Germany vows to shutdown Nuclear Plants by 2022

One of Germany's ageing nuclear power plant

I suppose it is very appropriate to bring up this topic now, especially after Japan's untimely disaster with earthquakes and tsunamis, and just as the whole world was beginning to recover from 2008 economic crisis. Germany's coalition government announced a reversal of policy that will see its nuclear power plants being phased out by 2022.

Protesting Nuclear energy in Germany

Personally i am not opposed to nuclear power because i believe they can be built and operated safely. We should learn from our mistakes and build better, efficient, safer nuclear plants rather than completely phasing them out. Some things can be prevented such as Chernobyl disaster, which was down to human errors and design flaw, while some things just happen to be unpredictable.

More importantly, the lessons that we can learn from Fukushima Daichii would be not to build along fault zones and at the sea level (even if the view is really breath-taking). Instead we could easily build them to survive Tsunami, earthquakes and terrorist attacks as we have done for Skyscrapers surviving earthquakes and reactors being placed in submarines to survive any kind of weather condition. They can be engineered to be fail-safe, with passive cooling or built to produce only elements of faster decoy.

Tectonic plate movement is common near Fukushima or Sendai

The Nuclear plant was just next to the sea

However, i am not a blind supporter of nuclear energy. I believe there can be so much more done to make nuclear energy safer. How about putting in more money to research into using Thorium based fuel. 

More importantly, it is not the markets that have been spooked but public opinion and the governments that react to that opinion - at least in democracies. Germany is not going to extend the operating life of ten of their aging reactors. US and China will actually be reviewing safety procedures and future projects.Surely, the cost of construction has gone up as a result of Fukushima and public opinion has hardened, but as we saw in Chernobyl, time does allow fears to subside and the reality is nuclear power will continue to provide a significant percentage of power supply in many countries. But not all forms of nuclear power are equal and do not carry the same inherent risk of meltdown. China is investing considerable sums in developing a technology using radioactive thorium that was first conceived back in the 1960s by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory but, supporters say, lacked funding because it didn’t have the benefit of creating weapons-grade fissile material as a by-product. In those Cold War days, weapons production was as important as energy production. There are potentially two thorium nuclear energy production technologies; the approach to be developed by China will be a thorium-based molten salt reactor. The fail-safe requires no external power or intervention. If the reaction begins to overheat, a plug in the base of the containment vessel melts and the contents simply drain under gravity into a pan. As a Telegraph article quotes former NASA engineer Kirk Sorensen saying, the reactor saves itself. Read more about Thorium nuclear power by clicking here.

Hearing this actually makes me angry because we sometimes prioritise weapons technology over building for safer energy. But lets not point fingers now and lets see what impact will this policy have on current economy.

Economic implications

Germany phasing out their nuclear plants obviously is a good news for Oil&Gas and especially shale gas. Also neighboring countries has unique opportunity to build up nuclear power and sell it to Germany. The bad news is consumers in the whole EU are going to pay substantially more for power and economy as a whole will suffer because of this policy. This is the politic reality and I doubt we can do anything with that especially if the Germans think this is an irreversible policy. 

Germany's decision to abandon this path may result in the EU paying a hefty amount for their electricity needs because renewable energy (i am sorry to say but lets be realistic here) is expensive. Soon i will talk about renewable energy and its practicality in another post. Till then, lets ponder on the future of nuclear energy, should we go thorium based fuel or nuclear fusion?

Leave a comment below, if you have an alternative idea or just want to find out more about nuclear energy.