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Nuclear power hots up as German election issue

By Vasilije Gallak on Sep 21, 2009 in Berlin, Featured, Germany

Berlin - What do the farmers of Lower Saxony, anti-fascist skinheads, and a Munich mothers� association have in common? Not much � apart from the fact that they�re all against nuclear energy.

These groups are part of a surprisingly disparate anti-nuclear movement in Germany that in early September staged probably the largest and most colourful demonstration in an otherwise dreary election campaign.

Some 40,000 people marched in Berlin � complete with a convoy of tractors, a mock-up nuclear waste transporter, a Trojan horse, and effigies of babies scorched by nuclear winds � to remind the government that a solid majority (57 per cent, according to recent polls) of Germans support the planned shut-down of the country�s 17 nuclear powerplants.

According to the Phase-Out Law negotiated by a previous Social Democrat (SPD)-Green government in 2001, those plants, which currently produce around 25 per cent of Germany�s electricity, would be gradually closed down by 2020 � in most cases around ten years earlier than scheduled.

But it may not stay that way, if Chancellor Angela Merkel�s Christian Democrats (CDU) wins the election and manages to form a government with the liberal Free Democrats. Both parties, while rejecting building any new nuclear plants, would like to keep the old ones running a bit longer.

�The most important thing is that we transfer to renewable energy as quickly as possible � but do we have to pull out by 2020, or could we not have a bit more time?� Merkel asked the nation, rhetorically, during the TV debate with rival Social Democrat challenger Frank-Walter Steinmeier on September 13.

This wish to keep the reactors humming � just in case � has infuriated a huge swathe of political opinion, from the far-left to the SPD, with whom Merkel currently governs.

And a string of events in the run-up to the election has served to undermine what little public trust there was in Germany that the nuclear industry can run itself safely and transparently.

In July a nuclear plant at Kruemmel, in Schleswig-Holstein, broke down just days after a two-year shutdown prompted by an earlier accident.

In August it emerged that the German government under Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1980s had suppressed scientific evidence against using an underground salt cavern at Gorleben (under the rich farmland of Lower Saxony) as a permanent nuclear waste storage site
- and went ahead with it anyway.

The site has sucked up billions of dollars over the years, and is still not ready to be used as a storage site.

Then a few days later it was revealed that the level of plutonium waste at Asse, a temporary storage site also in Lower Saxony, was three times higher than had been previously admitted.

http://eyugoslavia.com/european-union/germany/berlin/21/nuclear-power-hots-up-as-german-election-issue-2211651/

[Manner of Speaking]

Ahh, it's the 80s all over again. Plus c'est la change...

[Sergio Stefanuto]

Perhaps they don't like it because it's Jewish?