This Saturday, the last three nuclear power plants in Germany will be shut down. This marks the end of the era of commercial, peaceful use of nuclear power in Germany after 62 years.
The decision to finally phase out nuclear power was made in the then grand coalition in the spring of 2011 after a major meltdown had occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as a result of a seaquake and a tsunami. On March 17, 2011, one week after the disaster, Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) said: “The hitherto undisputed safety of German nuclear power plants is based on compliance with the Atomic Energy Act, the statutory ordinances based on the Atomic Energy Act and the permits issued. The events in Japan have shown, however, that events can also occur beyond the scenarios considered so far.”
Originally, according to the Atomic Energy Act amended in 2011, the Emsland, Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim 2 nuclear power plants were only supposed to run until the end of 2022. But against the background of the Ukraine war, its energy policy consequences and the uncertain situation of the power supply in Germany before last winter, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) had spoken the word of power that the three nuclear power plants should remain on the grid until April 15, 2023 . Most recently, they accounted for 6.4 percent of the electricity generated in Germany. At the peak of the 20th and early 21st centuries, the share was around a third.
Ministry of Atomic Affairs
62 years ago, in June 1961, the experimental reactor in Kahl, Bavaria, was the first German nuclear power plant to feed electricity into the German grid after three and a half years of construction. The boiling water reactor had an electrical output of 15 megawatts (MW). Before that, the federal government under Konrad Adenauer had set up the Ministry for Atomic Affairs in October 1955, and Franz Josef Strauss (CSU) became Minister, who moved to the Ministry of Defense just a year later. In 1962, the Ministry for Atomic Questions became part of the Federal Ministry for Scientific Research. Also in 1955, Willi Stoph became the first minister for nuclear issues in the GDR.
The “nuclear dilemma” of the time in view of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War II and the Cold War finds its expression in the 1959 Godesberg Program of the SPD. In it it says, warned by the destructive wars and barbarities of his recent past, man fears his own future, “because at any moment at any point in the world the chaos of self-destruction can be unleashed by human error. But that is also the hope of this time that man in the atomic age can make his life easier, free from sorrows and create prosperity for all, if he uses his daily increasing power over the forces of nature only for peaceful purposes”.
Nuclear research centers were installed in Hamburg, Jülich, Geesthacht, Berlin and Karlsruhe. At the end of October 1957, the research reactor of the Technical University of Munich was the first German reactor to go into operation in Garching. The egg-shaped building was included in the city coat of arms in 1967. The Atomic Energy Act, to which Merkel referred in March 2011, was promulgated in 1959, the legal basis for the construction and operation of nuclear power plants. This is the first time liability issues that can arise from the peaceful use of nuclear energy have been regulated worldwide. Clear legislation should pave the way for nuclear power plants.
Various concepts were initially pursued for this in the Federal Republic: the heavy water-cooled pressurized water reactor in the multi-purpose research reactor in Karlsruhe, a pebble bed reactor in Jülich, a pressure tube reactor in Niederaichbach, a superheated steam reactor in Karlstein and a sodium-cooled breeder reactor, the “fast breeder” SNR-300 in Kalkar. The THTR-300 pebble bed reactor in Hamm was in commercial operation for two years, and the Kalkar fast breeder reactor was completed in 1985 after a project period of around twelve years, but it never went into operation.
Technology import from the USA
Instead of the concepts that had been discarded for safety reasons, the US light water reactor technology was adopted in Germany, for example at the Kahl, Lingen, Gundremmingen A and Obrigheim sites. The technology was further developed in Germany and was used in Stade from 1972, for example. In the early 1970s, Biblis A was the world’s first plant with an output of 1300 MW.
In the GDR, nuclear power plants were operated at the Rheinsberg and Greifswald sites. These were so-called water-water-energy reactors (WWER), reactor types of Soviet design. In Rheinsberg, a WWER-70 with an output of 62 MW fed into the grid from 1966, followed in 1972 by a first-generation pressurized water reactor (PWR) in Greifswald. A total of four VWER 440 units were operated here. All systems in the former GDR were taken off the grid in 1990 due to safety concerns.
