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July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Earth Day ‘23: A Newly Post-Nuclear Germany vs. California’s Reactor Relapse

Germany’s initiative calls out California’s backpedaling

 

By Harvey Wasserman
Reuters reported on December 16, 2022 that renewable sources like these wind turbines now produce over 46% of Germany’s electricity.

This year’s Earth Day marked a massive green energy triumph in Germany that stands in stark contrast to a bitter nuclear challenge in California.

A wide range of estimates puts the two regions at a virtual tie for the world’s fourth and fifth-largest economies.

They also share a leading growth industry — renewable energy — with unprecedented investments in wind, solar, batteries, and efficiency. But when it comes to atomic power, they are headed in very different directions.

On April 15, 2023 Germany claimed a huge global landmark by becoming one of the world’s wealthiest nations to pull the plug on atomic power.

The decision dates back to 2011, when Germany’s powerful Green movement led a national demonstration aiming to shut the seventeen atomic reactors that, at the time, provided around a quarter of the nation’s electricity.

Before the rally took place, four reactor buildings blew up in Fukushima, Japan, sending huge clouds of radioactive fallout into the air and ocean.

Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel — who has a Ph.D. in quantum chemistry — ordered eight reactors immediately shut, and soon announced a plan to shut the remaining nine by December 31, 2022.

This “energiewende,” or “energy transition,” substitutes wind, solar, battery storage, and increased efficiency for nuclear reactors, moving Germany toward full reliance on renewables. Germany, since then, has invested billions in the renewables sector, transitioning whole towns to locally owned, rooftop solar power and corporate wind power pumped in from large turbines in the North Sea.

The shutdown of Germany’s last three reactors was delayed by nearly four months due to natural gas shortages caused by the Russian war in Ukraine.

It was also complicated by a major atomic breakdown in neighboring France. Heavily reliant on nuclear power, France’s more than fifty standard-design reactors succumbed to a wide range of problems, including generic structural flaws and warming rivers too hot to cool their super-heated radioactive cores. In 2022, with more than half its fleet of reactors under repair, France made up for the energy shortfall by importing power from Germany, much of it generated by the burning of coal.

This prompted the nuclear industry to criticize Germany’s plan by pointing to a rise in the country’s CO2 emissions from burning increased quantities of coal, failing to note that much of that power was being exported to France to compensate for its own shuttered reactors.

California, whose economy may now be slightly larger than Germany’s, has taken an opposite route.

Two of its last four reactors — at San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego — were shuttered in 2012, and closed permanently in 2013, after flaws were found in the turbines and other components.

In 2016, a deal was reached to shut the Golden State’s last two reactors, located at Diablo Canyon, nine miles west of San Luis Obispo. In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of protestors were arrested at Diablo Canyon, more than at any other American nuclear reactor.

The 2016 shutdown deal involved another energiewende, based on blueprints to replace Diablo’s power with a huge influx of new wind, solar, battery, and efficiency installations. The agreement was approved by the California state legislature, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the state Public Utilities Commission. It was signed by then-Governor Jerry Brown, then-Lieutenant-Governor Gavin Newsom, and a wide range of local governments, unions, and environmental groups, all of whom assumed the state would thus be nuke-free once Unit Two was shut in 2025 — the date its original forty-year license would expire.

But along the way, the state experienced two close calls with partial blackouts. During both incidents, Newsom, now the governor, asked consumers to dial back their energy use. Ironically, independent battery capacity — mostly controlled by individual owners — helped the state stay lit.

But Newsom reversed course and now argues that California must keep Diablo open. Infuriating the national safe energy movement, Newsom rammed through the legislature a $1.4 billion midnight bailout for PG&E, to be funded by all of the state’s consumers, including many who live hundreds of miles from the reactors, and receive no energy from it at all.

The Biden Administration also kicked in $1.1 billion, money that safe energy advocates angrily argue would be far better spent on renewables.

In 2019, a statewide petition signed by Hollywood’s Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen, Lily Tomlin, Eric Roberts, and some 2,500 other Californians demanded that Newsom facilitate an independent inspection. Nearing forty years of age, both Diablo reactors suffer a wide range of structural and age-related defects.

They are also surrounded by at least a dozen known earthquake faults, sitting just forty-five miles from the infamous San Andreas fault. Former NRC site inspector Michael Peck, who was stationed at Diablo for five years, has warned it might not survive a major earthquake, for which its owner, PG&E, has little or no private insurance. The state has never made public any plans to evacuate Los Angeles or other heavily populated areas in the event of an accident.

