germany’s phantom house of nuclear horrors

Nuclear energy has a very bad reputation, even though that reputation is based on just two incidents, only one of which actually released radiation into the environment thanks to poor training and bad reactor design. Over the last quarter of a century, however, nuclear power plants in the developed world have been running safely, producing hundreds of terawatt hours of energy every year. The U.S. gets some 20% of its energy needs from fission plants, Japan gets 34.5% from the same source, and France practically runs on nuclear fission with a remarkable 78% of its electricity coming from splitting atoms. So you’d think that with only minor incidents and technology that withstood decades of real world use, Germany’s move to keep the 17 nuclear power plants providing about 23% of the nation’s energy open another 12 years, wouldn’t be much of a controversy. But it managed to send thousands of protesters to the streets, accusing the German government of throttling green energy for the benefit of major utility companies, and forecasting the typical anti-nuclear gloom and doom.

Why is it that whenever people hear the worlds “nuclear,” or “radiation,” they lose all sense of perspective and shriek in terror about fallout-like radioactive miasmas engulfing thousands of square miles around a nuclear reactor, giving rise to hordes of zombie pets, eight-eyed fish, humming trees, and instant cancers? Maybe the aftermath of the Cold War’s nuclear paranoia has them confusing the effects of a controlled nuclear reaction achieved in a power plant, with the effects of a global nuclear war? And why exactly would the continued use of existing nuclear reactors somehow be a death knell to green technologies? Who says that you can’t invest in more wind and solar while the reactors are still running? Was there an edict from Merkel transferring funds earmarked for alternative energies to the tax benefits utility companies enjoy? In fact, the entire debate lies in the fact that green lobbies are predicting that there will be enough alternative energy capacity to replace every nuclear power plant in the nation by 2022, while Merkel is skeptical, and wants to hedge her bets on existing, proven technology that already provides a significant percentage of Germany’s energy mix. So why not simply use this as a motivation for stepping up alternative energy research and pitch the results to the utilities?

Unfortunately, this is where we encounter the issue with many environmentalists’ mindsets. They don’t really seem to care about working with existing companies and upgrading energy infrastructures. They want a total revamp, and they want it now. And so they hijack serious work on climate change to make unfounded edicts to governments, cry gloom and doom in the media, using global warming as a bogeyman that will kill us all rather than a phenomena that will pose major challenges over the next century, and use scientists to shield themselves from necessary criticism of their actions so while they appropriate climatology for politics, the researchers who study what our industries do to nature are left to take the heat for green zealotry. The notion that global governments and major utility companies will suddenly change their ways because you threaten them with apocalyptic scenarios should they fail to do exactly as you say only helps to create climate change denialists, and entrench existing ones. Working within the system to present better economics for alternative energy sources, and convincing companies that “green” shouldn’t be the marketing gimmick it is today, but the de facto standard for future products is the only way to achieve mutual progress and demonstrate why the entire denialist movement is usually nothing but political stubbornness.

So while Germany’s environmentalists regurgitate the same hysterical fears about nuclear power we’ve all heard and debunked before, they’re forgetting that no one banned them from demonstrating the alternatives which they say would render the nuclear power plants obsolete. And even more importantly, their visceral and panicked reaction to the idea that somewhere, something radioactive might be generating power for us is the kind of powerful Luddism that keeps an entire field of energy generation research on a leash. No doubt they’ll be protesting just as loudly if the ITER experiment makes industrial nuclear fusion a reality, too scared about something that emits any dose of radiation to do their research and find out that fusion is far more potent and produces far less waste than fission. And since yours truly lived within a few hours drive of Chernobyl when it exploded and still isn’t afraid of nuclear power, it amazes me how many people who’ve never even seen a real nuclear disaster can be so terrified of nuclear energy after decades of safe and efficient operation.