Merkel backs proposal to end nuclear power in 2022
Reactors 1 and 2 of nuclear power plant Neckarwestheim, run by German energy supplier EnBW, are pictured in Neckarwestheim, southern Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that 2022 was "a good time" for Germany to end nuclear power, backing a proposal by the Bavarian wing of her party.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Saturday that 2022 was "a good time" for Germany to end nuclear power, backing a proposal by the Bavarian wing of her party.
She described as "an important contribution" the scenario set out by the Christian Social Union at a meeting in the southern town of Andechs.
The centre-right government is to set out its strategy by the beginning of June and agree draft legislation at a cabinet meeting on June 7 or 15.
Following the earthquake and tsunami which wrecked the Japanese nuclear plant of Fukushima in March, Merkel ordered the closure for three months of Germany's seven oldest reactors.
She also announced a moratorium for the same period of an earlier decision by her government to extend the lifetime of Germany's 17 reactors by an average of 12 years.
(c) 2011 AFP
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May 22, 2011
Rank: not rated yet
That ends well.
May 22, 2011
Rank: 3.5 / 5 (4)
Luckily the people aren't buying this sudden fake green conscience in the conservatives and are voting for the true green parties. Just today in a regional election the conservatives got severely defeated.
May 22, 2011
Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
Unfortunately, they are buying the green fake concience, which is ultimately worse.
Why not nuclear power?
Because it's too easy - you don't have to change the society and culture to what the green ideologists want when you can solve the problems in some other way than what they propose.
Energy has to be expensive, resources must be scarce, consumption and energy use must go down, because only under those circumstances do their rhetorics come valid.
May 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
how?
There are many reasons...
what are green ideologists?
resources ARE scarce.
energy IS expensive.
what rhetoric?
You are being very implicit.
May 23, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Surely relying on just on renewable energy sources would be irresponsible leaving a unstable power grid?
May 23, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Well, my strawman for the green idelogist is the person who needs scarcity of energy for example to justify a certain social ideal. Namely the neo-socialist model whose argument is that since resources are strictly limited, they should be controlled by an authority to ensure proper distribution.
The rhetorics is; the gain of one is the loss of others, so nobody should strive for more than what their neighbor has, and you need a government to ensure that nobody does, or at least succeeds in it.
Nuclear power is less expensive, potentially very cheap, and with enough cheap energy available to you, recycling (instead of downcycling which is what most "recycling" actually is) materials starts to have a point.
Renewable energies are very very expensive and difficult, both to produce and to use, which is masked by the fact that they are subsidized heavily.
May 23, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Ideologists: energy/environmental crisis is used as a tool for social change. Anything that solves the crisis is bad, if it disrupts the plan. Don't really care for the environment. (e.g Greenpeace)
Hippies: magical thinkers with a strange version of reality where nuclear power disrupts the "chakra of nature" or something equally incredible bullshit.
The scared: people who don't know much about nuclear power, often possess weird ideas of how nuclear power works, what are the hazards or radiation, why powerplants fail. These are easily led by the ideologists through simple propaganda.
The pessimist: people who basically understand nuclear power, but don't believe the corporations/governments/scientists can ever make it safe enough, or if they can then there's still some hidden caveat which makes it all blow up anyways.
The idiot: "electricity comes from the wall - why do we need nuclear power?"
May 23, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
These "back to the nature" and "responsible elite" types hate nuclear power because it represents the continuation of the modern human culture and the power of humans to change nature to whatever we desire.
May 23, 2011
Rank: 4 / 5 (1)
People who produce and sell windmills and other renewable energy technology on the large scale, or have invested in it don't like nuclear power, because renewables and nuclear power don't really get along in the grid, and nuclear power is cheaper. Their interest is to do anything they can to lobby for the removal of nuclear power, so they could sell their stuff instead.
All in all, there are good reasons why you should argue against nuclear power, but in my opinion most people are doing it for all the wrong reasons.
May 23, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
In germany there has been a society wide agreement that we should stop using nuclear power. This has been the norm since shortly after Chernobyl. The social democracts and the greens put this agreement into law when they were in power at the beginning of the millenium. The current conservative government overturned that (against the people's will).
So it's not a matter of changing the culture to green ideologies. That change has already happened 25 years ago.
May 23, 2011
Rank: 4 / 5 (1)
Yet you still used, depended and built on energy from nuclear power for 25 years, and still do. The culture didn't change because it couldn't change then.
I think it's called "let's not and say we did".
It's a feelgood law that plays into the delusions of the people who think going without nuclear power is going to be just peachy.
May 23, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
People can smoke themselves to death by cigarettes and poison their neighborhood with soot particles from burning wood in their heating systems as an effort to be "green", and spew thorium and uranium sky high from the smokestacks of coal fired powerplants.
And then complain about the hypothetical possibility of a Chernobyl-type accident in a German nuclear powerplant of a completely different design.
I guess slowly destroying yourself and the environment is better.
May 23, 2011
Rank: not rated yet
Fukushima was Germany's last calling.
This is a second chance. Second chances are rare.
Third chances are nonexistence.
May 23, 2011
Rank: not rated yet
Sie reden völlig Quatsch. Menschenkenntnis null.
May 28, 2011
Rank: not rated yet
May 29, 2011
Rank: not rated yet
It is ignorant and arrogant to speak for and about others the way you do.
As for your neo-fascist specious screeds about socialism, there can't be anything more "socialistic" by your definition than nuclear power. It's subsidized by taxpayers and the companies that run these plants never pay the full cost of decommissioning them (which is at least the same cost as building them. So it is NOT cheap).
If thorium reactors work then GREAT! If lefties need education on the technology then so be it.
What do born again right wing anti-science anti-intellectual religious freaks know more about science than "hippies"?
How much more do wall st. greedheads who aren't educated in that area know?
Uranium fission designs of the past are DEAD.
BTW wood burning masonry/finnish stoves create almost NO SOOT! What's that? a 200 year old design? Sorry, it is YOU who is ignorant of the social, political and economic implications of these technology designs...