Germany's Energiewende And The End Of Nuclear Power

Politics / Nuclear PowerNov 25, 2012 - 11:05 AM

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 "unforseen 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.