Unlike in France, for example, nuclear power plants were not built in series in Germany. Experiences from the construction and operation of the existing plants could thus be transferred to the design of the subsequent power plants. The Society for Plant and Reactor Safety (GRS) explains that not only has the design been continuously improved, but problems that are currently showing up in French plants have also been avoided. Due to the series construction, errors in certain components affect several systems at the same time.
Anti-Atom-Proteste
For the operation of nuclear power plants, GRS emphasizes that it has also observed events that are important in terms of safety abroad. After the Chernobyl reactor catastrophe in April 1986, filtered venting was developed, which enabled filtered pressure relief of the containment in an emergency. Recombiners were also developed, with which hydrogen is oxidized to water with the surrounding oxygen. This could prevent hydrogen explosions in accidents with cooling failure, as occurred in Fukushima in March 2011.
The worst case scenario at Chernobyl led to major protests against nuclear power in the Federal Republic of Germany, but also in the GDR, as the BUND describes in retrospect. In the mid-1980s, the protests that had started in the previous years continued to grow in the West. In Wyhl, Baden-Württemberg, protests by local winegrowers and farmers in the mid-1970s ensured that the construction project for a nuclear power plant there was abandoned. In 1979, 100,000 people demonstrated against the planned reprocessing plant and nuclear waste storage facility in Gorleben in Lower Saxony. In the same year, a severe accident involving a partial core meltdown occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, USA. In 1981, around 100,000 people also demonstrated at the construction site of the Brokdorf nuclear power plant in Schleswig-Holstein.
BUND writes in its review that 500 nuclear facilities and nuclear power plants should have been built in Germany, according to plans in the 1970s. Ultimately, just over a hundred nuclear facilities were built in this country. Even after the last three nuclear power plants have been shut down, there will still be reactors in Germany for research purposes. The switched off nuclear power plants still have to be dismantled, which will take decades. There will continue to be a fuel element factory in Lingen in Emsland. It is still unclear where the remains of the nuclear facilities are to be disposed of. The search for a repository will probably not be completed until around 2050.
risk society
“The residual risk of nuclear energy can only be accepted by someone who is convinced that it cannot reasonably be expected to occur,” said the Chancellor in March 2011. “But if it does occur, the consequences will be so devastating and far-reaching, both in terms of space and time, that they far outweigh the risks of any other energy source.” This seems like a possible answer to what the sociologist Ulrich Beck had said in a newspaper interview a few days earlier: “The concept of risk means that we make past experiences the basis and thus the horizon of expectation for future catastrophes. However, this assumption in particular is being questioned because we now know that we are threatened by catastrophes that we have not yet experienced and that we primarily shouldn’t find out.”
Beck’s book “Risk Society”, which was much discussed at the time, was published in 1986 almost at the same time as the Chernobyl reactor catastrophe. Back then, Franz Josef Strauss was able to dismiss the worst case scenario in Ukraine as a “communist catastrophe,” Beck said 25 years later. After Fukushima, the fiction is gone, the West can feel safe. “We are dealing with consequences of the successes of modernity and its technical imagination. They present us with possible catastrophes that exceed our conceptual and institutional comprehension. Nevertheless, we are forced to make decisions,” said Beck.
Countries like Great Britain, France and now Poland have decided differently than Germany. In view of the challenges posed by climate change and the desire to become independent of energy sources from Russia, they rely on nuclear power. Japan, scene of the most recent nuclear disaster, only paused a few years. There, the lifetimes of the nuclear power plants are to be extended, and the building of new nuclear power plants is also being considered there. Meanwhile, the actual dismantling of the reactors damaged in Fukushima in March 2011 has not yet started.
(anw)