Newsom has also supported moves by state regulators to severely slash compensation paid by utilities to solar panel owners who feed their excess energy into the grid. While 1,500 workers are stationed at Diablo, some 70,000 work in the state’s solar industry, which angrily charges that Newsom’s pro-nuclear, anti-green positions are crippling the state’s top job creator.

Indeed, the irony of these twin economies heading in opposite energy directions is hard to ignore. In the 1970s, much of America’s early anti-nuclear movement was inspired by mass demonstrations led by German Greens (with the slogan “Atomkraft? Nein, danke!”). Both movements succeeded in massively moving their communities toward a renewable future.

But at this critical moment, Germany appears to be moving beyond nuclear power, while California clings to a hugely controversial technology it had once planned to transcend.

— Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman, the author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience With Atomic Energy and other books, is a senior editor and columnist for FreePress.org

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Germany Shutters Remaining Reactors

By John LaForge

Germany has switched off the last of its nuclear power reactors for good.

The world’s press made much of “Europe’s largest economy” finally going nuclear-free, a renunciation of poison power that Germany has been planning for since 2011.

The country will replace the puny 6% of electricity provided by its last three plutonium/MOX-fueled behemoths with solar and wind generators, geothermal, conservation, and other renewables that already provide 46.9% of the country’s electricity.

A Greenpeace activist in Berlin on April 15, 2023. Photo Credit: ODD ANDERSEN / AFP

“The position of the German government is clear: nuclear power is not green. Nor is it sustainable,” Steffi Lemke, Germany’s Federal Minister for the Environment and Consumer Protection and a Green Party member, told CNN. Minister Lemke told France’s Le Monde, “The risks of nuclear power are ultimately unmanageable,” after making an April visit to Japan’s Fukushima disaster zone.

Earlier, the 1986 reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl in Ukraine created a plume of radioactive fallout that doused large parts of Germany, and threw nuclear power in the doghouse for millions.

The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that smashed and flooded the Fukushima-Daiichi complex in Japan resulted in three simultaneous reactor meltdowns and the largest radiation release to the environment — still ongoing — in history. For most in Germany, Fukushima was confirmation “that assurances that a nuclear accident of a large scale can’t happen are not credible,” Miranda Schreurs, professor of environment and climate policy at the Technical University of Munich, told CNN.

Emsland nuclear facility in Lower Saxony, Lingen, and two others in Germany closed on April 15. Photo Credit: Sina Schuldt/picture-alliance/dpa/AP

Three days after the earthquake and tsunami, Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel called Fukushima an “inconceivable catastrophe for Japan” and a “turning point” which it was, at least for Germany.

Plenty of other European countries are rejecting nuclear, CNN reported recently. Denmark passed a resolution in the 1980s not to build new reactors. Switzerland voted in 2017 to phase out nuclear. Italy closed its last reactors in 1990, and Austria’s one reactor site has never operated. Lucky for them.

“Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power is a historic event and an overdue step in energy terms,” Simone Peter, president of the German Renewable Energy Federation, told CNN. “It is high time that we leave the nuclear age behind and consistently organize the renewable age.”

— Le Monde and CNN, April 15, 2023; Reuters, Dec 16, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

May 2, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

International Waste Shipments Halted

By Matthew Jahnke

International non-proliferation advocacy played a significant role in the decision to halt the shipment of radioactive waste from a German port to the notorious nuclear material refinement facility Savannah River Site in South Carolina. According to SRS Watch, German authorities confirmed “the [shipment of] spent fuel has indeed been terminated.” The approximately one million graphite pebbles, six cm in diameter, are stored in two locations in the German state of North Rhine-Westfalia. Most of the graphite pebbles contain highly enriched uranium supplied by the U.S. and used in two experimental reactors in northwest Germany which ceased operations in the 1980’s. Other radioactive isotopes present in the pellets include tritium, potassium-95, and carbon-14. SRS researches repurposing uranium for nuclear weapons and has used the threat of weaponization as justification for accepting the contaminated fuel, lest it pass into other hands. The illegal shipment would have spread radioactive contamination. U.S. anti-nuclear groups, as well as German groups including STOP Westcastor and .ausgestrahlt, successfully protested the waste transfer alongside German politicians in the Green and Left parties. The U.S. Department of Energy failed to conduct a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement and kept the public in the dark on the proposal. — SRS Watch Press Release, January 2023

