It's the end of an era. After years of contentious debates
Germany has shut down its last three remaining nuclear power plants.
Is closing these plants in Germany a good decision?
It is a bad decision and it's out of step with Germany's
trading partners and allies, not just in Europe, but around the world.
It's a small nation's worth of energy that's being turned off today.
Energy that could power tens of millions of people in developing countries
or 5 million Germans.
It's the cheapest energy Germany's got.
So it's a fairly catastrophic decision, especially considering this energy
works around the clock all year, not just when the weather is right.
The actual electricity generation (not just capacity) by planned renewables
next year corresponds to the output of the three nuclear power plants closed.
Germany is on track.
Germany said it would stop nuclear.
Germany said it would go renewables.
And this is essentially what's happening.
The same is true for the coal burning.
The coal burn is diminishing stepwise.
Germany will be paying about four times as much for only
the carbon permits alone per unit of electricity,
plus another double or so cost for its own lignite coal burning.
That's what it's replacing lost nuclear with.
And then only slowly over time
is it planning to add in the renewables to replace, if that works.
The renewables expansion has been planned a certain way, but we do not know
if- Germans will tolerate the further construction of wind turbines.
Counting future weather and climate based energy as for-sure going to come
and replace the nuclear electricity that is lost
and being replaced by the coal electricity now.
For Germany to be hogging, by choice, carbon emission trading permits,
that means that poorer countries in Europe will not be able to feed
their industries, will not be able to power their businesses
because Germany is buying the fossil fuels and the carbon permits
with its wealth levels that are higher than surrounding nations.
Nuclear is just far too expensive.
And critically, in terms of our climate problems, it's just too late.
It takes up to 20 years to put on one nuclear station.
We simply do not have the time.
We do not have the capacity for
new nuclear.
The only option, our only option, is indeed
renewables.
And if you want to look at sort of another example in terms of France,
German power exports to France jumped last year largely
because half of France's nuclear capacity was offline, despite all of the nuclear
public relations, in terms of France, EDF are essentially bankrupt.
There is no question it will be too late for climate.
And there is no question that renewables will do the heavy lifting for net zero.
And that's not rhetoric.
That's not me that's saying that it's just simply a fact.
I agree with Dr.
Dorfman that the French fleet was performing poorly,
but that just underscores the German nuclear fleet
that is closing today is the envy of the world.
The three finest reactors in the world producing the most electricity.
Ultra high reliability.
The German nuclear plants operate so well that it takes ten times
as much solar panels capacity to match what nuclear does per gigawatt.
It's astonishing number and the fact that we have to cite countries
that are stating they will become nuclear focused in the future like France...
France is moving towards nuclear.
Yet it's Germany
whose nuclear plants are already built today, not in 20 years, like Dr.
Dorfman said, nuclear plants are ready today in Germany.
They don't need upgrades. They don't need fixing.
They're ready today to provide the cheapest,
stablest energy for 12 million Germans.
So to change the subject to a nuclear fleet that isn't working
well is to miss the fact that it's the German nuclear fleet
that's the outstanding backbone of energy for Europe during the winter.
Paul, you wrote a piece last year
in which you said it's not just that nuclear is slow and expensive,
it's just far too inflexible to go up and down with the swings of demand.
Why is that the case?
It doesn't (what's known as) load-follow
it doesn't sort of do this up-and-down well to back up variable renewables.
There are answers to variable renewables in terms of storage,
in terms of demand side
management, in terms of interconnection, in terms of distributed grids.
Now, given the fact, and it is a fact, that renewables will do the heavy
lifting for net zero, the last thing that you want to back
that up with is nuclear, because nuclear goes...
and runs.
It is economic if it doesn't do that.
The very last thing that you want to back up
the variability of renewables is nuclear.
Nuclear plants have excellent ability to go up and down.
I mean, for one, it would be a basic safety requirement.
So nuclear plants can, and do, operate in a load-following mode.
Now, there's no reason that the nuclear plants should do more
load-following just because some weather based energy gets more subsidies.
That's maybe good for the owners of the wind and solar plant,
but it does not make economic good sense for the country as a whole.
So Germany's about to discover that, of course, that they're going to back up
their wind and solar with hard coal and lignite coal
instead of the ultra cheap nuclear they had.
That seems to be an error.
But make no mistake, it's not a physical limitation for nuclear to
move up and down.
It's not a problem.
Once young people and old people get curious about nuclear and investigate,
they find that what they've heard is untrue
and they demand more nuclear power.
That's why you see countries around Europe are planning nuclear programs
now, including multiple countries on the border with
Germany have plans to add nuclear today.
There's a lot of discourse for nuclear
because nuclear is a very strong lobby in all kinds of problematic ways.
The head of the IAEA, which is the nuclear regulator International
says that we are now living on borrowed time in terms of Zaporizhia.
In a world that's becoming increasingly unstable, to have
these targets is deeply problematic.
Now, in terms of Fukushima, what we've seen is that even in a advanced
state, the consequences of a real nuclear accident can be catastrophic.
And I remember after speaking on the same platform as Naoto
Kan who was the prime minister of Japan at the same time.
We had supper afterwards.
And I was astonished when he turned to me and said
if the wind was in the wrong direction we would have lost Tokyo.
All of the G7 except for Germany are committed
to nuclear energy, especially Japan.
The voters of Japan democratically chose, time
after time, the most pro-nuclear candidate possible.
That mandate has given the government in Japan desire to repeatedly
announce expansions of its ambitions in nuclear energy.
Not just restarting reactors
that have been closed since the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, but adding more.
There's a reason why the countries where the great nuclear disasters
have occurred have learned to not be afraid of nuclear.
For example, in Ukraine,
the reactors at Zaporizhia Nuclear Plant are all turned off.
The heat level is low.
It means that Fukushima type disaster is simply not in the cards.
But the engineering message has not gotten out.
Quite to the contrary of Dr.
Dorfman’s claim that the atomic lobby is powerful...
The nuclear industry is almost completely incapable
of talking plainly and clearly to the public.
I am on this program in part because nuclear employees
are not allowed to talk to the press almost anywhere in the world.
The nuclear lobby in Germany was paid off by the government to stay silent
and they were not present today and they scarcely speak to the media.
That's quite to the opposite of the claims that some nuclear lobby is powerful.
Rather, it's people getting involved, volunteering their time and speaking up,
which is the reason why young people around the world
are turning in the same direction as the G7,
except for Germany, which is a commitment to nuclear.
It's difficult to know what to say. I mean,
aside from
essentially PR, it's difficult to understand why there's
so much discussion about nuclear in terms of policy and press at the moment.
Nuclear is basically a 20th century technology.
It's past its sell by date.
The future is renewable.
All right. We have run out of time.
So we're going to have to leave the conversation there.
You can see the program again any time by visiting our website, aljazeera.com.