By Eli Vieira
Germany closed its last three nuclear power plants – Isar 2, Emsland, and Neckarwestheim 2 – just over a week ago.
The decision accomplishes the last stage of a process that began with the Atomic Energy Act in 2011, still under Angela Merkel’s government.
The legislation had undergone some 20 amendments, including postponements of full decommissioning by the current prime minister, Olaf Scholz, who got a four-month extension.
But the dreams of the country’s anti-nuclear solid green movement have finally come true.
The green motivations of the decision are questioned by the immediate price: a new dependence on coal and natural gas, which generate carbon gases that contribute to global warming.
The day before the lights went out, dozens of scientists sent Scholz a letter urging him to keep the plants running, including James Hansen, a climate expert who worked for NASA, but they were not heard.
German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke said that the hope of renewing nuclear power as a clean and safe alternative is a “myth,” according to the Associated Press (AP) news agency.
Among those unhappy with the measure is the conservative governor of Bavaria, Markus Soeder.
Despite supporting the plans 12 years ago, he declared that the decommissioning was “a wrong decision.”
“While many countries worldwide are expanding nuclear power, Germany is doing the opposite.”
“We need every possible form of energy. Otherwise, we risk higher prices for electricity and a flight of companies,” he noted.
However, Dieter Krone, mayor of the city that is home to the Emsland plant, told the AP that the city is ready to use wind turbines to generate hydrogen, replacing the economic importance of nuclear reactors.
The nuclear power plant is run by RWE, the same company that called in the police in January to evict activist Greta Thunberg from a low-grade brown coal digging site whose exploitation required the destruction of a village.
Wind and solar energy supply about 35% of Germany’s needs.
However, their delivery is extremely unstable: in a single week in April 2020, it varied between 90% and 5% of capacity, rarely keeping up with demand.
Moreover, they are also not free of environmental and human impacts.
In Africa, cobalt mines use child labor, especially in Congo, which has 70% of the world’s mineral reserves.
Germany promises to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.
Until then, it will pay US$12 billion a year in the social costs of consequences of using coal mining, mostly because of air pollution and its damage to citizens’ health, according to calculations by economist Stephen Jarvis, a professor at the London School of Economics, along with two colleagues.
STRANGE CONNECTIONS WITH RUSSIA
Energy has made its presence felt in the conflict in Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2022.
Despite adhering to international sanctions against Russia, Germany paid dearly for natural gas under Vladimir Putin’s control but managed to replace it.
Gerhard Schröder, Germany’s prime minister from 1998 to 2005, helped pave the way for the current state of the country’s energy grid.
Under his government, the country struck a deal to use Russian gas delivered through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.
In 2022, during the war, he also pushed for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline’s approval.
Schröder is a friend of Putin and met with him during the period.
After his term as chancellor of the Germans, he held top positions in Russian energy state-owned companies.
His party, which is the same as Scholz’s, threatened to expel him, but the politician survived.
He left the board of the Rosneft oil company (once state-owned).
He declined an invitation to the board of Gazprom (which controls the gas pipelines and has a majority Russian state shareholding) in May 2022 after the European Parliament called for European Union citizens like him with Russian connections also to face sanctions.
FRANCE INVESTS IN THE ALTERNATIVE
In the opposite direction to the Germans, the UK, and France are expanding their nuclear power grid.
Currently, 70% of the energy consumed in France comes from nuclear power plants.
The country is waging an energy cold war against Germany within the European Union.
While countries like Austria and Luxembourg are on Germany’s side against nuclear power, others like the Czech Republic and Poland join the pro-nuclear French bloc.
“It’s not safe, it’s not fast, it’s not cheap, and it’s not climate-friendly,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said at a leaders’ summit last month.
“With European flags on it, it would be a fraud.”
Joël Barre, appointed by President Emmanuel Macron to look after nuclear expansion since last October, told the Politico website this month that “if we don’t invest, clearly we will be on the brink because our reactors currently in service will reach the end of their useful life between 2040 and 2050.”
Macron’s promise is the construction of 14 new reactors to make a nuclear renaissance in the energy sector, in addition to the renewal of these expiring reactors.
“I don’t understand Germany’s position,” Barre said, “because I don’t believe at all that they are going to be able to get to a zero-carbon strategy by mid-century based solely on renewable sources.”
GERMAN MOTIVATION
The starting date of the German initiative to discontinue the nuclear grid, 2011, is no coincidence: it was the year of the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan.
In March of that year, a 9-magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami that hit the northeastern coast and resulted in waves up to 40 meters high that swept across the Japanese islands, leaving 18,000 people dead.
In the path of the waves was the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which had damage to its reactor cooling system and the emergency power supply that could keep it running.
As a result, there was partial melting of the cores of three reactors and the release of radioactive material into the environment.
The event has been compared to the Chornobyl disaster of 1986.
Following this scare, Germany committed to discontinuing its entire nuclear grid, which supplied a quarter of its domestic needs, and to spend US$36 billion a year on renewable energy.
The last three plants supplied 5% of Germany’s needs.
Despite the justification, even Japan paid a high price for discontinuing nuclear power and replacing it with fossil fuels.
An analysis published in 2021 by Matthew Neidell of Columbia University found that in the post-Fukushima period, the country suffered price hikes in electricity bills, reduced energy consumption, and increased mortality.
Deaths caused by nuclear accidents, which are rare, get spectacular treatment in the news and fictionalized versions in series and movies.
Deaths caused by air pollution or lower energy use due to high prices leading to the risk of hypothermia in cold countries get less attention, although they are potentially more frequent.
*Eli Vieira is a biologist with a master’s degree in molecular biology from UFRGS and a master’s in genetics from Cambridge University, UK. He has been blogging for the public since 2007, won the Outreach Fund of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology in 2014, and his academic publications have been cited more than 500 times. He has been a contributor to Gazeta do Povo since 2020.
With information from Gazeta do Povo