 

Silence on German spent fuel import plan remains a black eye on a derelict DOE (srswatch.org)

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Nuclear Weapons, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

January 22, 2023 by Nukewatch 2 Comments

Cracks Appearing in Wall of US Opposition to Nuclear Ban Treaty

Australia Moves to Consider Signing, Ratifying TPNW

By John LaForge

At the United Nations on October 5, Australia boldly ended five years of opposition to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reports. Rather than voting against the annual UN General Assembly resolution urging countries to join the treaty — as it did under its former government — Australia “abstained” for the first time.

The plucky reversal by a military ally of the United States, the leader of minority opposition to the landmark treaty, was applauded by campaigners and by other governments. Gem Romuld, with ICAN Australia, said in a statement, “The majority of nations recognize that ‘nuclear deterrence’ is a dangerous theory that only perpetuates the nuclear threat and legitimizes the forever existence of nuclear weapons, an unacceptable prospect.”

New Zealand’s minister for disarmament and arms control, Phil Twyford, said his government welcomed “Australia’s approach” to the treaty. Indonesia’s ambassador to Australia, Siswo Pramono, said the Aussie’s positive shift on the treaty would “give encouragement to others who believe that we are on the right path” in seeking abolition. Indonesia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Ireland were among the United Nations members co-sponsoring this year’s UN resolution pressing additional ratifications of the TPNW.

In 2018, Anthony Albanese, Australia’s Labor leader and new prime minister, initiated a resolution committing the party to sign and ratify the TPNW. As he introduced the motion, Albanese said, “Nuclear weapons are the most destructive, inhumane, and indiscriminate weapons ever created. Today we have an opportunity to take a step towards their elimination.” The Labor party reaffirmed its position in 2021, and Albanese’s “abstain” vote is merely abiding by the party’s platform. A formal cabinet-level decision to support and join the TPNW is pending, according to the Guardian.

Australian Lawyers for Human Rights

The treaty, which prohibits the development, testing, stockpiling, use, and threatened use of nuclear weapons, now has 91 signatories, 68 formal ratifications; it entered into force last year.

The hostile US reaction to Australia’s action on October 7 was as swift as it was laughable. The US Embassy in Australia’s capitol Canberra announced that the vote to abstain would “obstruct” Australia’s reliance on US nuclear forces. However, most Australians view nuclear weapons as a threat to the world and want them abolished. The country’s Medical Association for Prevention of War tweeted, “The majority of the Australian people support our country joining the TPNW. Our government should act accordingly.” An Ipsos poll taken in March 2022 found 76% of Australians supported signing and ratifying the treaty, the Guardian reported.

Both the Trump and Biden Administrations have urged US allies to reject the 2017 treaty, and both of them continued Obama’s $1.7 trillion program, launched in 2014, to rebuild the country’s entire nuclear weapons complex and replace all the major nuclear weapons systems — including submarines, bombers, land-based missiles, and forward-deployed H-bombs in Europe — with new versions. The plan’s unfathomable nearly $2 trillion cost — a proposed 30-year-long avalanche of weapons industry contracts — continues in the face of increasingly severe global crises of climate chaos, ocean-level rise, war-displaced populations, droughts, wildfires, flooding, deforestation, desertification, famine, and water shortages.

When in office, Trump publicly scolded countries that had joined the treaty, preposterously telling them to withdraw their ratifications. For his part, President Biden reportedly urged Germany and Japan to avoid, even as “observers,” the First Meeting of States Parties to the treaty, which took place in Vienna last June. Several US allies snubbed President Biden’s directive and attended the meeting, including Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Australia, and NATO members Belgium, Germany, and The Netherlands. Opposition by the United States, as one of only nine nuclear powers in the world, represents a small global minority, ICAN’s Romuld told the Guardian.

– Julia Conley, Common Dreams, Nov. 11, 2022; The Guardian, Nov. 8, 2022; The Guardian, Oct. 28, 2022

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter

January 18, 2023 by Nukewatch 4 Comments

John’s Jail Updates – RELEASED!

John LaForge at an anti-war rally during work release 3 days before his final release from prison for nuclear weapons actions in Germany.

