German Nuclear Madness: Last Minute Appeals from Nobel Laureate and Climate Scientists Ignored by DieterLand Politicians

Shutdowns will Endanger Economy - Wood Pellet Burning and Air Pollution to Increase

Ignoring a last-minute plea from a long list of scientific luminaries (including Nobel laureate Steven Chu and climate scientist James Hansen) to reconsider, as well as recent polls showing pronuclear sentiment among a majority of its population, Germany shut down its last three operating nuclear power plants late Saturday, ending 60-plus years of electricity generation from fission.

Those three facilities—RWE’s Emsland, PreussenElektra’s Isar, and EnBW Kernkraft’s Neckarwestheim—were previously scheduled to close at the end of 2022, in keeping with Germany’s nuclear phaseout policy. In October 2022, however, chancellor Olaf Scholz announced his decision, later approved by the German cabinet, to allow the plants to operate “beyond 31 December 2022 until 15 April 2023” to ensure sufficient power generation for the coming winter.

Emsland, Isar, and Neckarwestheim all house single-unit pressurized water reactors rated at 1,335 MWe, 1,410 MWe, and 1,310 MWe, respectively. RWE Nuclear's technical director, Nikolaus Valerius, waxed elegiac in his statement on Emsland. “Nuclear energy at RWE was a real success story,” he said. “Our last nuclear power plant in Lingen alone generated electricity safe and carbon free for 35 years. The output generated at the Emsland nuclear power plant, amounting to more than 390 terawatt-hours, could cover Berlin’s current electricity needs for almost 31 years.”

Nuclear Reaction

The completion of Germany’s nuclear exit was, unsurprisingly, both panned and praised. Wolfgang Kubicki, cochair of the Free Democratic Party, declared that “the shutdown of the world’s most modern and safest nuclear power plants in Germany is a dramatic mistake that will have painful economic and ecological consequences for us.” Jens Spahn, deputy leader of the conservative Christian Democrats, dubbed it a “black day for climate protection in Germany.”

Also displeased with the news was energy expert Mark Nelson, who via Twitter noted, “First night of Germany’s grid without nuclear: it’s bad. It’s night. No sun. Wind has dropped to almost nothing. Most of German ‘renewables’ right now is [sic] richly subsidized bioenergy with half the net CO₂ emissions of an efficient gas power plant.”

Anti-nuclear advocates, of course, were celebratory, and at least one was something more than that. Mélanie Vogel, member of the French Senate and cochair of the European Green Party, tweeted, “Sex is good, but have you tried having your country shutting down its last nuclear power plants in 30 mn?” (Vogel is in a relationship with Terry Reintke, a member of the European Parliament from Germany.)

Dirty Coal

Without nuclear, Germany “will burn more coal than anybody in Europe, much of it lignite, the dirtiest, most polluting kind,” So writes Lincoln Hill, director of policy and external affairs at the Nuclear Industry Association. He cites a 2019 study by the Columbia University Earth Institute that concluded that a nuclear shutdown and increased coal burning in Germany could lead to “an additional 16,000 deaths and 1,100 [metric tons of] CO₂ cumulative emissions” by 2035.

While Germany continues to expand solar and wind power, the government’s decision to phase out nuclear energy means it must now rely heavily on the dirtiest form of coal, lignite, to generate electricity. The result is that after two decades of progress, the country’s CO2 emissions are rising.

Forests Worldwide Sacrificed for German “Biofuel”

Burning wood in the EU emits over 300 million tonnes of carbon pollution each year, about the same as the total reported emissions of Spain, yet burning wood and other biomass is counted  as  “zero carbon” energy. Forest harvesting for fuel – a particularly ruthless practice of the modern biomass industry, which vacuums up nearly every scrap, leaving land naked and depleted – is in part responsible for more than 80% of assessed EU forest ecosystems being designated as in inadequate or bad condition. And as shown in a new report from the Forest Defenders Alliance, while the biomass industry often claims to mostly burn sawdust from mills, or branches left over from forest harvesting, in fact they are burning trees.

Putin's Ploy Achieved: Final Shut Down of Germany's Nuclear Power Plants