The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Goodbye atomic energy: Germany shuts down its last three nuclear reactors and opens a new era

2023-04-12T19:41:39.930Z


It will be this Saturday, after strong controversies in the country. What are other European countries doing on this issue?


An era ends.

Germany will shut down its last three nuclear reactors on Saturday after six decades of using the atom to generate electricity.

Since in 1961 the small Kahl nuclear plant began to inject energy into the electrical grid until this Saturday the 

last reactors

are disconnected.

Nuclear power started with a bang in the 1960s, but with it

an environmental and anti-nuclear movement

began to grow , which led to the formation of the German Green Party in those years.

The ecologists are now in the government as a second political force and control the Ministry of Energy and Economy.

Social Democrats and Christian Democrats maintained nuclear development and with Angela Merkel, more than 15 years ago, it was proposed to extend the useful life of the plants so that they could function for 60 years and not the 40 for which they were built.

But in 2011 a tsunami washed away the Japanese nuclear power plant in Fukushima and its consequences were felt as far as Berlin.

EWN's atomic power station in Lubmin, northern Germany, is already being dismantled.

Photo: AFP

political controversies

The wind in favor of nuclear power changed and Merkel, after a huge demonstration of hundreds of thousands of people, approved an

accelerated shutdown

schedule that led to ending nuclear on December 31, 2022.

Russia's military aggression against Ukraine generated such an energy crisis in Europe that the German government decided to postpone the blackout for a few months, which finally arrives on April 15, three and a half months later than expected.

The closure of the three reactors, say the authorities,

will not generate any supply problem

because they already only generated between 3% and 7% of the electricity used by Germany, which in recent months even had surpluses to export to France, in need to import electricity because nearly half of its 56-reactor nuclear park was shut down all fall and winter.

German liberals say nuclear is still necessary, even though the data says it isn't.

For conservatives the nuclear blackout is "a black day

for climate protection in Germany".

For the social democrats in power "energy supply is assured and whoever says otherwise only wants to scare the population."

The conservatives were, with Merkel, the ones who decreed the accelerated closure and in 2021 they went to the elections promising that they would respect it.

Tanks at the EWN nuclear power plant in Lubmin, Germany, about to be decommissioned, in March.

Photo: AFP

The atomic landscape in Europe


The German nuclear blackout leaves

12 European Union countries with active reactors and 15 without them

.

Five of those 12, including Spain, have closure schedules that will see them run out of nuclear power plants by 2035 at the latest.

Only eight of the 27 member states of the European Union have plans to build new reactors: France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Under construction there is only one in France and one in Hungary.

Among the countries that never had nuclear reactors, there is only one with construction plans: Poland.

Nuclear energy weighs less and less in Europe

.

Between 2006 and 2020, according to data from the European Commission Statistics Office, the share of nuclear in European electricity generation fell by 25% to account for 24.6% of all electricity generated in Europe.

France is the great European nuclear power with 56 reactors

, almost half stopped for one reason or another, including the appearance of cracks in the curves of the reactors.

France will close 14 reactors by 2035 and in that period, if President Emmanuel Macron's plans are fulfilled, it will build six.

All these deadlines are difficult to meet estimates because the only reactor under construction, Flamanville III, takes 17 years and 21,000 million euros when it was budgeted to be built in eight years and less than 4,000 million.

Spain has seven reactors in operation that will be closing between 2027 and 2035. Sweden has six when it reached 13 and its closure schedule reaches 2040.

The Belgian case is special and a symptom of the energy policy of the large European electricity companies.

The government approved that it would respect the closure schedule (by 2025) for five of its reactors but would keep two open.

The owner, Engie Belgium, a subsidiary of the French Engie, continues to drag its feet and is uncompromising.

She assures that she wants to focus on investing in renewables and that nuclear is no longer a priority.

The atomic power plant, in France.

Photo: AFP

The Czech Republic has six Soviet-made reactors and promises to build one by 2029. Finland has three old reactors that will close soon and the recently opened Olkiluoto III, which was projected to last eight years and cost 3 billion euros and cost more than 10 billion and 20 years.

Bulgaria, which once had four, has two left.

Hungary also has four but they are "small", 500 MWe, half the usual.

He promises to build two more with Russia.

Slovakia and Romania have two, and Slovenia shares ownership of one of the former Yugoslavia's with Croatia.

war and energy


Russia's war in Ukraine and Europe's energy crisis in recent months have reignited the nuclear debate, but the data shows its decline outside of Russia and China.

Beijing plugs in more new reactors than the rest of the planet,

but its pace is insufficient to compensate for the global decline.

According to data from the 2022 report “World Nuclear Industry Status Report” by the French energy consultancy Mycle Schneider, 411 reactors were operating on the planet at the end of the year in 33 countries, four less than a year earlier and 27 less than in 2002.

In 2021, six were plugged in (three in China and the other three in the United Arab Emirates, India and Pakistan).

10 were closed and another 10 began to be built (six in China and four in Russia).

This decade marks the 40th anniversary of those who plugged in at the beginning of the golden decade of nuclear energy, in the 1980s.

The average age of the reactors in operation is 30.9 years, but in the still leading nuclear power on the planet (United States) it is 41.7 years and in the leading European and third world power (France) it is 37.2 years.

In the last two decades, 98 reactors were turned on worldwide (50 in China) and 105 were closed. If China is not taken into account, in 20 years the net balance is 57 closures.

change of era


The world is experiencing a change of energy era in recent years.

2021 was the year in which non-hydraulic renewables (wind and solar) surpassed nuclear power generation for the first time in history.

And the first time in 40 years that nuclear did not generate even 10% of all the electricity on the planet.

Money follows that change of era

.

In 2021, 366 billion dollars were invested worldwide in solar and wind energy, 15 times more than in new nuclear reactors.

Since 2009, the cost of installing wind power has fallen by 72%, solar power by 90% and new nuclear power up by 36%.

The nuclear decline will continue for decades to come.

To maintain the current number of reactors, 161 would have to be plugged in between 2030 and 2039, which should already be under construction.

But there are only 53 under construction, of which 21 are in China.

Brussels, special

BC


look also

What's wrong with Emmanuel Macron?

Explosive speech, booing and the ghost of pension reform

How Ukraine managed to win the war by keeping the lights on

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2023-04-12

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-05T16:21:52.733Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.