Gwynne Dyer · Columnist | Posted: Jan. 4, 2022
A nuclear power plant in Gundremmingen, Germany. German has taken futehr steps to shutter it's nuclear power grid, with the last reactors due to go offline later this year.
At the stroke of midnight last Friday, half of Germany’s remaining nuclear power stations closed down. The remaining three plants (of an original 17) will shut down on Dec. 31 of this year, and Germans will no longer have to live with the fear of a nuclear (power) holocaust.
What’s more, all the lost energy from the nuclear plants will be “compensated for by the expansion of renewable energies,” promised Claudia Kemfert, an energy expert at the German Institute for Economic Research.
An elegant solution, but there is a catch.
Most of the wind and solar power that Germany is building will go to replace its nuclear power plants, not to eliminate the coal and gas that it is still burning in huge amounts to generate electricity. So Germany will go on burning coal until 2038 (France is out now, the U.K. by 2024), and it also imports big volumes of gas from Russia (at great geopolitical cost).
Fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide; nuclear power doesn’t. By shutting down nuclear power instead of coal and gas, Germany has dumped an extra 350 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 into the air in the past decade — plus maybe another 350 Mt yet to come before they have built enough wind and solar power to replace the fossil fuels they should have dumped first.
There’s also an estimated extra 1,100 Germans a year dying from breathing in the fossil fuel pollution in their country, but they’re dying in a good cause: all their nervous fellow-citizens will sleep better at night.
At the stroke of midnight last Friday, half of Germany’s remaining nuclear power stations closed down. The remaining three plants (of an original 17) will shut down on Dec. 31 of this year, and Germans will no longer have to live with the fear of a nuclear (power) holocaust.
What’s more, all the lost energy from the nuclear plants will be “compensated for by the expansion of renewable energies,” promised Claudia Kemfert, an energy expert at the German Institute for Economic Research.
An elegant solution, but there is a catch.
Most of the wind and solar power that Germany is building will go to replace its nuclear power plants, not to eliminate the coal and gas that it is still burning in huge amounts to generate electricity. So Germany will go on burning coal until 2038 (France is out now, the U.K. by 2024), and it also imports big volumes of gas from Russia (at great geopolitical cost).
Fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide; nuclear power doesn’t. By shutting down nuclear power instead of coal and gas, Germany has dumped an extra 350 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 into the air in the past decade — plus maybe another 350 Mt yet to come before they have built enough wind and solar power to replace the fossil fuels they should have dumped first.
There’s also an estimated extra 1,100 Germans a year dying from breathing in the fossil fuel pollution in their country, but they’re dying in a good cause: all their nervous fellow-citizens will sleep better at night.
Just one day ahead of Germany, Belgium announced on Dec. 30 that it will shut all of the country’s nuclear power plants by 2025. It too promises to replace the lost electricity with power from renewable sources eventually, but it will just burn more coal and gas in the meantime.
How long is meantime? Nobody knows, but it’s clearly a price that Belgians are willing to pay.
And when the European Commission proposed a new law last weekend that recognises nuclear power as “green” (provided that the plants have strict plans for the disposal of nuclear waste), there was an outcry all across the European Union. German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke condemned the proposal as simply “wrong.”
This is the triumph of fear over common sense. To advocate abandoning nuclear power when the great threat is carbon dioxide emissions (and we are losing the race to decarbonize) is folly.
There are currently 441 commercial nuclear reactors in the world, supplying about 10 per cent of the world’s electricity. There could have been three or four times as much nuclear power by now if the Green movement had not exploited a couple of accidents in the 1970s and ’80s to cripple it.
There is reason to suspect that the original Green hostility to nuclear power was encouraged and subsidized by the U.S. fossil fuel industry, which has always been quick to spot emerging potential rivals and sabotage them. But the hostility is self-sustaining now, fed by fantasy statistics and deliberate scare-mongering.
There have actually been just three major accidents in some 60 years of operation by hundreds of nuclear power plants, only one of which caused human casualties: Chernobyl in 1986, where 28 plant workers were killed and 15 other people subsequently died of thyroid cancer.
