The irrational optimism of the nuclear power lobby.

12 Apr 25, https://theaimn.net/the-irrational-optimism-of-the-nuclear-power-lobby/

Australia’s Opposition Party is the prime example of this unfounded optimism. Liberal Coalition leader Peter Dutton is full of enthusiasm in his nuclear plan :

Our plan will deliver a net-zero electricity grid by 2050 and a strong and resilient economy. It will set our country up for decades to come. At the front of this next wave of growth will be those communities which host zero-emissions nuclear plants. Not only will local communities benefit from high paying, multi-generational jobs but communities will be empowered to maximise the benefits from hosting an asset of national importance .……….

A Federal Coalition Government will initially develop two establishment projects using either small modular reactors or modern larger plants such as the AP1000 or APR1400. They will start producing electricity by 2035 (with small modular reactors) or 2037 (if modern larger plants are found to be the best option).

Dutton and his chief nuclear spruiker, Ted O’Brien, gloss easily over concerns about costs, safety, water shortage, environmental effects, timing, and of comparisons with wind and solar power.

Ted O’Brien is indeed a master at this stuff. He looks just the right guy to be a reassuring expert to farmers, and rural communities. His background in marketing shows, with his perfect marketing style. Pleasant, affable, -even warm, calm and confident, O’Brien doesn’t need the detailed facts to interfere with his comfortable assertions about Australia’s wonderful nuclear energy future.

“because hand on heart that’s in our national interest It is the right thing to do I It is why othercountries all around the world are now introducing nuclear energy It’s in Australia’s interest …….We’ll always have to focus on what is right for Australia.

Australia is already behind the eight ball when it comes to zero-emission nuclear energy. The sooner we get going the betterIt has proven around the world to be the fastest way to decarbonise electricity grids.”

Australia, geographically remote from the countries that do have nuclear power, is vulnerable to this kind of “style over substance” persuasion.

If we look at the substance of what is going on in those countries, we find a very mixed bag indeed. The national governments of France, USA, UK, Canada, Japan, Russia, are all for new nuclear power – encouraging and subsidising big and (so far non-existent) small nuclear reactors. Not so much China, which is going allout for renewable energy.

The politicians might be backing nuclear power – but the economic realities tell a different story:

BRITAIN: Let’s start with the COSTS – Hinkley Point C nuclear will cost at least £75 billion – highly unlikely that Sizewell C will be any cheaper. Then there’s the WASTES problem – Nuclear bosses quizzed by MPs over Sellafield’s £130 billion century-long clean up. And there’s the OPPOSITION to the industry and to its wastes – Resistance to nuke dump grows in South Copeland.

FRANCE. is in all sorts of trouble with its nuclear programme – France delays EPR2 reactors to 2038. The Flamanville EPR nuclear reactor will not be able to deliver its full power without major works. Squabble with Britain over who pays for France’s nuclear projects in the UK. And there’s The poisonous problem of France’s nuclear waste

USA – COSTS – USA nuclear power companies feeling the financial pain- future very dubious. Failure of small nuclear reactor project. Attempts to restart old reactors – Groups Demand DOE Environmental Impact Statement Before Agency Bails Out Palisades Zombie Reactor Restart.

JAPAN. has a huge nuclear WASTE problem. And it’s not just the Fukushima continuing waste disaster. There is little enthusiasm in government or community for reviving the nuclear industry – TEPCO’s rehabilitation plan delays expose limits to nuke power reliance.

CANADA. The government is gung-ho for nuclear power, but here is strong and well-informed opposition to it. And those pesky indigenous opponents are having legal wins on waste plans, – the wastes problem does put a damper on new nuclear.

These are all nations that are stuck with existing nuclear reactors, many of them aging, and stuck with the very significant waste problem – which, by the way, doesn’t get a mention from the comforting Mr Ted O’Brien.

Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition has as its main policy, the setting up of a tax-payer funded nuclear industry. This is a breathtakingly bold step for a Liberal party, traditionally the champion of private enterprise, and sworn enemy of socialism.

The Coalition doesn’t seem to have much else in the way of policies. Their leader, Peter Dutton. is currently inclined to shut up a bit about nuclear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12RE1WGl-VQ

It’s up to Ted O’Brien to work his marketing magic. He will probably be helped with his “style above substance” message, by well-funded groups like Advance and The Atlas Network.

Well, it worked in America. Voters, tired of all the bad stuff, turned away from facts and policy details, and voted for an entertaining charlatan. It could work in Australia, and would certainly be a triumph for the nice Mr O’Brien.

April 12, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Christina's notes

4 Comments »

Germany: New federal government wants nuclear fusion instead of nuclear power plants – no word on nuclear energy in the coalition agreement

April 14, 2025

Berlin – In the last election campaign, the CDU/CSU heavily criticized the “traffic light” coalition for shutting down the last three nuclear power plants in Germany and announced a return to nuclear energy. However, after the election, the coalition agreement no longer mentions a single word on nuclear energy.

Nuclear power plants: CDU/CSU and SPD do not want a return to nuclear energy in Germany

Of the 17 nuclear power plants still in operation in Germany in 2010, a total of 14 nuclear power plants were shut down by the end of 2021 with the participation of the CDU/CSU federal governments. However, the shutdown of the last three nuclear power plants by the “traffic light” coalition, in particular, subsequently drew regular criticism in Germany.

The coalition parties have not yet provided a reason for not considering nuclear energy. The reasons are likely varied, but all of them were known long before the elections. The advanced age and high costs of reactivating the old nuclear power plants would be just one of the numerous challenges. The most recently shut down nuclear power plants, Emsland (1985), Isar II (1988), and Neckarwestheim 2 (1989), are already 35 years old and have already exceeded their designed operating life. Furthermore, the dismantling of the old nuclear power plants is already underway; the Atomic Energy Act would have to be reopened, and the resulting additional nuclear waste would have to be re-regulated.

Energy industry not available for new nuclear power plants – no price-reducing effect from nuclear energy

Furthermore, the energy industry, as the operator of the old nuclear power plants that are to be reactivated, is not available. RWE CEO Markus Krebber has repeatedly rejected a return to nuclear power. The energy supplier EnBW has also ruled out the restart of its decommissioned nuclear power plants, deeming the construction of new reactors unrealistic. E.ON CEO Leonhard Birnbaum, for his part, stated in an interview with Handelsblatt that there is no private company in Germany that would invest money in new nuclear power plants.

A price-reducing effect is also not to be expected from the expansion of nuclear energy. The public often misunderstands that a higher electricity supply alone leads to lower electricity prices. In fact, the formation of electricity prices on the exchange works differently based on the marginal cost model (merit order).

All power plants used are ranked according to their costs in the hourly auction, from lowest to highest. The highest price of the last power plant to enter the auction determines the price for all other power plants. This “clearance price” is currently generally determined primarily by the gas price and thus by the gas-fired power plants. Cheaper power plants then play no role and do not lower the electricity price. Extremely high gas prices—and not a problem with electricity volumes—were a key driver of the subsequent explosion in electricity prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent rapid rise in inflation.

In Europe, there is a shared electricity grid with 36 European countries. This is the second largest electricity grid in the world after China’s. Electricity is traded on electricity exchanges. The Baltic states’ grid connection from Russia’s grid to the Western grid was completed without any problems in 2025.

https://www.iwr.de/news/neue-bundesregierung-will-kernfusion-statt-atomkraftwerke-kein-wort-zur-atomenergie-im-koalitionsvertrag-news39104

https://www.entsoe.eu/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Network_of_Transmission_System_Operators_for_Electricity

Translation: Dieter Kaufmann, Working Group Against Nuclear Power Plants, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Comment by Dieter Kaufmann | April 14, 2025 | Reply
- Thank you Dieter Kaufmann, for this valuable information
  
  Comment by Christina Macpherson | April 15, 2025 | Reply
  - The Hunger for Nuclear Power
    
    As of April 14, 2025, 5:34 p.m. by Sereina Donatsch
    
    Look at a familiar picture in Australia. An inflatable nuclear waste barrel. Printed in the Frankfurter Rundschau, a national newspaper in Germany.
    
