At first glance counterintuitive, but for some experts the solution: nuclear power could help us out of the climate crisis.
Bill Gates is one of the proponents of this idea.
Seattle - The prices for energy are rising, at the same time the climate crisis seems to be unstoppable: The Paris Agreement aims to limit global warming to below two degrees - or ideally 1.5 degrees - compared to the pre-industrial era.
But environmental experts and the UN warn: The world is currently heading for a temperature rise of 2.7 degrees in this century - with dangerous consequences.
For some experts, nuclear power is the solution to the problem.
Energy should be low in CO2, independent of wind and weather and cheap.
But is that true?
That speaks for nuclear energy as a climate protection solution
Bill Gates takes a clear position in his book How We Avoid the Climate Crisis. From his point of view, progress is the answer to the climate question; many processes are to be electrified in the future. Nuclear power could solve the energy problem, and he makes a few arguments for that. The energy transition needs time, but the world does not have it. In addition, nuclear energy produces almost no CO2 emissions. For Bill Gates, nuclear power is therefore “clean energy”. According to a report by the OECD, around 23,000 people die every year in the EU as a result of air pollution from coal power. Nuclear accidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl are dramatic and momentous, but rare. Calculated per terawatt hour, nuclear energy is the safest of the conventional forms of energy.In the case of the renewable energies wind and solar, negative health effects have so far only been known to affect marine life: the construction of offshore wind turbines can, if no appropriate noise protection precautions are taken, affect animals.
There are currently six nuclear reactors in use in Germany, which are to be shut down by the end of 2022.
Quarks.de
has calculated what would happen if you left them online. The science experts calculate that five lignite power plants could be replaced: Boxberg, Lippendorf, Neurath, Niederaussem, Boxberg and Jänschwalde. That would save an estimated 70 million tons of CO2 per year - around ten percent of Germany's emissions and almost a third of Germany's energy-related fuel emissions. That sounds convincing! But there are also CO2 emissions from nuclear power, for example when mining uranium, building the power plant or final storage. The
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experts
but come to the conclusion: Even if this is included in the calculation, 54 million tons of CO2 could still be saved if the nuclear power plants remained connected to the grid for longer.
The nuclear phase-out in Germany was long considered a done deal.
But is there a rethinking?
Saxony-Anhalt's Minister of Economic Affairs, Sven Schulze, recently brought an extension of the service life of nuclear power plants into play.
These arguments speak against nuclear power
The nuclear disasters in Fukushima and Chernobyl are probably the most obvious reasons that speak against nuclear energy. If nuclear energy gets out of hand, it has far-reaching consequences. Final disposal is also a problem that has not yet been resolved. What can you do with radioactive waste without polluting water or endangering local residents? Some states such as the USA, the former Soviet Union, Great Britain or Switzerland, which simply dumped their nuclear waste into the ocean, found a very short-term solution. However, due to the high salt content of the water, the containers dissolve and the radioactive waste ended up in nature.
Due to the long half-life, repositories should theoretically last for a million years, but who can say with certainty what will happen in this period of time?
A process called transmutation could shorten the half-life of nuclear waste to 500 to 1000 years.
Or how about shooting nuclear waste into space with rockets?
Also risky, considering that the missiles could explode.
In any case, advocates of nuclear energy must always think about disposal.
Which is cheaper: nuclear power or wind power?
In a study, the Ecological-Social Market Economy forum calculated the cost of nuclear power to be 42.2 cents per kilowatt hour; for wind energy, they came to just 8.1 cents.
However, even calculating electricity costs is complicated and linked to ideological questions.
For example, should environmental costs be included?
What about health costs, such as coal-fired power plants?
There are also a wide variety of calculations, all of which come to different results: A study by Greenpeace from 2017 sees the cost of nuclear energy at 6.2 cents to 15.2 cents per kilowatt hour, the Ministry of Energy and Economics comes to 13 cents per kilowatt hour for nuclear power.
The Frauenhofer Institute comes to 7.49 to 13.79 cents per kilowatt hour for onshore wind power plants.
"We need hundreds of companies trying different things, whether solar, wind, nuclear or coal," says Bill Gates in a video on his blog
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.
"At least a few of them should be successful [...] so that poor people get cheap energy and at the same time the environment is not harmed," the Microsoft founder wishes.
He and his company TerraPower are researching running wave reactors and soon plans to build a nuclear power plant in Wyoming.
In the meantime, the world is looking to the UN World Climate Conference, where the countries of this world are currently wrestling with measures to combat the climate crisis.