But nobody at all died at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011 (although 20,000 died as a result of the magnitude 9.0 sub-sea quake and the tsunami that devastated the city). Many more people die from coal pollution each and every day than have died from nuclear power accidents in the entire past half-century.
Yet a vocal minority of Europeans are terrified of the technology, and they are so well organized that most European countries have banned nuclear power or are shutting it down now. (France and the U.K. are the great exceptions.)
What can explain this strange behaviour on the continent that was once home to the Enlightenment?
I don’t know, but I once noticed that Europe’s anti-nuclear fervour plots nicely onto the witch-hunts of the 15th to 18th centuries. Of the 40,000 to 60,000 alleged witches hanged or burned, German-speaking Europe alone accounted for almost half, and it’s the heartland of anti-nuclear sentiment today.
Never mind. We can forgive the Europeans for their anti-nuclear foolishness, because in most other respects they lead the world in cutting emissions. And outside Europe, the only noteworthy countries that ban nuclear power are Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and the Philippines.
There are currently new 52 nuclear reactors under construction, most of them in Asia. A new generation of compact modular reactors that can be assembled in factories and cannot melt down will be on the market in less than five years.
The missing piece of the post-fossil-fuel puzzle has been found — and the Europeans can sleep in peace.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is “The Shortest History of War.”
Dyer: ‘Nuclear twilight’ – something else to worry about
As the Omicron variant turns out to be less lethal than its predecessors, premature outbreaks of cheerfulness have been spotted in many quarters.
Author of the article: Gwynne Dyer •
As the Omicron variant turns out to be less lethal than its predecessors, premature outbreaks of cheerfulness have been spotted in many quarters. As I am under a contractual obligation to keep the readers worried, I was at my wit’s end — but then I interviewed Prof. Alan Robock of Rutgers University.
He’s a renowned climate scientist, but recently he led a team of researchers who re-examined the phenomenon of nuclear winter. That’s not really a climate phenomenon. It would be the by-product of a superpower nuclear war, in which the smoke from a thousand burning cities blocks out the sun and leaves the world freezing in the dark for years.
A different team of researchers discovered nuclear winter almost 40 years ago, and it helped to convince the great powers they must never fight a nuclear war.
True, there are now other countries with nuclear weapons. However, everybody assumed the damage would be confined to the combatants’ region. Wrong.
The Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals each amount to about 150 warheads — modest compared to the thousands held by the superpowers, but enough to cause, let’s call it, a nuclear twilight.
India and Pakistan have fought three full-scale wars and half a dozen major skirmishes since their independence. Another is possible, and the risk of escalation to nuclear weapons would be high, for two reasons.
First, most of their nuclear-capable aircraft and missiles are still vulnerable to being destroyed on the ground in a surprise attack. Second, the two countries are so close together that only a brief warning time is available. In these circumstances, a policy of “launch on warning” is the only rational option for both sides.
The first victims would be Pakistani and Indian civilians, because cities will be on the target lists: that’s where the major ports, airfields and critical infrastructure are. Robock’s team calculated those burning cities would loft enough black carbon into the stratosphere to create a shroud of soot over the whole world within a few weeks.
It wouldn’t be the full nuclear winter of superpower war. However, 300 nuclear explosions in the Indian subcontinent would dim the sun enough to drop temperatures and severely damage crop yields in the main food-producing regions of the planet.
The main effects would be a severe drop in the average global temperature and a comparable decline in global food production, with the worst-hit areas being north of latitude 30 degrees north. It’s counter-intuitive because almost all of India and Pakistan are south of that, but that’s the way the climate system works.
The most important breadbaskets of the planet — grain-growing areas that produce a big crop surplus for export — are the United States, Canada, and Europe and all north of 30.
The dimming effects of an Indo-Pak nuclear war in 2025, say, would drop the average global temperature by five degrees Celsius over all the continents, but the key regions of North America and Europe could reach 10 degrees colder. Maximum cooling would be reached in the fourth year after the war, and would gradually return to normal by around Year 15.