    The caption reads: There are also protests against nuclear power in Canada. An oversight.
    
    The Canadian flag is red, white, and red.
    
    I’ve never seen the Australian parliament in Canberra. I recognize the flag immediately. I’d eat a grizzly bear in Australia if that isn’t the Australian flag. I had to laugh so hard.
    
    Back to the article
    
    The People’s Republic of China plans to put more than 40 nuclear power plants into operation within the next 15 years. Other Asian countries such as Bangladesh, Japan, India, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates are returning to nuclear energy. Russia is also busy building, albeit not in its own country, but primarily in Africa, such as Egypt and Ghana, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
    
    Some excerpts from the article on Europe
    
    Thirteen of the 27 EU member states and the United Kingdom currently operate nuclear power plants. That’s a total of around 100 reactors, more than half of which are located in France. And the French president doesn’t want to stop there. He wants to build up to 14 new large nuclear power plants and many small-scale nuclear reactors (SMRs).
    
    Countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden have extended the operating lives of older nuclear power plants and are planning major expansion programs in some cases. Poland, which has so far been nuclear-free, wants to build a large nuclear power plant on the Baltic Sea. A total of six large nuclear power plants and many small-scale nuclear reactors are planned.
    
    Nuclear energy remains expensive and very dangerous, while renewable energies are becoming increasingly affordable. The IEA also points out that the expansion of the nuclear power fleet relies primarily on technologies from China and Russia, which poses long-term risks related to political and economic dependence.
    
    https://www.fr.de/politik/der-hunger-nach-atomkraft-kernenergie-erlebt-global-ein-comeback-93683928.html
    
    Note on China: After Fukushima in 2011, China postponed 185 nuclear power plants in the country. All planned sites remain in place. Renewable energy sources were built on some. The planned 40 nuclear power plants will be built exclusively on China’s coast. Should a major disaster occur, it is likely that the radioactive cloud will drift into the sea. Nuclear power plants consume an infinite amount of water. On the coast, water can be drawn from the sea. This could also be a problem for Australia. In Europe, nuclear power plants and coal-fired power plants in the European Union consume 44 percent of the total drinking water consumption for the population. In France, several nuclear power plants were temporarily out of service due to drought.
    
    Two years ago today, April 15, 2023, the last three nuclear power plants in Germany were shut down. Of course, we celebrate that.
    
    Dieter Kaufmann, Working Group Against Nuclear Facilities, Frankfurt am Main.
    
    Comment by Dieter Kaufmann | April 15, 2025
Germany: One exit and back? The role of nuclear power in the Merz coalition

April 14, 2025, 7:39 p.m. by Joachim Wille

Although desired by some members of the Merz coalition, there will be no comeback for nuclear power plants. Joachim Wille philosophizes about the reasons.

Berlin – For a while, it looked as if the future Merz coalition would reverse the shutdown of the most recently shut-down nuclear power plants. The CDU/CSU, by far the largest partner, pushed for reversing the phase-out. The paper from the grand coalition’s “Energy and Climate” exploratory group stated – colored in the CDU/CSU blue – the CDU/CSU’s wish: “Nuclear energy can play a significant role, particularly with regard to climate goals and security of supply.”

Union backtracks on nuclear power: Coalition agreement seals Germany’s nuclear phase-out

But the coalition agreement recently presented by Merz and his colleagues no longer mentions any of this. This is an unmistakable signal: Germany is sticking to its nuclear phase-out, which was initiated in 2011 by CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel after the Fukushima disaster.

