[Skybird]

To balance my emotional rant before:
https://www.focus.de/politik/deutsch...190918680.html


How Greens and opponents of nuclear power make politics with lies and fear

Anna Veronika Wendland is a German historian of technology and Eastern Europe. She works at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg and completed her habilitation at the University of Marburg with a thesis on reactor safety in Eastern Europe and Germany.
Wendland is a member of the German-Ukrainian Historical Commission (DUHK). In July 2020, she and Rainer Moormann published a memorandum attributing a crucial role to nuclear power in the energy transition. She is also the author of the book "Nuclear Power? Yes Please!".
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The German nuclear phase-out is a decision against better judgment - and a triumph of counter-enlightenment. So there are plenty of reasons for a left-wing critique of the nuclear phase-out.

The other day, a Swiss journalist asked me almost incredulously how it could have happened that the plug was pulled on a high-tech industry in, of all places, the world's fourth-largest economy. The reason is three German special paths in the political, cultural and industrial-structural spheres.

The green counter-modernism

First, we have a weighty bloc of anti-nuclear parties on the center left because the German left, in the course of its bourgeoisification, has thrown nuclear energy, in Marxist terms the most progressive productive force, at the feet of the right.

This, in turn, was only possible because, secondly, an ecological style of thinking was able to establish itself that had always existed in the German bourgeoisie and which the bourgeois children's revolt of 1968 did not shatter but reinforced. The anti-modern, technology- and industry-critical, eco-romantic thinking traditions of the German bourgeoisie go back to the counter-revolutionary 19th century. The Greens, contrary to what their opponents claim, are not a socialist party in this sense, but a conservative one.

The left-wing Green K-group descendants of Trittin's ilk, who attacked the nuclear power plant as the incarnation of Rhenish capitalism, were interested in the anti-nuclear issue only insofar as it did not win them the working class, but at least the imitation of participation in a mass movement.

Messages of fear

But no matter where they came from, the Greens shared a set of unquestioned statements that - in the wake of their successful march into discourse-determining positions in schools, churches, the media, academia - increasingly dominated the discourse on nuclear energy.
At the center was the message of fear: fear of the threat posed by nuclear fission to "holistic" contexts of matter, life and meaning; fear of the decomposing, omnipresent radiation; fear of cancer; fear of the complexity of nuclear plants, whose procedures were perceived as alchemical sorcerer's apprenticeship; fear of the engineering hubris as an offense against higher, natural orders.

To the fear belonged, like a twin sister, the deification of the small, decentralized and therefore supposedly democratic as an end in itself, from Demeter farms to wind turbines. And this also included the demonization of the nuclear power plant as an authoritarian structure while at the same time evading criticism of the capital relationship, which would be the true reason to fear.

A successful project

But the reactionary root of the criticism of nuclear power is ultimately also the cultural secret of the German nuclear phase-out: the anti-modernism elevated to party status by the Greens, which was not compensated for by their progressive trend-setting in terms of civil and gender rights, was precisely connectable deep into the bourgeois political camp, especially its Christian-influenced part. This made it possible for Angela Merkel in 2011 to dupe the technocratic, entrepreneurial wing of the CDU/CSU without a party revolt and to push through the nuclear phase-out.

In short, nuclear power had to go not because it failed technically, but because it failed discursively: because talking about it was at some point only done by people who thought such thoughts about it as described above, while our engineering class knew nothing to counter this narrative except the message of technical perfection - and the false hope that a CDU booked for eternity as the chancellor's party would already hold a protective hand over the German nuclear industry.

The comprehensible, winning, people-oriented communication of a progressive counter-narrative, openness and curiosity in the face of well-founded criticism - unfortunately, this was not learned in the study of nuclear process engineering.

The renewable-fossil energy transition

But it only succeeded in turning the fear message into a phase-out program because it succeeded in portraying nuclear energy as superfluous and replaceable.

