FROschTOsch

by Rudi Floren (BvA)

Recently, German politicians decided to shut down all nuclear power plants until 2022. 7 of our oldest reactors are brought down now. The rest will follow between 2015 and 2022.

The whole story started as the dramatic catastrophe in Japan happened. Many German activists saw new ways to enforce their sakes. The problem was, no-one knew how the hole in the Germans’ energy need should be filled. The first answer was: renewable energies.

But how? To fill the hole we have to invest a lot of money to build wind or water turbines. Or rather solar pannels? All these techniques are not yet as efficient as nuclear power.

The other problem is that the more effective off-shore wind turbines are only buildable in the north of Germany. But the energy network is not  extended enough from the north of Germany to the south. We have to build 3600 km of new power lines. This is very expensive.

A new problem is that these power lines don’t pop up out of the ground in one second. It is a process. As long as we don’t upgrade the equipment we are dependent on energy from our neighbours.

But is that the solution?
France produces a lot more energy by nuclear power. Some reactors are placed near our border, in the middle of an earthquake region.

And Romania has built a new nuclear power plant …… yes, .. in the middle of an earthquake region.
Some of the German nuclear power plants were safer than those earthquake endangered reactors!!!

It is a vicious circle. We want to get rid of nuclear power because of its risks, but now the risk is – in some ways in the next years – higher than before.

We will see what the future will bring.

by Frauke Brecko and Ailish Eickhorn (BvA)

In April 2011 the attention of the world was focused on Japan. 25 years after Tschernobyl, another power plant catastrophe occured in Fukushima, Japan, because of a tsunami in combination with an earthquake.

For weeks the news were dominated by new reports from the nuclear power plant. The operator company TEPCO and the Japanese government gave many contradictory statements and annuled them again concerning the dimension of the catastrophe.

In Germany this catastrophe broke loose a heated discussion about energy politics. Not long ago the German government had decided in favour of a lifetime extention for the German nuclear plants.

The people in Germany are quite concerned about nuclear energy as is proven in the election results in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz. The Green Party had the highest voting results in their history.

These days German politicians discuss to reinstall the older version of energy politics which included a sooner withdrawal from the nuclear energy programme and greater sponsorship in alternative energies.

But Germany, Austria and Switzerland are the only European countries which decided to withdraw from the risky technology of nuclear energy. Also countries which just have the financial opportunities to afford nuclear power plants now try to gain profit from it. Therefore they conceal the dangers of nuclear energy.

This is the case, for example, in Belarus and Czechia where people still suffer the most from nuclear radiation. Only some people try to give the majority of the population an idea of the dangers.

In Germany at least, the catastrophe in Japan, which cost again many lives, exert  influence on politics. It is not forseeable yet in which dimension, but it happens.