Exit – to enter the future
Dear Bärbel Schäfer,
Dear Gerda – it’s wonderful to be back in your Freiburg,
Dear Mr. Stücklin,
Dear Mr. Engelberger,
Dear Corinne Lepage,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Today is indeed a historic day. Today, Fessenheim is finally being shut down.
Even though the journey from Berlin to Freiburg, especially with a face mask, is not the shortest, I am glad to be here. I like to switch off every now and then.
Until midnight yesterday, Fessenheim was the oldest operating nuclear power plant in France. Fessenheim was a trinational nuclear power plant with owners in France, Switzerland, and Germany. The dangers of this outdated reactor were also trinational. Due to its location, any accident would have affected the entire area on both sides of the Rhine. 980,000 people would have needed to be evacuated.
This danger is not theoretical, as we learned from Harrisburg in 1979. As we learned on April 26, 1986, from Chernobyl. And we were once again starkly reminded on March 11, 2011, in Fukushima, when three core meltdowns occurred there – a super-GAU that, according to safety researchers, was supposed to be impossible. But it happened. Nuclear energy is a high-risk technology.
The German Minister of Environment repeatedly demanded the closure of Fessenheim, and rightly so. But Germany has done much to keep Fessenheim running. Its fuel rods came from Emsland, from the fuel element factory in Lingen. It is a historical irony that Germany is phasing out nuclear energy but continues to supply nuclear power plants worldwide with enriched uranium, and even provides weapons-grade material to the USA.
We need to finally shut down the nuclear factories in Lingen and Gronau.
The shutdown of Fessenheim, however, is a contribution to better relations between France, Germany, and Switzerland. It is a day for less fear and more unity. For more Europe.
From Wyhl to Fessenheim
45 years ago – four years before Harrisburg – citizens occupied the construction site of the Wyhl nuclear power plant here at Kaiserstuhl. And they succeeded. Eight years later, the plan was abandoned. The anti-nuclear movement was born.
In the Wendland region, farmers and citizens took to their tractors for the Gorleben trek. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated against the fast breeder reactor in Kalkar, despite massive police violence in Brokdorf and Grohnde. The beginning of the end of nuclear energy – at least in Germany – started right at the beginning.
The full force of the state was required to push through nuclear energy in Germany. This excess of power made the anti-nuclear movement strong – and led to the founding of the Greens.
In the end, nuclear energy lost this test of power. An energy source that could only be enforced with violence against the population ultimately failed. Not just in Germany – but starting from Germany.
At the end of 2022, the last nuclear power plant in Germany will go offline. The sites are Isar, Neckarwestheim, and Emsland.
France is still grappling with itself. Aiming to reduce nuclear energy from over 70% today to 50% by 2035 is not very ambitious. But France is also unable to replace its old nuclear power plants with new ones. The disaster of the reactor in Olkiluoto, Finland, looms over the French nuclear industry. The reactor was not only delayed by over a decade but also cost three times as much as initially calculated. If the French government had not stepped in, Areva would have gone bankrupt.
Nuclear energy is not only dangerous – it is a bad business model. Anyone who bets on it for too long will miss out on the future. The future is renewable. But before I look at that, I want to address a question.
Why did we go in?
When the Greens were founded, all other German parties supported nuclear power plants. Then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt saw it as a way out of dependence on oil. And SPD left-winger Erhard Eppler saw nuclear power as a way to end world hunger. Today, other technologies, like the genetic engineering of Bayer-Monsanto, make similar promises.
But the adoption of nuclear power had little to do with energy policy and even less with meeting the needs of the population. At the start of nuclear power adoption was Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace,” a speech he delivered on December 8, 1953, before the UN General Assembly in New York City. The decision to embrace nuclear energy was a political mandate from the USA and the emerging European nuclear powers of the 1950s.
It aimed to control the civilian and military use of nuclear energy globally. As a result, the IAEA was founded, with the goal of preventing the misuse of fissile material for building nuclear weapons. It wasn’t about energy supply but rather about preventing proliferation.
For countries without nuclear weapons, like Germany and Japan, it was about gaining access to this technology – which is why Germany enshrined its right to uranium enrichment in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Today, Iran benefits from this.
Today, countries planning new nuclear power plants are mainly those with a strategic interest in nuclear weapons, or those that do not convincingly deny interest in the atomic bomb. That includes Egypt, Turkey, Brazil… there are many Irans.
Above all, this shows that there is no Chinese wall between civilian and military use of nuclear energy.
Overall, nuclear energy is on the decline worldwide. And that is a good and extremely important thing. Instead, we are witnessing the
Boom of renewables
And that is good for the climate.
The energy transition, which began in Germany with the nuclear phase-out and the Renewable Energy Sources Act, has made renewables globally so affordable that for the sixth consecutive year, more renewable capacities have been connected to the grid than fossil and fissile ones.
Renewable energy is booming globally in power generation. In China, more than ten times as much as in Germany, and in the USA, six times as much has been invested. Since 2015, more than 300 billion US dollars have been invested annually in renewables.
Meanwhile, nuclear energy globally suffers from stagnant growth. Wind power production grew by 29% in 2018, while solar grew by 13%. While renewables added 156 GW of new capacity to the grid, the nuclear industry managed just 9 GW. No new nuclear power plant has been ordered in the USA since Harrisburg. In Europe, including France, the ongoing construction projects cannot even maintain the current level of nuclear power. Only in China is there a net increase.
