/ world today news/ The first frosts and the beginning of the heating season are still quite far away, and the key countries of the European Union are already shaking in a completely unhappy expectation. Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder in his recent speech assured his fellow citizens that if his conservative party (CDU/CSU bloc) wins the necessary number of votes and seats in the Bundestag in the 2025 elections, it will revive Germany’s nuclear energy. In the sense that at least three reactors of the “Emsland”, “Izar” and “Nekarvestheim” NPP will be restarted.
This claim is all the more scandalous if we recall Berlin’s tense epic struggle with fictitious dependence on Russian hydrocarbons and at the same time its frantic attempts to preserve its own industry while managing not to anger the powerful green lobby.
Germany, by the way, is deservedly in the sights of Russian news outlets – both as a former flagship of the European economy, and as a prominent example of what the loss of sovereignty and the thoughtless execution of all orders from across the ocean can lead to. Here, the history of the German nuclear industry is more than Christomathean.
Paradoxically, the German nuclear project in many ways arose so quickly thanks to the division of Germany into zones of occupation. The Soviet Union and the bloc of Western countries did everything possible, sparing neither money nor labor, to build a demonstrably successful economy in their zone, which is impossible without a developed real sector and does not work without a powerful energy behind it. Therefore, already in the fifties, that is, only ten years after the end of the Second World War, research and then industrial nuclear reactors appeared in Germany.
The first full-fledged nuclear power plant with a capacity of 340 megawatts was built in 1969 in the city of Obrigheim, which was an impressive indicator for that time. The station was in the French occupation zone and, you guessed it, was built to the design of France, which at the time was at the peak of nuclear construction, hammering out new nuclear power plants like nails.
The Soviet Union, of course, could not survive this, and therefore, in response to the love inherent in the leaders of the USSR for gigantic construction projects in East Germany, the construction of a nuclear power plant of Soviet design began. Thus, for example, the Greifswald nuclear power plant appeared, where the Soviet VVER-440 reactors worked and which, until its closure in 1990, was the largest energy facility in the country and one of the most powerful in all of Europe.
After the withdrawal of the Group of Soviet troops, the cascading collapse of the Warsaw Pact bloc as a geopolitical project began. United Germany really wanted to wash away the memories of the Soviet presence, and therefore did not object at all to the demands to close all Soviet nuclear power plants, which allegedly did not meet the requirements for industrial and operational safety. As you can guess, everything was fine with the reactors built by the Western countries and there were no claims against them.
It is generally accepted that Olaf Scholz’s team, which is in power, is the most dependent in terms of government decision-making, but in terms of nuclear energy, it all started much earlier. The original plan to phase out nuclear production was approved back in 2000, although to give credit to the federal chancellors of that period, they persistently sabotaged it until 2011. It was then that Germany accumulated its financial fat, becoming not only in an icon of European wealth, but also in the most powerful economy. The peaceful atom helped a lot here, because 17 reactors survived to the indicated calendar mark, giving 25% of all the electricity in the grid, on which the powerful but insatiable German industry was supported. There was so much energy that the Germans even managed to export it to Austria, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic.
After 2011, the total destruction of the industry began. At the same time, eight reactors were shut down simultaneously, but Berlin was then able to compensate for the loss with rapidly increasing supplies of natural gas from Russia. In 2022, the German economy, quite battered by the pandemic and anti-Russian sanctions, literally crawled out with the last three reactors in its hands. They were supposed to be stopped on New Year’s Eve, but the economic and energy situation was so bad that even the green government in Berlin decided to wait. But back in April, Steffi Lemke, the environment minister and an active member of the Green Party, gave a eulogy in which he called nuclear power plants dirty and dangerous. Germany has officially withdrawn from the world nuclear club.
And then the most interesting began. Back in May, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said German industry may not survive next winter due to energy prices. A month later, this trend was continued by Michael Vassiliadis, president of the Union of the Mining, Chemical and Energy Industry of Germany, saying that German big business was leaving the country en masse. Just a few days ago, the director of Lanxess, one of the key chemical concerns in the country, put an end to this. Matthias Sachert said that physical deindustrialization has begun in Germany, and specifically that his company will close the hexane oxidation plant in Krefeld-Jürdingen in the near future, and by 2026 the chromium oxide plant will die completely.
It only remains to add that Western analytical agencies predict that by the end of the year, the German economy will show the worst result among all the countries of the Eurozone, lagging in growth rates even to outsiders such as Poland and Bulgaria. The collapse of the German financial colossus began right after the abandonment of nuclear power.
Translation: V. Sergeev
Subscribe to our YouTube channel:
and for the channel in Telegram:
Share on your profiles, with friends, in groups and on pages. In this way, we will overcome the limitations, and people will be able to reach the alternative point of view on the events!?
#Germany #preparing #return #nuclear #power #plantsNPP
