Is nuclear power climate friendly? And can it make us more independent of Russia in terms of energy policy? Technology and Eastern Europe historian Anna Veronika Wendland affirms both. In an interview with FOCUS Online, she also talks about the political double standards of the Greens and repeats her accusation that the party is fueling “irrational nuclear fear”.
FOCUS Online: Ms. Wendland, the EU Parliament recently declared nuclear power and gas “green” as part of the so-called taxonomy. As an eco-modernist, that should make you happy, right?
Anna Veronika Wendland: I see it with mixed feelings. Nuclear power rightly appears in the taxonomy, after all it is primarily about financing climate-friendly technologies. But the fact that it contains natural gas doesn’t make me happy at all. This is a step against climate protection.
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Germany has opposed the decision of the EU Parliament, Chancellor Olaf Scholz even said to Maybrit Illner last Thursday: “I always thought that was wrong”.
Wendland: In my opinion, that is pure hypocrisy. We know how this agreement came about, it was a Franco-German deal along the lines of “we keep our nuclear power plants in, you keep your gas”. Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Scholz and Habeck based their energy transition strategy on natural gas. And for that they also needed this taxonomy.
So the current traffic light coalition is part of it. The Greens had no other strategy either, everyone knew that renewable energies needed a backup. Wind and solar energy are volatile.
And if nuclear energy is banned from our system, if we can no longer accept coal for climate protection reasons and if electricity storage systems are not yet in place – then only natural gas will remain. Significantly, the German protest against natural gas in the taxonomy was also much quieter than that against nuclear power.
In several interviews you have said that nuclear energy is the real climate protection technology. Why nuclear power?
Wendland: We are talking here about the question of what function German nuclear power plants could have in a climate protection strategy. Your climate balance is on the same level as wind power. In addition, they can generate electricity as stably and predictably as coal-fired power plants.
That means they bring two benefits, one for the climate and one for the power grid. They are much more valuable for the grid than wind farms because they provide reliable output and help stabilize the grid. That all speaks for nuclear energy.
The Greens claim nuclear power is a high-risk technology. Scientifically, that’s not true. It can be said without lying that we are dealing with one of the safest and cleanest industries that Germany has ever had. In contrast to coal, which Habeck now favors. There have been thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, not to mention accidents in the mines and plants themselves.
Anna Veronika Wendland is a German historian of technology and Eastern Europe. She works at the Herder Institute for Historical East Central European Research in Marburg and completed her habilitation at the University of Marburg with a thesis on reactor safety in Eastern Europe and Germany.
Wendland is a member of the German-Ukrainian Commission of Historians (DUHK). In July 2020, together with Rainer Moormann, she published a memorandum in which nuclear power is ascribed a decisive role in the energy transition. She is also the author of the book “Nuclear Power? Yes Please!”.
Speaking of the Greens: In a guest article in “Spiegel” they accuse the party of “irrational nuclear fear”.
That’s right. Because they operate with certain images of fear that are not supported by scientific evidence. Viewed globally, but especially when you consider Germany’s 70 years of experience with nuclear energy, nuclear power is a low-risk industry. Even considering the aftermath of the Fukushima and Chernobyl accidents.
In terms of damage and casualties per unit of energy provided, the nuclear power plants show very low values that are in the range of renewable energies. If a German facility like Isar 2 had stood in Chernobyl, then probably only Eastern European historians would know the name of the region today.
You have to ask the Greens what technology we are talking about. A flawed Soviet reactor design? Or a German power plant that was way ahead of its time when it was built and is still internationally regarded as pioneering in the field of reactor safety?
There is also a lot on the credit side: we owe the massive reduction in air pollution, the number one killer in industrial societies, and the reduction in greenhouse gases to nuclear power. It has been doing this since the 1970s, well before the introduction of renewables. Anyone who denies this also denies scientific facts.
So you claim that the Greens are clinging to their own ideology. But didn’t Habeck prove with the natural gas deal in Qatar that they can very well break out?
Wendland: In my opinion, that’s a fallacy. In the end, fossil structures have always been part of the green anti-nuclear strategy. Seeing nuclear as the main enemy meant not only being pro-renewable, but also pro-coal and natural gas as the lesser evil, which was in fact the greater evil. Because otherwise there would have been no backup for renewable energies.
In the 1980s, for example, the Greens argued in parliamentary questions that “domestic coal” was threatened by the expansion of nuclear energy. That fitted in well with the strategy of the SPD, which was concerned with jobs and votes in the fossil fuel industry.