The reason for this is simple: nuclear energy is simply not competitive.
The eternal costs for each gigawatt-hour of nuclear power are higher than any gigawatt-hour generated by coal, oil, gas, and much higher than those from hydro, wind, and solar power.
It’s about more than just eternal costs. The reference price for electricity per kilowatt-hour was achieved in Qatar for a 25-year contract tender – 1.47 cents per kWh for solar power. These are figures that operators of coal, gas, or oil power plants cannot even dream of. Not to mention nuclear. A new nuclear power plant could not even deliver power for ten times that price.
The only ones who profit from nuclear energy are the operators – or construction companies like Bilfinger, which are now involved in the heavily subsidized Hinkley Point C.
Dear Corinne Lepage, I have been following on Twitter the wave of protest your appearance here in Freiburg has caused. The trolls of the nuclear industry tried to read out the old fairy tale of climate protection through nuclear power. But fairy tales are fairy tales – even if adults believe in them. Of course, there is no such thing as completely CO2-free power generation. This applies to the concrete and steel in nuclear power plants, wind turbines, and dams. And it also applies to the CO2 emissions from uranium mining.
When the consensus on the nuclear phase-out was signed in Germany in 2001, the 19 German nuclear power plants supplied just under a quarter of our electricity. Renewables accounted for 4%. In 2020, renewables were supposed to supply 20% of electricity. This goal was already exceeded in 2012. Today in 2020, more than half of Germany’s electricity is generated from renewable sources. Renewables have more than doubled the capacity of nuclear power plants.
The energy transition not only overcompensated for the capacities of our nuclear waste producers but also replaced fossil capacities in equal measure. But is that enough? No. We still have a long way to go on climate protection. Germany has reduced a lot of CO2 emissions, but it is still the largest emitter in Europe. The climate crisis makes no compromises.
More than half of the emissions caused by human combustion of fossil fuels have entered the atmosphere in the last three decades, since 1990. More than half – since the adoption of the Climate Framework Convention. In 2018, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported an all-time high of 33.1 gigatons of emissions per year. The Earth’s atmosphere has the highest concentration of CO2 in the last 3 million years.
From today’s perspective, the likelihood of us reaching +3 °C is significantly higher than that of us staying below 2 °C. Some countries have decoupled growth and greenhouse gas emissions, but the global primary energy demand is still fossil.
Can nuclear energy help us with this? With all its risks, not really. It’s too insignificant. Nuclear energy accounts for just 4.4% of global final energy consumption. It fails to reach the 5% threshold. Converting the world economy from cars, airplanes, and ships to heating and industry on nuclear power would not only take decades we don’t have. It would be more than ten times as expensive as expanding renewable energy and developing a strategy for green hydrogen.
Above all, belief in nuclear power does not replace the need to phase out oil, coal, and gas. For the 2 °C target, four-fifths – 80% – of known oil, gas, and coal resources must remain underground. And this must be achieved before 2050.
This is a huge challenge. On the financial markets, there is a bet against the Paris Climate Agreement. In 2018 alone, $730 billion was invested in oil and gas outside the power generation sector. Exxon anticipates a 25% sales increase in the next decade. Around $7 trillion in capital is tied up in the fossil reserves of publicly listed companies worldwide. And there is a counter-bet. Institutional investors like Blackrock and Allianz advise against investments in fossil industries. They have been given strong arguments by the coronavirus crisis. This year, we will see probably the biggest drop in greenhouse gases ever. The International Energy Agency expects an 8% decline globally.
However, the global energy demand will only decrease by 6%. Greenhouse gases are falling more sharply than energy demand. The reason for this is not nuclear power. Its production is also declining. But coal consumption is falling most significantly, by nearly 8%, and oil consumption by over 9%. These days, fracking companies are going bankrupt one after another due to the collapse in demand for natural gas.
During the coronavirus crisis, only one form of energy has increased. Renewables are growing by 1.5% despite the recession. So there are chances that Blackrock and Allianz will win the bet, and Exxon and Total will lose.
Paris
But this bet will not be decided by the market. The bet against Paris will be decided this decade. Europe plays a key role here.
Politics must create the right framework. We don’t need nostalgic debates about a non-competitive high-risk technology. We need a Green Deal. Europe must become climate-neutral before 2050. The parties to Paris – Germany, France, and Switzerland – must commit to more ambitious 2030 climate targets. Here we must pull together as French, Germans, and Swiss. We must not waste time or money. We must invest in what quickly frees us from fossil dependence. That’s renewable energy. From today, the signal of a new beginning must go out.
Out of nuclear – into renewables.
The Wyhl activist and long-time BUND chairman here on the Upper Rhine, Axel Meyer, made a suggestion: namely, to pop open three bottles of champagne.
The first today,
the second when the fuel elements are removed from the interim storage,
the third when the nuclear waste from Fessenheim really no longer radiates – in about a million years.
I think we should add a fourth bottle in between: when finally 100 percent of energy is produced renewably. And we want to drink that before 2050.
In this spirit:
Adieu Fessenheim – bonjour l’avenir!
[1] Since 2014, renewable capacity has grown more than fossil: https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2019/Apr/Renewable-Energy-Now-Accounts-for-a-Third-of-Global-Power-Capacity
[2] Global Energy Briefing 187, p. 15