And this despite the fact that the public image of nuclear power has turned positive. The last three nuclear power plants in Germany were shut down two years ago. Today, however, according to a survey, a narrow majority of Germans (55 percent) support a return to nuclear energy, while 36 percent oppose it.

In politics, the CDU/CSU could have seen its pro-nuclear stance vindicated. It wanted to investigate whether the recently shut-down reactors could still be reactivated, and possibly even build new mini-reactors, as well as invest more money in the promising future of nuclear fusion. In the current representative Verivox survey, almost a third of respondents (32 percent) favor building new nuclear power plants, while another 22 percent would like to see only the most recently decommissioned plants brought back online.

After the Fukushima disaster: The Bundestag in Berlin voted in 2011 to shut down nuclear power plants

The phase-out of nuclear power, which at its peak provided around a third of the electricity consumed in Germany, was finally sealed by the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. In 2011, the Bundestag passed a cross-party resolution to gradually shut down the 17 nuclear power plants still in operation at the time.

After the reactor meltdowns in Japan, which rendered an entire region uninhabitable, there was a consensus: the “residual risk” of even Western nuclear technology is too great, and a phase-out is necessary. Ultimately, safety calculations showed that even with nuclear power plants made in Germany, serious accidents with radioactive contamination of large areas in the surrounding area, including entire cities, could not be ruled out.

Polls at the time showed high levels of support for the decision pushed forward by Merkel. The physicist’s legendary utterance when she saw the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear power plants on TV was legendary: “That’s it.”

Note: In 2011 polls, over 80 percent of the German population wanted to shut down all nuclear power plants after Fukushima.

After the end of the Merkel era: The Union included plans for a return to nuclear power in coalition negotiations

After the end of the Merkel era, the remaining nuclear fans in the Union felt they had the upper hand again. It also looked as if they had a good chance of prevailing in the negotiations with the SPD. In particular, their demand for an “assessment of whether … a resumption of operation of the most recently shut-down nuclear power plants is still possible at a reasonable technical and financial cost,” as stated in the energy policymakers’ paper, seemed to have a good chance of success.

But there is no mention of this in the coalition agreement. Only fusion research plays a role here. “Our goal is: The world’s first fusion reactor should be located in Germany,” it states. However, the time perspective here is two or more decades. So, have Klingbeil’s Social Democrats, who have been pushing for a phase-out since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, prevailed with their course against the CDU/CSU’s nuclear fans?

The energy industry doubts the CDU/CSU’s plan to reactivate nuclear power plants.

The most recent election platform clearly stated: “Nuclear power has been shut down in Germany, and that’s a good thing.” The anti-nuclear NGO “ausgestrahlt” sees it this way, accusing the SPD of having “burst the Union’s nuclear soap bubbles.” In fact, it’s at least as likely that the Union leaders realistically assessed the problems of the nuclear power renaissance. The dismantling of the nuclear power plants is already well advanced, and restarting them would be extremely expensive and very time-consuming due to the need for new permits.

A return to nuclear power is hardly possible: Nuclear power plant operators have closed their chapter.

In addition, the three current nuclear power plant operators, EnBW, PreussenElektra, and RWE, have practically closed the chapter on nuclear power. None of them would voluntarily take the entrepreneurial risk of reversing the decommissioning process. Before the start of the grand coalition negotiations, the line was clear. EnBW’s nuclear power chief Jörg Michels said: “The decommissioning status of our five nuclear power plants is, in practical terms, irreversible.”

PreussenElektra stated that it was not “engaged in such thought experiments.” RWE CEO Markus Krebber stated: “We are past the point in this country where we should bring decommissioned nuclear power plants back online.”

Estimates by the nuclear power plant service provider Nukem show how expensive the restart would have been. He estimates the cost of repairing the six reactors shut down between 2021 and 2023 at one to three billion euros per nuclear power plant, depending on how far the decommissioning has progressed. This would therefore involve a sum of ten billion euros or more, which would likely have had to come from the federal budget in Berlin.