So it was easy for both sides to focus on the coal and not the nuclear industry. That’s how it went for decades. It only got tight when the climate movement and the phase-out of coal emerged. Germany made a double exit, which ultimately fell on our feet.
It was Gerhard Schröder who, together with the Greens under Joschka Fischer, initiated the first German nuclear phase-out in the early 2000s. As a savior, he had Gazprom in his portfolio, among others. It was the beginning of our – and also his – involvement in Russian gas. If the Greens now complain about 16 years of conservative energy policy or the omissions before that, then as a historian I have to say: you have a fairly short memory.
Let’s get back to the actual topic. So should Germany rely on nuclear power in the fight against climate change?
Wendland: In my opinion, we need a complementary climate strategy. This means that you combine renewable energy and nuclear energy. We rely almost exclusively on wind and sun, i.e. forms of energy that have the disadvantage of being intermittent.
Because we don’t have any storage facilities – nobody bothered about that for 20 years either – we need a power plant park that safeguards the renewables. The question is what that could be. I think that nuclear energy is much better suited for this than coal or gas. You could do very well with a mix of renewable energies, nuclear power and a little gas power.
But should the reactors that we have shut down then be restarted? That is always sharply criticized.
Wendland: A comprehensive strategy would of course include more nuclear power plants than are currently in operation. An acute extension of the service life would affect the three operating nuclear power plants, but also the three power plants that were taken off the grid in December 2021. They are still operational, they have just lost their authorization to operate under power.
Older reactors cannot simply be switched on again, they are irretrievably lost, or at least a number of systems that have already been dismantled would then have to be reinstalled. EnBW couldn’t blow up the cooling towers in Philippsburg fast enough. Barely decommissioned, already sawed up: This is typical of the German way of dealing with nuclear energy.
A kind of “abolition furor” has spread. There are also reasons for this: the legislator obliges the operators to completely dismantle and of course they want to solve this with the expertise that is still available on the systems, and time is money in the industry.
A long-term nuclear strategy would actually include the construction of new plants in addition to a lifetime extension. Finally, all sectors must be decarbonized. This means that in 2050 we will be using around three times more electricity than we do today, since everything is supposed to be switched to electricity. The federal government wants to rely solely on renewable energies. But weaning the renewables off their fossil backup on the way there will probably be much more time-consuming and expensive than including nuclear energy.
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In connection with the Ukraine war, there is also the question of how we can become more independent of Russia in terms of energy policy. Would nuclear power plants be a pillar we should bet on?
Wendland: As long as we don’t build Russian plants and don’t buy fuel elements from Russia, definitely. At the moment, however, part of the nuclear fuel consumed in the EU goes through Russian enrichment plants. A total of 40 percent of our requirements come from Kazakhstan and Russia. Kazakh uranium is also processed in Russia.
There are, however, solutions to this problem. You could have special deals with Kazakhstan, for example, and as I said, 60 percent of the uranium is from Australia, Canada and some African countries. If push came to shove, even German uranium reserves could be used, which would be too expensive to mine today.
It is also important to know that uranium is significantly less addictive than gas. Fuel elements are not conducted energy carriers. You order them and you can store multiple reactor loads in the power plant. If someone stops the deliveries, the stock will last for at least a year and you can take care of a replacement during that time. Nevertheless, it would of course be important in the long term to decouple from Russia. The Ukrainians started this years ago.
nuclear power? Yes, please!
What would you wish for in terms of energy policy in the future?
Wendland: For the near future I would wish for reason and pragmatism. That we are not stupid enough to pull the oldest coal-fired power plants out of the reserve. But that politicians are signaling to people that they should bite the bullet when it comes to protecting the climate.
For the Greens, that would mean abandoning their ideological goals on nuclear power. The party denied that. What we need would be a major review of Germany’s nuclear phase-out by a commission of inquiry or a similar scientific-political body. This was neglected when the nuclear power plant was phased out in 2011, the ethics committee was only an auxiliary instrument for the subsequent legitimacy of a decision that had already been made. If the nuclear phase-out were reversed, we could pursue climate protection in a technology-neutral manner.
The state should only set CO emissions targets, but not technologies. The various actors can then choose whether to achieve the fleet target with wind, solar or nuclear energy. This is exactly the goal that the EU is also pursuing with its taxonomy: it promotes everything that serves to protect the climate – including nuclear power.