In June, Germany announced its intention to join the small band of countries that have rejected the atom as an energy source. In a U-turn with colossal consequences, the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel shut down eight of the country's 17 reactors and pledged to close the others by 2022. Berlin's bold new energy policy commits Germany to a future based on renewables, a move being compared to unification in terms of its implications for the country – and for Europe.
This abrupt turn of events may have been prompted by the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, but it was the scale and extent of pre-existing popular distrust of nuclear power that ensured the disaster became a tipping point. Merkel's alternative, say insiders, was a long public debate that the administration could not win. Even members of its own ranks, such as the environment minister, Norbert Röttgen, were on the anti-nuclear bandwagon long before Fukushima.
That there was a bandwagon is due to the tenacity of the anti-nuclear energy movement. Over the course of nearly 40 years it swayed public opinion decisively against nuclear power. First, it convinced left-leaning Germans (and thereby spawned a political party, the Greens), then the Social Democrats and trade unions, and, finally, Germany's conservatives. Today, there is broad consensus across the political spectrum that renewable energy, and not nuclear or fossil fuels, is the way to go.
The three major arguments that led the German public to its no-nuclear stand are elucidated in this compact, financially accessible book by the journalist and environment specialist Gerd Rosenkranz.
Firstly, nuclear energy is unsafe: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima – as well as hundreds of smaller incidents – have confirmed that the risks inherent in atomic energy production are real and lethal, Rosenkranz argues.
Secondly, there is no solution to the problem of nuclear-waste storage.
Lastly, in his view, the time of renewable alternative energies has finally come – and nations that ignore this will not only miss out on clean, abundant sources of energy, but will also deprive their economies of profits and jobs.
For Rosenkranz, these are just the tip of the iceberg of arguments against nuclear power – and he applies most of these arguments to the 435 reactors worldwide.
One set of concerns is security. He points out that captured terrorists have admitted that nuclear plants have seriously been considered as targets, and yet 15 new reactors are being planned in the Middle East. The relation of civilian-use nuclear power to nuclear weapons cannot be new to anybody following events in Iran.
His focus, though, is on the 'renaissance' of nuclear energy and the birth of a renewable-energy economy. He maintains that the economic analysis behind the nuclear lobby's pre-Fukushima "myth" of a nuclear renaissance vastly underestimated the cost and timeframe of constructing a new generation of nuclear reactors. He underscores, for example, that new nuclear power plants are unthinkable without massive state subsidies. The intentions of the US and China to build more, ostensibly safer, state-of-the-art nuclear plants cannot be realised without public funding that dwarfs previous subsidies.
Moreover, contends Rosenkranz, there is simply not enough raw uranium in the world to power hundreds of new nuclear reactors for decades to come.
Choosing a side
Rosenkranz maintains there is a fundamental "either-or" choice to be made between a future based on nuclear energy and one oriented toward renewable energies. From day one, nuclear power has depended on massive state subsidies. Had that money gone to harness renewable energy – wind, sun, water, biomass, and biofuel – the world would be immensely closer to running its economies and heating its housing on alternative energies.
In his view, as long as nuclear power is an option, nuclear power will, in economic terms, 'crowd out' the transition to renewable energies, because energy companies will have no incentive to develop alternative sources: once reactors are built, they can produce energy very cheaply.
The corollary of this "either-or" argument is a 'win-win' view of climate policy: Germany can rid itself of nuclear energy and curb climate change, simultaneously.
Rosenkranz's book does not address many of the challenges that a no-nuclear policy now leaves in the lap of German policymakers, including how to manage the transition, what role there should be for fossil fuels in the transitional energy mix, what infrastructure a renewable-energy economy will need, and how to address the side-effects of renewable-energy sources such as biofuel, though it does consider at some length the changes needed to the grid system.
What Rosenkranz does is to hammer home the points that the lion's share of Germans have now made their own: that a switch from nuclear energy to renewable energy is essential and feasible.
Berlin's decision to scrap nuclear power would have been unthinkable without the grit of the Greens and the anti-nuclear campaign over many years. This is a book with limitations, but within its own frame of reference is persuasive.
An updated, translated version of Rosenkranz's little book might take these arguments farther afield, into France, eastern Europe, north America, and Asia. And ultimately, as Rosenkranz admits, the transition to alternative energies is one that has to be made on a global scale if it is to make any sense.
