Skip to main content

Gear Crunching U-Turn in Germany

By

Merkel This happened last week:

Angela Merkel's U-turn on nuclear energy became even more gear-crunching on Tuesday when she announced the temporary closure of seven of Germany's nuclear power stations.

The chancellor said that reactors built before 1980 would be taken offline while an urgent review of their safety was carried out.

"Safety has the priority in all our deliberations," Merkel declared after she met politicians from affected German states.

This isn’t enormously surprising, as Germany has a rather fraught relationship with its nuclear plants. Put Germany in our search box and you’ll see we’ve covered German top-spinning over nuclear energy for a long time. So another whipsaw fast change in the wake of the events in Japan seems wrong-headed but not completely unexpected.

In any event, I thought, if Germany has to import electricity, it’ll probably get a fair amount from neighbor France – which of course would be a bit hypocritical.

What I didn’t know was how much political calculus was involved:

Sunday's election in Baden-Wuerttemberg is viewed as the most important of seven state ballots this year. The south-west region is the only one where her centre-right coalition has to face state voters. Its chances of re-election are "small and they have become smaller" due to the nuclear story, said Nils Diederich, political science professor at Berlin's Free University.

Baden-Wuerttemberg is a large state in the southwest that borders France and Switzerland. Since it is one of the most conservative areas in Germany, this is bad news for Merkel’s coalition. But Germany has 16 states and the move against nuclear may not play well on a national level – perhaps not even in Baden-Wuerttemberg:

"The abrupt turnaround hasn't helped," said pollster Manfred Guellner. A majority of her voters "were for using nuclear power, and still are after Japan - and they will be confused by such an abrupt change of course."

Rock, meet hard place. If this move works for Merkel’s party, well, good for her. But the sum of the equation is that she hasn’t helped her country by acting so precipitously – the NRC and the nuclear industry here are doing what Germany is doing without closing the plants – and she may not be helping her party’s cause. We’ll know soon enough.

Angela Merkel – an attractive shot. German newspapers tend to run really harsh pictures of their politicians. Not sure why – but not this time.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Nanomaterials Can Make Nuclear Reactors Safer and More Efficient

By
The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.

From the batteries in our cell phones to the clothes on our backs, "nanomaterials" that are designed molecule by molecule are working their way into our economy and our lives. Now there’s some promising work on new materials for nuclear reactors.

Reactors are a tough environment. The sub atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction, neutrons, are great for splitting additional uranium atoms, but not all of them hit a uranium atom; some of them end up in various metal components of the reactor. The metal is usually a crystalline structure, meaning it is as orderly as a ladder or a sheet of graph paper, but the neutrons rearrange the atoms, leaving some infinitesimal voids in the structure and some areas of extra density. The components literally grow, getting longer and thicker. The phenomenon is well understood and designers compensate for it with a …
1 comment
Read more

Why America Needs the MOX Facility

By
If Isaiah had been a nuclear engineer, he’d have loved this project. And the Trump Administration should too, despite the proposal to eliminate it in the FY 2018 budget.

The project is a massive factory near Aiken, S.C., that will take plutonium from the government’s arsenal and turn it into fuel for civilian power reactors. The plutonium, made by the United States during the Cold War in a competition with the Soviet Union, is now surplus, and the United States and the Russian Federation jointly agreed to reduce their stocks, to reduce the chance of its use in weapons. Over two thousand construction workers, technicians and engineers are at work to enable the transformation.

Carrying Isaiah’s “swords into plowshares” vision into the nuclear field did not originate with plutonium. In 1993, the United States and Russia began a 20-year program to take weapons-grade uranium out of the Russian inventory, dilute it to levels appropriate for civilian power plants, and then use it to produce…
Post a Comment
Read more

Nuclear Is a Long-Term Investment for Ohio that Will Pay Big

By
With 50 different state legislative calendars, more than half of them adjourn by June, and those still in session throughout the year usually take a recess in the summer. So springtime is prime time for state legislative activity. In the next few weeks, legislatures are hosting hearings and calling for votes on bills that have been battered back and forth in the capital halls.

On Tuesday, The Ohio Public Utilities Committee hosted its third round of hearings on the Zero Emissions Nuclear Resources Program, House Bill 178, and NEI’s Maria Korsnick testified before a jam-packed room of legislators.


Washingtonians parachuting into state debates can be a tricky platform, but in this case, Maria’s remarks provided national perspective that put the Ohio conundrum into context. At the heart of this debate is the impact nuclear plants have on local jobs and the local economy, and that nuclear assets should be viewed as “long-term investments” for the state. Of course, clean air and electrons …
Post a Comment
Read more