Nukewatch’s John LaForge was released from Glasmoor Prison in Hamburg, Germany on February 28, 2023 as planned after completing his 50-day sentence for his part in actions aimed at removing US nuclear weapons from Germany. Learn more about the campaign to remove US nuclear weapons from Germany HERE.

Read John’s letter after being released HERE.


John LaForge entering Billwerder prison in Germany on January 10, 2023 (Photo by Marion Küpker)
Read John’s first letter from jail January 15.
February 22, 2023

John was able to celebrate his birthday in prison, with a balloon and all. He shared herring with his cellmates and received many birthday wishes in the mail which were much appreciated.

February 14, 2023

John is doing well. He has 2 weeks left of incarceration. You can still send mail since it has only been taking 7-8 days to reach him from the U.S., especially since his birthday will be coming up February 22.  He is still being released on weekends making it all more tolerable.


January 30, 2023

Today the German group Nonviolent Action Abolish Nuclear Weapons sent an open letter to the German Constitutional Court (signed by 77 people) to demand the acceptance of John’s constitutional complaint to review the illegality under international law of the US nuclear bombs stationed in Germany.

Read the press release.

Read the letter of support from retired judge Bernd Hahnfeld, board member of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms


January 28, 2023

John emailed the Nukewatch office during his first full 32-hour ‘work release’ day outside the Glasmoor prison camp. He went to the Cotton Club for a wonderful Jazz concert with friends.

He wrote to make sure we were doing our work spell-checking and proofreading. He mentioned that a friend had recently come across a letter he had written February 14, 1983, from solitary confinement in Leavenworth Federal Correctional Institution! He wrote, “after 40 years of this, I don’t have anything to prove any more. It’s like my friend Jeff always says: ‘You have to start young if you’re going to stick it out.'”

John is able to make daily phone calls out within Germany, so we know he is doing well. From now on every weekend John will be allowed to leave every Friday at 3pm and has to be back in prison on Sunday afternoon. His release date is February 28 so you still have time to write him a letter at the address above.

 

January 24, 2023

At the Nukewatch office we received a poem for John from Sharon Cody a Nukewatch supporter.

I hope you like this little spoof-
A tribute to my favorite goof:
Enjoy your 50-day vacation
But keep alive your dedication
To the cause we both desire-
That Earth avoids a full-on fire
Caused by dropping bombs galore,
Thus ending life forevermore.

January 22, 2023

Hooray! John LaForge was given an unexpected 10-hour furlough today from the JVA Glasmoor Prison and was able to participate in the Nuclear Ban Treaty festivities at the Hamburg City Hall.

Out of Jail for a Day Celebrating the 2nd Anniversary of the Nuclear Ban Treaty!
Photo by Hinrich Schultze

January 21, 2023

John welcomed his first visitors in prison today, his wife Marion Küpker (also spokewoman for the campaign “Büchel is everywhere! Nuclear-weapons free now!”) and brother-in-law Gerrit Küpker, where they found him in good condition. He will sit in the prison a little over one month longer. He is happily receiving about 15 letters each day and looks forward to receiving more mail.

A voice recording of John was played at the European Regional Meeting of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (watch for a future upload of the video). In the recording he praised the passing of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons(TPNW) and condemned the international law breaking by the United States and Germany in their nuclear-sharing agreement that violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Nuremburg Principles, and the TPNW.

January 18, 2023

John already received very early mailings from Canada and the US. He is in good condition and shares a cell with two men at the new prison where he has a shower room that is always available. They also have their own refrigerator and can make their own tea and coffee throughout the day. His nickname in prison is “Greenpeace.”

January 17, 2023

Today John was moved to a halfway prison “Glasmoor.” His new address is: John LaForge, JVA Glasmoor, Am Glasmoor 99, 22852 Norderstedt, Germany. He will also receive the mail going to the former prison, but this always takes extra time.

He was able to make a phone call out today. In this new prison he finally received all his books and vitamin and mineral supplements that he took in with his personal luggage.

January 10, 2023

A vigil with 24 people accompanied John to prison today. He was also allowed to call out of the prison a few hours after entering to say he was fine and that he will be sent in a halfway prison next week, which is in northern Hamburg and much nicer: big garden and free movement in the garden until midnight…

Filed Under: Direct Action, Nuclear Weapons, On The Bright Side, US Bombs Out of Germany

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