German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is a pandering fool.
Of course, he has to be to stay in power in a country where the Green Party plays such an outsized role in politics. And the Greens have been agitating against the use of nuclear power in Germany for 50 years.
“The fact is that with the end of the use of nuclear power, dismantling has also begun” at the power stations that have been closed down, he said. “Any talk of resuming the use of atomic energy would imply building new power stations,” Scholz argued.
“Anyone who wanted to build new nuclear power plants would need 15 years and would have to spend €15-€20 billion each,” he went on.
Perhaps if you cut some idiotic red tape, it wouldn’t take fifteen fricking years and $20 billion to build a power plant.
Germany has always been a bit loopy about nuclear stuff. We might have understood their opposition to the deployment of Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in 1983 — stupid and shortsighted though it may have been.
But there’s a massive difference between nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors — a difference that most left-wing Germans can’t seem to grasp. So Chancellor Scholz is slamming the door on nuclear power. To paraphrase George Wallace: No nuclear power plants now, no nuke plants tomorrow, no nuke plants forever.
The fact that the world is in something of an energy crisis because Vladimir Putin is at war with Ukraine hasn’t quite sunk in for Scholz and many Germans. But for some members in his own coalition, it’s as much a mystery as it is to anyone who thinks rationally.
Members of the Free Democrats Party supported a statement telling Scholz “to stop the dismantling of the nuclear power plants that are still fit to use.” And there’s a very practical reason for any politician not hypnotized by the Greens: Germany’s public commitment to be “carbon-free” by mid-century.
Scholz has been running around Europe lecturing nuclear nations like France and Great Britain, telling them they should also commit power suicide and close down their nuclear plants. France is dismissing Scholz like a Nobel Prize-winning physicist might dismiss a grad student trying to prove the earth is flat.
“I don’t understand the position of Germany because I don’t believe at all that up to the middle of the century they will be able to carry out a zero-carbon strategy based solely on renewable sources,” France’s nuclear power chief Joël Barre told Politico last April.
Indeed, the chief of the German power company Eon Energy, CEO Leonhard Birnbaum, tried to remind Scholz that it’s partly French nuclear power generation that allows Germany to transition to renewables given the EU’s power-sharing arrangements.
“Neither the French will be able to persuade us to use nuclear power, nor we will be able to persuade them not to. That’s why I think we should take a different approach to the discussion,” he added.
Birnbaum, whose company owned one of the three German nuclear plants shut down this year, pointed out that French nuclear energy was helping the conversion to a system of renewable energy in Germany.
This was a reference to Europe’s shared power market that allows countries to buy and sell electricity from one another.
Germany has been a net importer of French electricity since shutting down its own nuclear plants, which last month prompted the French energy minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher to accuse Berlin of hypocrisy.
“It’s a contradiction to massively import French nuclear energy while rejecting every piece of EU legislation that recognizes the value of nuclear as a low-carbon energy source,” [Agnes] Pannier-Runacher told the German business daily Handelsblatt.
Madame Pannier-Runacher obviously doesn’t know how the green mind works. It’s not a contradiction because Scholz says it isn’t. End of story.
In Germany, those who back nuclear power generation are genuinely perplexed.
Backers of the technology argue that until Germany has sufficient renewable-energy infrastructure in place, which could be years away, the country may have to draw even more on polluting fuels like coal.
Scholz told Deutschlandfunk that his administration is committed to building out renewables so that they cover 80% of Germany’s power needs by the end of the decade and 100% “shortly thereafter.”
At its peak in 2000, nuclear power accounted for almost 30% of German electricity generation. That dropped to about 4% shortly before the final three plants went offline.
France will continue to subsidize Germany’s transition to renewables with its nuclear energy, and Germany will continue to lecture the rest of the EU on how green it is. And Scholz and his Social Democrats will ignore the obvious contradictions and celebrate how conscientious they are about the environment.