And this brings us to the third part of our triad . Fear alone is not enough to not want to use a technology - otherwise a great many people who fly would not get on a plane. They may be afraid of flying, but they also don't want to cross the Atlantic by ship. What breaks a technology is the combination of a message of fear and a message of joy that you have an alternative, a much better, safer, cheaper substitute.

And this is exactly what the Greens and the SPD were able to do, because they actually had a substitute: namely, in addition to renewables, which were euphorically welcomed and perceived as unproblematic, above all coal-fired power and gas, which provided them with the security that volatile renewables alone could never have guaranteed. They benefited from the dual structure of the German electricity industry, in which coal interests were so strong alongside the nuclear interests that companies like RWE had to be carried by the state to the nuclear hunt as late as the 1960s.

In this sense, there was never a German nucléocratie or a systemic dependence on nuclear energy as in France, for example, quite apart from the lack of a military nuclear program as a motivator.

The life lie of the energy turnaround

The idea that with good German coal and "clean" German coal-fired power plant technology as a bridging technology for the energy turnaround, one would have a harmless alternative to nuclear energy, was the life lie of the energy turnaround, if one looks at the environmental and sacrifice balance of the electricity producers in comparison.

However, this idea was compatible with all milieus and actors, from the Greens and the unions to the CDU/CSU and the "ethics commission" that had to legitimize Merkel's decision to phase out nuclear power after Fukushima in 2011. This connectivity also extends into the here and now to Robert Habeck, who would rather give RWE permission to mine the coal under Lützerath than extend the operating life of RWE's Emsland NPP. Emsland could produce the electricity equivalent of this coal within 16 months - to the climate balance of wind power, of course.

The energy transition state and its conventions

The fact that it has come to this is also the result of language conventions in the energy debate that have been established by the state, the media and academia. What the nuclear state, which the opponents of nuclear power always painted on the wall, never achieved, the real existing energy transition state is now achieving: the domestication of criticism in the form of the media and the environmental movement. The latter has degenerated into the legitimizing authority of the renewable energy industry, which also waves through the most brazen undermining of planning law, nature conservation and species protection.

For many years, there was no statement about nuclear energy in the German media without a preamble of reprehensibility, no visualization of a nuclear power plant without threatening music underneath. Hardly an article about nuclear waste gets by without a picture of rusty, yellow, but fake barrels, and not a week goes by without an ÖRR blog or talk show appearance by economist Claudia Kemfert, who preaches to us that nuclear power is expensive, dangerous, inflexible, and at best militarily motivated. All four statements are demonstrably false . Kemfert defames criticism as a conspiracy of an overpowering fossil fuel lobby. This Manichean worldview is the death of any differentiated and fair debate.

This is the reason why the pro-nuclear voices in the FDP and CDU/CDU, which have recently become audible again, are so depressed and conceptless - because they no longer dare to speak about this topic with an audible, self-confident voice and to present a bold, powerful climate strategy for nuclear power and renewables.

German nuclear power: a victim of atonement

We saw virtually no arguments against German nuclear power plants in the past debate that were based on the concrete technical realities of these plants. Rather, it was experience from French, Soviet or Japanese nuclear plants that was projected onto our plants.

Germany's nuclear power plants are sacrificed vicariously in a kind of atonement ritual: we give Brokdorf for Three Mile Island, Neckarwestheim for Chernobyl and Isar-2 for Fukushima, Emsland for too warm cooling water in France, Grohnde for the Russian tanks in front of the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhya.

Change life? Without the Greens

If one had given up this belief, one might have realized that the abolition of the last six nuclear power plants alone means the same in terms of climate and electricity balance as if Habeck had 15,000 wind turbines blown up. Recognizing this, one could have paused and turned back. In this way, they could have regained credibility and respect, especially among those who are indifferent to climate protection and wait and see, because in their eyes it is unaffordable.

But the Greens did not want to give this signal. While they demand that everyone else change their lives for the sake of the climate, they are holding on to their old lives. And that will not work in the long run.