cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/20792066

The video shows the demolition of the two cooling towers of the Grundremmingen nuclear power plant in Bavaria / Germany on October 25.

The plant had been switched off four years before. Like the other German plants, it would have required a mayor overhaul to accomplish for modern safety requirements, and it was not deemed economical to do so.

There was a final decision to phase out nuclear power in 2011, after the tsunami catastrophe in Japan, which caused three of the four plants in Fukushim to melt down and explode, and severe further problems with a larger cooling storage for hot spent fuel rods.

That final decision for phase-out was taken by Chancellor Angela Merkel after big losses in elections. Her conservative party CDU was about to lose power. Merkel had reversed an earlier decision for a nuclear phase–out and could not sustain it politically.

And that earlier decision had been made by the former Green-Social Democrat coalition which had been following a renewable energy strategy. Experts had been working on that transition for years and the majority expert consensus was that continuing nuclear energy would not only be expensive, but that it also in the long run would hamper this renewable transition.

Returning to the topic of Fukushima and Merkel’s political emergency stop - Why had this event such a big impact on the public opinion in Germany?

Well, there had been a fierce discussion around nuclear power since the mid-eighties. That discussion had a broadness, technical depth and persaviveness that is hard to imagine in today’s world of tweets and video shorts. One literally could not open a newspaper or even a boy scout’s magazine without it having a drawing of a nuclear power plant, how it was supposed to work, and what were possible weak points.

One constant argument of the pro-nuclear side was THAT NUCLEAR PLANTS CANNOT BLOW UP AND A MELT-DOWN CAN NEVER HAPPEN, BECAUSE OF THEIR TIGHT TECHNICAL PRECAUTIONS. And that major nuclear accidents WILL NOT HAPPEN MORE OFTEN THAN ONCE IN TEN THOUSAND YEARS.

It turned out that this was not true.

Germany also had experienced the consequences of nuclear fallout in 1984 after the Chernobyl plant had exploded. Kids were not allowed to play outside for weeks. Agricultural produce was disposed of and some stuff disapeared and showed up as far away as South America. Newspapers printed Becquerel numbers of food for months, and foraging mushrooms was discouraged for many years in parts of Southern Germany. And all that because as little as a few hundred grams of Caesium isotope from Chernobyl.

Interestingly, at the end of the eighties a technical report came out which made a bit of waves. It was titled, I think, “Risikostudie Biblis B Phase II” or so, and was concerned with what would happen in a loss-of-cooling accident in a pressurized reactor. The conclusion was that the steel vessel would be able to contain the radiactive material only for a very short time, and then would burst, with much of the radioactive inventory shattered outside. By the way, that loss-of-cooling scenario was almost what happened in the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, which, as we know today, also led to a partial melt-down. America was probably lucky that its president at that this time happened to be a real expert on nuclear safety.

Another part of the discussion originated from the fact that early proponents of nuclear power, like the Bavarian politican Franz-Josef Strauß were also fans of nuclear arms. But the majority of Germans were opposed to nuclear arms, and these decades of discussion made it really clear that Germany - unlike perhaps the US - could never survive a nuclear war, because its small size and dense population. After the end of the cold war it became clear that more than 160 missiles had been targeting Berlin alone, and each with a destructive force far larger than the single bomb that marked humanity’s darkest day in Hiroshima.

There were also concerns about the effect of low-dose radiation on kids. In the Merkel years, it had emerged that there was an unusual cluster of child leukemia cases around a plant in Krümmel in Northern Germany. But its operators denied that anything dangerous radiation escape had happened. Statistics were done about risk of leukemia for children living near any plant in Germany, and a clearly elevated risk was found - which cannot be explained by the dominant scientific theory on the effects of radiation. Later, such clusters were also found near the plants in Hamm-Uentrop and AVR Jülich - two experimental Thorium plants.

Another thread of the nuclear discussion was safe storage of spent nuclear fuel rods and waste after use. Nobody wanted to have that stuff in his neighborhood - especially not the home country of Franz-Josef Strauss, Bavaria. There was the idea to store the waste in old salt mines. There were fierce protests of the Green movement as well as local farmers in Gorleben which flared up with every new transport. Receiving the nuclear waste was so unpopular that the federated state did not want to shoulder more bills for the huge police activities.

Public trust was not exactly fostered by what happened in another salt mine, Asse II. It was an experimental store for weakly radioactive stuff. The thinking was that the salt stone which had been there for millions of years would keep the content isolated from groundwater. Long story short, the mine was under water very soon and the whole experiment turned out to be a highly irresponsible mess.

The difficulty with the hot fuel rod store in Fukushima, which was short of melting down as well, was perhaps the final nail in the coffin. It had no concrete containment and nobody had apparently realized how dangerous it was. German plants had the same problem.