Power Engineering - Germany's plan to phase out nuclear power facing renewed criticism

12 January 2007 - Worries about gas supplies from Russia and a desire to cut greenhouse-gas emissions have fueled criticism of Germany's plans to shut down its 17 electricity-generating nuclear power plants beginning as early as next year.

The nuclear energy debate resonates in environment-conscious Europe, and the question has taken on redoubled urgency this week as parts of the continent saw a three-day cutoff in Russian natural gas because of a price dispute between Moscow and Belarus, which has key transit pipelines.

Critics see Germany's nuclear phase-out plan as a relic of a bygone time, before the EU started pressing for lower emissions thought to cause global warming and before Russia spurred doubts about its reliability as Europe's key energy supplier.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose election campaign program called the phase-out "disastrous," sparked debate when she said this week that Germany needed to consider the consquences of the shutdown deal, reached in 2000 when the anti-nuclear Greens were part of Germany's governing coalition.

"It remains a fact that the phase-out has consequences and that we must not have a ban on thinking," said Merkel. She added, "especially those who say we don't want nuclear energy must take part in finding answers."

Merkel says her government will stick to the deal, and a reversal would be difficult: The shutdown is sacred to her partners, the left-of-centre Social Democrats who were in power in 2000, and it is in their coalition agreement.

But conservative politicians and business lobbyists - bedrocks of support for Merkel's Christian Democrats - have been increasingly vocal in their campaign for a re-think.

Even with green-minded Germans the issue may cut both ways: nuclear accidents could cause catastrophic harm to the environment, but other forms of energy release pollution and greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, believed to contribute to global warming.

For now, Germany generates about a third of its electricity from nuclear power, which doesn't produce greenhouse gases. If nuclear power is phased out, the burden would likely be taken up mainly by coal or natural gas fired plants, which do. Electricity-generating windmills, which dot the German countryside, produce only 4.3 per cent of its power.

Merkel's economics minister, Michael Glos of the conservative, nuclear-friendly Christian Social Union, argued Germany can't meet the demands of the Kyoto treaty against global warming "if we turn our backs on nuclear power" - at a time when the EU is pushing Germany to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

"A longer operating life for nuclear plants will help us reach the carbon dioxide reduction goals, whether from Kyoto or elsewhere, much more easily," said Wolfgang Heller, an energy expert at Federation of German Industry.

The spread of such sentiments is contributing to what appears to be a pan-European movement to reconsider moves away from nuclear energy.

France gets 79 percent of its power from 59 nuclear reactors, while other countries have re-thought plans to get out of nuclear energy. Parliament in the Netherlands granted a 20-year extension to the country's one remaining reactor at Borssele, built in 1973, instead of letting it close in 2013; Sweden's government says it will keep existing reactors in use despite a 1980 referendum; Finland is building a fifth reactor.

Lower Saxony governor Christian Wulff has suggested closing no plants before the next national election in 2009.

The agreement was the fruit of Germany's anti-nuclear movement, motivated by fears about accidents after the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine and by the difficulty of disposing of nuclear waste, which sparks annual protests at Germany's Gorleben disposal site.

It guaranteed big utility companies a 32-year lifespan for their plants, meaning older ones built in the 1970s would start closing in the next several years. The last plant would shut down in 2021.

Now German companies are pushing to keep two of the country's oldest nuclear power plants in business longer - using provisions of the pact.

RWE AG has applied to the Environment Ministry for permission to transfer to its 1970s-vintage Biblis A plant, Germany's oldest, some of the operating life permitted to another company plant, instead of closing it as it as early as 2008.

EnBW has asked permission to do the same thing to keep another older plant at Neckarwestheim I going until 2017, instead of shutting it down in 2009, by giving it some of the life of its Neckarwestheim II plant.

Approval may be a long shot. Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel, a Social Democrat, has openly questioned the idea of transferring capacity from newer to older reactors.

EnBW argues it's more efficient to move two plants' staff to one site. And the company's statement on the issue notes another issue that to date has been somewhat lost in the fray: hundreds of jobs are at stake.

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