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Old 04-25-24, 04:25 PM   #392
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[Neue Zürcher Zeitung]

It has now been proven that Germany’s nuclear phase-out was ideology


Internal correspondence shows that at the height of the energy crisis, the Green ministries ignored warnings from their experts. They pushed through the nuclear phase-out, whatever the cost. The result is an energy policy tragedy.

Even at the height of the energy crisis, it was remarkable how stubbornly the Greens stuck to the shutdown of the last German nuclear power plants. Not even a geopolitical earthquake of the greatest magnitude could dissuade them. Everything had to be subordinated to the nuclear phase-out: energy security, electricity prices, even the climate.

Other countries decided to keep their nuclear power plants running for years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In Germany, it took a decisive statement from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to keep them on the grid for a few months.

At the time, there was a suspicion that the Greens were arguing primarily on ideological grounds. But there was no definitive proof of this. There was no evidence that the Green-led federal ministries knowingly ignored facts or reinterpreted them to suit their own purposes. This evidence now seems to have been provided.

The magazine "Cicero" and its editor Daniel Gräber have meticulously traced how the Green-led Federal Ministry of Economics and the Federal Ministry of the Environment behaved in the dispute over the operating time extension. To do this, they sued the internal correspondence of all parties in court and then evaluated it. The result is devastating.

High-ranking Green ministry officials ignored their own experts. In some cases they twisted their arguments into the exact opposite. Suddenly it was no longer justifiable for safety reasons to continue operating the reactors. The experts had previously had no concerns about keeping nuclear power plants on the grid for years longer. And in one case the information is said not to have even reached Federal Minister Habeck. If that's true, then he was being kept in the dark.

You have to be clear about the situation Germany was in at the time: the whole country was discussing how to replace Russian gas. The Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, recommended that citizens wash themselves with a rag instead of taking a shower.


Apparently, "every kilowatt hour" of electricity counted, at least according to Habeck. But at the same time, the ministry was pushing through the nuclear phase-out, whatever the cost, and jeopardizing the country's supply situation. This proves that it was very much about ideology.

Strictly speaking, this is hardly surprising. Few Germans are aware of it, but the real goal of the energy transition was never climate protection. It was about getting rid of nuclear energy. You only have to look at the genesis of the term.

It first became known to a wider public through a 1980 publication by the Öko-Institut, today one of the most powerful green environmental research institutes in the country. It was entitled: "Energy transition. Growth and prosperity without oil and uranium". The authors argued that Germany could be completely self-sufficient, half with renewable energies - and the other half with coal.

Climate protection was not yet an issue at the time, even if oil was abandoned. The authors were more concerned that petrol could become scarce at some point. But the most important thing for them was the nuclear phase-out. They spent pages and pages on the technology, which they considered expensive and dangerous. They were only happy if Germany burned domestic coal instead.

The same people who had been involved with the Öko-Institut in the 1980s founded the Green Party a little later. The nuclear phase-out remained their most important project over the years. That is why they erected barricades, why they allowed themselves to be beaten by police officers, why they later began the march through the institutions.

Today we can say that the pioneers of the energy transition have achieved their goals. Germany uses coal and gas power plants to generate electricity on cloudy and windless days. And the hated nuclear power plants have finally been shut down.

The result is an energy policy tragedy. It takes years to build nuclear power plants, and it is expensive. That is why it would have been so important to keep as many of them as possible. It is difficult to say whether that is still possible today. The dismantling has begun, and in some cases it could be irreversible. And whether it will be possible to build new nuclear power plants in Germany in the future is at least questionable.

In February, the former president of the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management, Wolfram König, made a suggestion. The Green and staunch opponent of nuclear power recommended in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" that nuclear power plants should be turned into monuments.
Ostensibly to honor the engineers and workers who worked there. But subconsciously, the text was also about reminding Germans of their supposed misguided path. The nuclear ruins were meant to show them the futile hopes that were once associated with this high technology.

Well, the nuclear power plants have become monuments. However, they remind us of a completely different misguided path. That of an energy supply that relies exclusively on renewables, and which no other major industrial nation other than Germany follows. They remind us of who first took this misguided path, the Greens, and who prevented the Germans from leaving it even during the energy crisis. The decommissioned nuclear power plants are memorials to a green misguided path.


https://www.nzz.ch/der-andere-blick/...gie-ld.1827929
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