German nuclear power over – Renewable energy the future
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German nuclear power plants
to be phased-out by 2022
Renewable energy the future
In the light of the disaster in Japan at the Fukushima nuclear plant, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced a phase-out of nuclear power in Germany and said that the decision can make her country a trailblazer in renewable energy.
The crisis in Japan, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami in March, led to mass anti-nuclear protests across Germany.
The anti-nuclear drive boosted Germany’s Green party, which took control of the Christian Democrat stronghold of Baden-Wuerttemberg, in late March. The Green party has been pushing for renewable energy funding for many years.
A future built with renewable energy
“We believe we as a country can be a trailblazer for a new age of renewable energy sources,” the German chancellor was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.
“We can be the first major industrialized country that achieves the transition to renewable energy with all the opportunities – for exports, development, technology, jobs – it carries with it.”
She also said that electricity in the future should be “safer and at the same time reliable and affordable”, linking the decision to step back from nuclear power to the crisis in Japan.
“We learned from Fukushima that we have to deal differently with risks,” she said.
Under the German plan the country’s seven oldest reactors – which were taken offline for a safety review immediately after the Japanese crisis – would never be used again. An eighth plant – the Kruemmel facility in northern Germany, which was already offline and has been plagued by technical problems – would also be shut down for good. Six others would go offline by 2021 at the latest and the three newest by 2022.
As of January, 2011, nearly a quarter of Germany’s electricity came from nuclear power. Renewable energy will have a big hole to fill.
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I’m a committed sceptic of the claim that carbon dioxide is responsible for global warming (even if there is global warming – there are so many counter-claims about it. Angela Merkels decision is based on the fact that she has to defend a precarious coalition government, as Britain is doing at the moment, and any upset puts her at risk. So this is a political decision and nothing else. The trouble is that Germany’s economic power makes it a powerful member of the European Union and it would not be beyond the bounds of possibility that the EU rulers would follow suit. It has already dictated how much carbon emission we [should] must reduce.
Nothing has been proved about carbon dioxide but all governments have fallen for the theory hook, line and sinker. The British government appointed a Liberal Democrat as Minister of Climate Change who, before he was appointed, refused to countenance nuclear power but has now changed his mind after realising that when the wind stops blowing there is no power. In the meantime he is subsidising, through our electicity bills, the building of seven thousand windmills in our tiny island. To see what arguments I have put forward see the link.
http://www.climatechangechallenge.org/News/Featured-Articles/global_warming_fact_or_fable.htm
Interesting article you guided me to Daniel (written by you), I am not a skeptic, I understand enough about science to know that if you burn something, i.e. wood, coal, gas, oil, it doesn’t disappear, but changes it’s appearance and structure and stays with as another form of gas (smoke) or ash and other residues. I grew up in the industrial midlands of England (the Black Country) when it actually produced something, and I saw what it did my immediate environment, when it snowed it was only white for a few hours and smell of slurry hung in the air on a permanent basis. I believe the heating and smelting of ores and the burning of fossil fuels to do it, is very damaging to people in the immediate area and to the world in general.
Hello Holte. I agree with what you say. I was born and bred in London and well remember the great smog in the early fifties which killed thousands of old people. I remember men walking in front of buses wielding flares to guide the way. It was after that that regulations banned the use of “dirty” coal.
The first time I went to the Black Country, Darlaston I think, I was waiting for the countryside to reappear after passing through Birmingham but it never did. It was an industrial wasteland.
But I think that most of the muck which was generated stayed close to ground. The yellow bricks and white stone of the buildings in London were blackened by soot. I agree with you that we have to use cleaner energy, not least because fossil fuels are running out and will never be replaced. But I believe that nuclear is the only option. Whatever we do to capture “natural” energy we will always need nearly a 100% backup so why not use the backup full time?
Don’t you think they are overreacting a bit? What do you think would happen to any country, no matter how they get their energy, after that big earthquake and accompanying aftershocks and tsunamis? A sudden massive carpet bombing would had been more merciful.
Not so much an overreaction but more of a yielding to pressure from the Green Party and environmental groups. Merkel’s government is right of center, so proof that even conservatives bend to the will of the people if there is enough of them.