Australia, Brazil and Argentina, the southern hemisphere’s breadbaskets, might be able to export some grain, but are not remotely capable of compensating for the huge shortfalls from the northern hemisphere.
Tens, maybe hundreds, of millions would starve in the poorer parts of the North. That would certainly take our minds off our longer-term problem of global heating, but when the effects finally faded, it would be right back to that bigger climate crisis.
And it would be bigger, for carbon dioxide would not have stopped accumulating during the hungry years. The world might find it was returning not to the average global temperature of plus-1.3°C that prevailed when the war, but to a climate hovering on the brink of plus two degrees.
Happy new year.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England.
As the Omicron variant turns out to be less lethal than its predecessors, premature outbreaks of cheerfulness have been spotted in many quarters.
Author of the article: Gwynne Dyer •
Special to Postmedia News
Publishing date: Dec 31, 2021 •
Publishing date: Dec 31, 2021 •
As the Omicron variant turns out to be less lethal than its predecessors, premature outbreaks of cheerfulness have been spotted in many quarters. As I am under a contractual obligation to keep the readers worried, I was at my wit’s end — but then I interviewed Prof. Alan Robock of Rutgers University.
He’s a renowned climate scientist, but recently he led a team of researchers who re-examined the phenomenon of nuclear winter. That’s not really a climate phenomenon. It would be the by-product of a superpower nuclear war, in which the smoke from a thousand burning cities blocks out the sun and leaves the world freezing in the dark for years.
A different team of researchers discovered nuclear winter almost 40 years ago, and it helped to convince the great powers they must never fight a nuclear war.
True, there are now other countries with nuclear weapons. However, everybody assumed the damage would be confined to the combatants’ region. Wrong.
The Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals each amount to about 150 warheads — modest compared to the thousands held by the superpowers, but enough to cause, let’s call it, a nuclear twilight.
India and Pakistan have fought three full-scale wars and half a dozen major skirmishes since their independence. Another is possible, and the risk of escalation to nuclear weapons would be high, for two reasons.
First, most of their nuclear-capable aircraft and missiles are still vulnerable to being destroyed on the ground in a surprise attack. Second, the two countries are so close together that only a brief warning time is available. In these circumstances, a policy of “launch on warning” is the only rational option for both sides.
The first victims would be Pakistani and Indian civilians, because cities will be on the target lists: that’s where the major ports, airfields and critical infrastructure are. Robock’s team calculated those burning cities would loft enough black carbon into the stratosphere to create a shroud of soot over the whole world within a few weeks.
It wouldn’t be the full nuclear winter of superpower war. However, 300 nuclear explosions in the Indian subcontinent would dim the sun enough to drop temperatures and severely damage crop yields in the main food-producing regions of the planet.
The main effects would be a severe drop in the average global temperature and a comparable decline in global food production, with the worst-hit areas being north of latitude 30 degrees north. It’s counter-intuitive because almost all of India and Pakistan are south of that, but that’s the way the climate system works.
The most important breadbaskets of the planet — grain-growing areas that produce a big crop surplus for export — are the United States, Canada, and Europe and all north of 30.
The dimming effects of an Indo-Pak nuclear war in 2025, say, would drop the average global temperature by five degrees Celsius over all the continents, but the key regions of North America and Europe could reach 10 degrees colder. Maximum cooling would be reached in the fourth year after the war, and would gradually return to normal by around Year 15.
Australia, Brazil and Argentina, the southern hemisphere’s breadbaskets, might be able to export some grain, but are not remotely capable of compensating for the huge shortfalls from the northern hemisphere.
Tens, maybe hundreds, of millions would starve in the poorer parts of the North. That would certainly take our minds off our longer-term problem of global heating, but when the effects finally faded, it would be right back to that bigger climate crisis.
And it would be bigger, for carbon dioxide would not have stopped accumulating during the hungry years. The world might find it was returning not to the average global temperature of plus-1.3°C that prevailed when the war, but to a climate hovering on the brink of plus two degrees.
Happy new year.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England.
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