{"id":2806,"date":"2012-02-11T17:18:38","date_gmt":"2012-02-11T22:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=2806"},"modified":"2012-02-15T22:44:36","modified_gmt":"2012-02-16T03:44:36","slug":"germans-reconsidering-nuclear-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2012\/02\/11\/germany\/germans-reconsidering-nuclear-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Germans Reconsidering Nuclear Power?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t think so!\u00a0 Less than a century after H. L. Mencken<\/a> wrote that the Uplift was a purely American phenomenon, there may now be even more of the pathologically pious in Germany per capita than in the U.S.\u00a0 They all think they’re far smarter than the average human being, they all see a savior of mankind when they look in the mirror, and almost all of them are cocksure that nuclear power is one of the Evils they need to save us from.\u00a0 Just last November tens of thousands of them turned out in force <\/a>to block the progress of a spent fuel castor from France to the German radioactive waste storage site at Gorleben.\u00a0 The affair turned into a regular Uplift feeding frenzy, complete with pitched battles between the police and the peaceful protesters, who were armed with clubs and pyrotechnics, tearing up of railroad tracks, etc.\u00a0 It’s no wonder the German government finally threw in the towel and announced the country would shut down its nuclear power plants.<\/p>\n

At least the decision took the wind out of their sails for a while.\u00a0 As Malcolm Muggeridge<\/a> once said, “nothing fails like success” for the Saviors of Mankind.\u00a0 Success tends to leave them high and dry.\u00a0 At best they have to go to the trouble of finding another holy cause to fight for.\u00a0 At worst, as in the aftermath of their fine victory in establishing a Worker’s Paradise in Russia, they’re all shot.<\/p>\n

It would seem the “bitter dregs of success” were evident in a recent article <\/a>on the website of the\u00a0German news magazine, Der Spiegel, entitled “Electricity is Becoming Scarce in Germany.”\u00a0 Der Spiegel has always been in the van of the pack of baying anti-nuclear hounds in Germany, so I was somewhat surprised by the somber byline, which reads as follows:<\/p>\n

The nuclear power shutdown has been a burden for Germany’s electric power suppliers in any case.\u00a0 Now the cold wave is making matters worse.\u00a0 The net operators have already had to fall back on emergency reserves for the second time this winter, and buy additional electricity from\u00a0Austria.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’ s quite an admission coming from the Der Spiegel, where anti-nuclear polemics are usually the order of the day.\u00a0 Even the\u00a0resolutely Green Washington Post editorialized <\/a>against the German shutdown, noting, among other things,<\/p>\n

THE INTERNATIONAL Energy Agency reported<\/a> on Monday that global energy-related carbon emissions last year were the highest ever, and that the world is far off track if it wants to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, after which the results could be very dangerous.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So what does Germany\u2019s government decide to do? Shut down terawatts of low-carbon electric capacity in the middle of Europe. Bowing to misguided political pressure from Germany\u2019s Green Party, Chancellor Angela Merkel endorsed a plan to close all of the country\u2019s nuclear power plants<\/a> by 2022.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

European financial analysts (estimate) that Germany\u2019s move will result in about 400 million tons of extra carbon emissions <\/a>by 2020, as the country relies more on fossil fuels. Nor is Donald Tusk, Poland\u2019s prime minister, who ominously announced that Germany has put coal-fired power \u201cback on the agenda\u201d \u2014 good for his coal-rich nation directly to Germany\u2019s east but terrible for the environment and public health.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and so on.\u00a0 Not exactly a glowing endorsement of the German Greens optimistic plans to replace nuclear with solar in a cloudy country that gets cold in the winter and lies on the wrong side of the 50th parallel of latitude.\u00a0 Poland’s prime minister is right to worry about being downwind of Germany.\u00a0 In spite of the cheery assurances of the Greens, she\u00a0currently plans to build 26 new coal-fired power plants.\u00a0 It’s funny how environmental zealots forget all about the terrible threat of global warming if its a question of opposing nuclear power.\u00a0 But Poland has a lot more to worry about than Germany’s carbon footprint.<\/p>\n

It’s estimated that 25,000 people die <\/a>from breathing coal particulates in the U.S. alone every year.\u00a0 The\u00a0per capita death rate\u00a0in Poland, directly downwind from the German plants, will likely be significantly higher.\u00a0 Then there’s the radiation problem.\u00a0 That’s right, coal\u00a0typically contains several parts per million of radioactive uranium and thorium<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0 A good-sized plant will release 5 tons of uranium and 10 tons of thorium into the environment each year.\u00a0 Estimated releases in 1982\u00a0 from worldwide combustion of 2800\u00a0million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.\u00a0 China currently burns that much coal by herself.\u00a0 The radiation from uranium and thorium is primarily in the form of alpha particles, or helium nuclei.\u00a0 Such radiation typically has a very short range in matter, because it slows down\u00a0quickly and then dumps all of its remaining energy in a very limited distance, the so-called Bragg peak.\u00a0 On the one hand that means that a piece of paper is enough to stop most alpha radiation.\u00a0 On the other it means that if you breath it in, the\u00a0radiation will be slammed to a stop\u00a0in your sensitive lung tissue, dealing tremendous damage in the process.\u00a0\u00a0Have you ever heard of people dying of lung cancer who never smoked a day in their lives?\u00a0 If you’re looking for a reason, look no further.<\/p>\n

No matter.\u00a0 As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy.\u00a0 One million is a statistic.\u00a0 Germany’s\u00a0Greens will continue to ignore such dry statistics,\u00a0and they will continue to strike noble poses as they fight the nuclear\u00a0demon, forgetting all about global warming in the process.\u00a0 For them, the pose is everything, and the reality nothing.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t think so!\u00a0 Less than a century after H. L. Mencken wrote that the Uplift was a purely American phenomenon, there may now be even more of the pathologically pious in Germany per capita than in the U.S.\u00a0 They all think they’re far smarter than the average human being, they all see a savior … Continue reading “Germans Reconsidering Nuclear Power?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[37,43,96,20,52,23,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-environment","category-europe","category-germany","category-global-warming","category-nuclear-energy","category-world-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-Jg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2806"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2811,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806\/revisions\/2811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}