German nuclear backlash means more coal power: EU

[frigidmagi]

Reuters

The political backlash against nuclear power in Germany means power generation will rely more on coal-fired plants, Europe's Energy Commissioner said on Monday.

"There will be more coal power ... with consequences for CO2 emissions," Guenther Oettinger, a former premier of Baden-Wuerttemberg state where Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives lost power on Sunday, told Reuters in Berlin.

"That will have to be taken into account," he added.

Oettinger's remarks, after a meeting in the German capital to promote the Nabucoo gas pipeline project, came as EU power and carbon emissions rights prices climbed steeply as the poll outcome was interpreted by energy traders as bullish.

Nuclear power is carbon-free and more fossil fuels-based power supply would be needed to make up for shortfalls, should the conservatives shut more reactors in the wake of events in Japan, which German voters made clear they preferred.

Prices of European carbon permits, which polluters must hold under EU environmental laws, climbed well over one percent to above 17 euros and German forward power hit its highest level since late 2008.

Oettinger at the meeting urged Germany to ensure that its increasingly likely moves to exit nuclear power faster than anticipated should be paralleled by efforts in other countries where he said nuclear might stay around for decades.

"Germany must negotiate nuclear safety across Europe as it does not stop at the borders," he said.

Since the Japan crisis when Germany took seven old plants out of action for at least three months, French and Czech nuclear suppliers have been cashing in on the situation, providing more power into Germany.

Other European energy goals which now needed promoting more urgently were pan-European power grids and diversified gas supplies, said Oettinger.

His commission backs Nabucco, a pipeline project to bring Caspian region gas to Europe, bypassing Russia.

He said Germany's gas strategy drawn up by Merkel last autumn had not extolled the merits of gas. "The big four utilities probably talked too much about nuclear," he said.

Stefan Judisch, chief executive of RWE Supply & Trading, agreed on the coal scenario for baseload power mentioned by Oettinger.

Baseload is around-the-clock electricity for basic industrial and household supply where nuclear features strongly.

"If we were to replace (nuclear) baseload with renewable energies and gas, then electricity would become expensive," he told reporters.

Judisch also said that gas prices should pick up in the coming months, having paused after a brief post-Japan rally as it became clear Japan did not immediately have enough gas-fired plants to absorb much more.

*groans*

[Josh]

Fucking thank you Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and their ilk.

This is one of those litmus test issues, basically, and it's why I'm dubious of their efforts in general.

[Cynical Cat]

Fucking coal. Have I mentioned how much I love blind, doctrinal support on any issue?

[Stofsk]

Fucking thank you Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and their ilk.

This is one of those litmus test issues, basically, and it's why I'm dubious of their efforts in general.

Eh. They're stupid but they have their hearts in the right place. The safety and waste management of nuclear will always be an issue.

Nuclear power wouldn't have a lot of the problems it does have if it weren't for companies like TEPCO, which basically demonstrated nuclear power safety remains a huge issue that isn't going away. I say this as a supporter of nuclear power by the way. It's a hell of a lot better than coal and other fossil-fuel burning sources. But it does have an inherent risk to it, and one which is magnified without proper oversight. TEPCO alone has managed to set back any resurgence of nuclear power adoption decades, and likely has killed it in a lot of countries for good (like Germany and more than likely Australia - to name two. Just a few years ago there was talk about seeing whether or not nuclear power should be brought to the table when we had conservatives in power, that was a huge step from the last couple of decades where it's basically been a no-go area for any government since Hawke in the 80s. Now it's politically impossible and will likely remain so).

Plus it's just bad luck Fukushima got hit by a giant fucking earthquake and tsunami.

[Josh]

Eh. They're stupid but they have their hearts in the right place. The safety and waste management of nuclear will always be an issue.

Nuclear power wouldn't have a lot of the problems it does have if it weren't for companies like TEPCO, which basically demonstrated nuclear power safety remains a huge issue that isn't going away. I say this as a supporter of nuclear power by the way. It's a hell of a lot better than coal and other fossil-fuel burning sources. But it does have an inherent risk to it, and one which is magnified without proper oversight. TEPCO alone has managed to set back any resurgence of nuclear power adoption decades, and likely has killed it in a lot of countries for good (like Germany and more than likely Australia - to name two. Just a few years ago there was talk about seeing whether or not nuclear power should be brought to the table when we had conservatives in power, that was a huge step from the last couple of decades where it's basically been a no-go area for any government since Hawke in the 80s. Now it's politically impossible and will likely remain so).

Plus it's just bad luck Fukushima got hit by a giant fucking earthquake and tsunami.

I get where you're coming from, but I don't feel their heart is in the right place on this. The issues of nuclear waste are real, but their scale and scope in comparison to other forms of power generation are totally miniscule. Yes, TEPCO fucked us and deserves to get a hammer dropped on them. I got no beef with that, but they don't get the fraction of attention that other forms of power generation do that rack up huge body counts.

Now I'll admit that I did have a dog in this hunt for a while, so there is some personal animus involved. I watched the Sierra Club engage in legal violations, racism, and all sorts of shenanigans to oppose a legit project.

There is bad rad waste out there, but there's also a ton of toxic chemical waste out there that doesn't garner anything like the attention. Your average landfill is a toxic cesspool where there's all sorts of potential exposures to anything and everything, but your sanitation workers stroll around with a PPE kit of hard hats, vest, and steel toes, and nobody thinks a thing of it. That includes radioactive items that are essentially harmless, but if they were generated in a nuclear facility would have to be disposed of to the tune of over ten bucks a square foot just because the source element was inside a boundary. I'm talking stuff like dinnerware painted with alpha-emitting dose that you can literally shield from with a piece of paper.

There is a lot of validity to nuke industry workers who complain about the environmentalist obsession with ATOMZ to the exclusion of the sea of toxic materials that produce the majority of our power as well as goods that maintain our standard of living.