Nukem CEO Thomas Seipolt told bild.de that he sees “a realistic possibility of a comeback for nuclear power” by 2030 and is therefore making a corresponding offer to the future German government. For his company, which specializes in the decommissioning of nuclear power plants and the management of nuclear waste, such a renaissance of nuclear power would have been extremely lucrative. But the fact remains: Despite the federal government’s €500 billion special fund for infrastructure and climate protection, such a massive cash injection for the nuclear power plant operators would have been virtually impossible to implement.

Further arguments against nuclear power: Green electricity now dominates the electricity market

But other arguments may have slowed the nuclear renaissance. “A return to nuclear power doesn’t fit in a market increasingly dominated by green electricity,” said Christoph Pistner, nuclear power expert at the Öko-Institut, to the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. The share of renewables in the grid is growing rapidly; currently, it’s already 60 percent, and according to current plans, it’s expected to reach around 80 percent by 2030 and even 100 percent by 2035.

Flexible gas-fired power plants will be increasingly needed, which can step in at short notice when solar and wind energy is insufficient, rather than baseload power plants like nuclear power plants, which are designed for continuous operation and are difficult to control, especially in the lower power range. Upgraded, large, legacy nuclear power plants, which, according to Nukem estimates, could have been reconnected to the grid from 2030, would have hardly fit into this structure.

The same applies, by the way, to the mini-nuclear power plants (Small Nuclear Reactors) proposed by the CDU/CSU, which, according to Pistner’s estimates, could not be ready for series production and built until the mid-2030s at the earliest. And: “As things stand today, SMRs will hardly be able to produce electricity more cheaply than conventional new nuclear power plants, unless thousands of them are mass-produced, which is not at all foreseeable.”

And then Pistner recalled a politically critical aspect: “A return to nuclear energy has the potential to jeopardize the search for a final storage site in Germany.” The search for a final storage site was restarted after the Fukushima nuclear phase-out, which eliminated the previously hotly contested Gorleben site, which proved to be geologically unsuitable. A Gorleben 2.0 would probably be the last thing the Merz grand coalition needs.

https://www.fr.de/politik/warum-sich-die-neue-koalition-gegen-eine-atom-rueckkehr-entschied-93684231.html

Groko (Grand Coalition) is an abbreviation for grand coalition.

Background: Nuclear phase-out in Germany

The first phase-out of nuclear energy in Germany took place in 2000. As early as 2006, it was clear that the conservative parties (CDU/CSU), also known as the Union, wanted to return to nuclear energy with a new government change in 2009. This happened in 2010. But then Fukushima happened in 2011, and Chancellor Merkel withdrew from nuclear energy after just a few months. The resolution was supported by all parties in the federal parliament in Berlin that the last nuclear power plants would be shut down on December 31, 2022. We would have preferred to phase out nuclear power sooner.

All social groups have prepared for the nuclear phase-out. Then Russia, Putin’s country, invaded Ukraine in February 2022 for the second time since 2014. Natural gas and oil became very expensive. Electricity prices also rose. In addition, half of all nuclear power plants in France were shut down in the winter of 2022/2023 for various reasons. The Union then wanted to re-enter nuclear energy. But it was too late. Nuclear power plant operators in Germany were annoyed. Planning security looks different. Nuclear power plants are not kettles that can be switched on and off.

An agreement was reached with the nuclear power plant operators, and the remaining three nuclear power plants were extended until April 15, 2023, as long as the nuclear fuel still allowed. Certain fuel elements were converted once again in the core area of the three nuclear power plants. Then it was over.

German wholesale electricity prices from January 2021 to December 2024 in German:

Note, abbreviation, background, and translation

Dieter Kaufmann, Working Group Against Nuclear Facilities, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Comment by Dieter Kaufmann | April 15, 2025 | Reply