Ditching Nuclear Power

Germany dropped a bomb late last month, sending further shockwaves through a nuclear power industry still reeling from the Japanese disaster in March.

The European economic powerhouse joined Italy as the second major industrialized nation in the world to abandon nuclear power as a source of its energy.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Germany would end its reliance on nuclear power by 2022. Merkel said the nation would shut down its 17 nuclear plants and instead rely upon alternative energy sources such as solar, wind and hydroelectric power.

Merkel said it was hoped Germany’s actions would set an example for other nations to follow.

“We believe that we can show those countries who decide to abandon nuclear power – or not to start using it – how it is possible to achieve growth, creating jobs and economic prosperity while shifting the energy supply toward renewable energies,” Merkel said in an Associated Press story.

Imagine going from a heavily-nuclear-powered economy to one based on renewable energy sources in just 11 years. But the move seems to have strong support from the German people, who are used to seeing things happen quickly. After all, it was just 22 years ago that Germany was still a divided nation — half free, half communist.

And only 45 years prior to that Germany was a monstrous military dictatorship, threatening to consume the entire world under the madness of Adolf Hitler. After World War II, a disarmed and free West Germany gradually became a model of peace and tolerance – a reputation it continues today after the reunification of its eastern and western portions in 1990.

Now Germany is asserting a new leadership on the world stage, declaring that an industrialized nation can thrive without the help of nuclear power, which has revealed its darker side in accidents at Three Mile Island in the U.S., Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union and most recently at the Fukushima nuclear facility in Japan, after the tidal wave in March that knocked out its power and put Japan on the edge of a nuclear meltdown.

According to the Associated Press story, Germans have strongly opposed nuclear power before and especially since the Chernobyl accident in 1986, which sent clouds of radioactivity over Germany and much of Europe.

Merkel, who had been a proponent of nuclear power in Germany, said the Japanese disaster revealed that nation’s “helplessness” when responding to a nuclear emergency and changed her mind about its future.

Merkel said Germany will focus on natural gas as a backup to wind, solar and hydro power. She acknowledged moving away from nuclear power would be a challenge but one that her nation is ready to accept and lead the way into a nonnuclear future.

What an amazing development! In a time when more and more countries have been moving toward nuclear as a source of “clean” energy, Germany is going in a new direction – one away from nuclear power’s inherent danger, poisonous byproducts, lack of safe places to store waste and its potential link to a terrorist bomb.

Using nuclear power has always been like trying to hold onto a poisonous snake that could bite you at any moment. And Germany is choosing to put down the snake.
     
It’s going to be interesting to watch.

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