excitement, she then said the most industrialized nation in Europe, the world’s fourth-largest economy, with a massive trade surplus due to its industry, would permanently close all nine of its remaining nuclear power plants by 2022. Even the exact date attracted its own, but smaller-sized to and fro of controversy.
BEWARE THE BLACKOUT
Initial and outraged reaction by Germany’s biggest nuclear operating power companies, especially RWE, by its colourful CEO Juergen Grossmann nicknamed “Nuclear Rambo”, included the threat or promise of blackouts on a scale that Germany had not experienced since the allied bombing at the end of World War II. Skyrocketing electricity prices would then follow. Soon the nation’s heavy manufacturing sector, and its car industry, in fact all industries would face collapse. It would be the end of the German economic miracle.

As we know, in fact nothing happened. Germany quickly adapted to the loss of the more-than-25% (but no much above that) of national power which nuclear electricity had provided……… http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article37715.html

November 26, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized