Germany Drops Nuclear Power

I expect that you have already read that the Government in Germany has decided to get out of nuclear power completely within 10-1/2 years – by the end of 2022. I am proud that my Government (I am a German citizen, resident in Switzerland) has made a firm decision – and an irrevocable decision at that – on such a critical matter. For me personally, I am not strongly and irrationally against nuclear power, but it is obvious that – with only three major failures in 30 years – that nuclear power is not safe to use on this earth. As I wrote on the GEOCOGEN blog, I think that the World was extremely lucky that the disaster at Fukushima happened in Japan. I cannot think of a country more qualified to handle such an emergency as Japan. While I am not wishing bad luck on the Japanese, I think if such an accident had occurred in another country, almost any other country, the results for the World would have been much, much worse.

It is important for national economies that such decisions as the one made by the German Government, and more recently the Swiss Government as well, are essentially irreversible. The reason is that business, and therefore the national economies, need to have firm foundations on which to make major decisions. Investments in new technologies are not something that will bear fruit next week or next month or even next year. A new major power plant, regardless of the source of the energy, will take 7-10 years to complete, including fuel supply, etc., and be placed on the grid. If rules and regulations are changing every 2 or 3 years, no responsible energy supplier will be willing to plan ahead and invest the major amount of money that is necessary for a major power plant.

Another factor that is now in discussion in many different forums is – simply put – how do we replace the electricity that is presently being produced in nuclear power plants within the next 10+ years? The more-or-less automatic answers to date have been “more renewable energy” and “save energy.” I have not yet seen a responsible assessment of exactly how these massive amounts of electricity will be produced and/or saved. But I am open to suggestions! One massive replacement option, from my viewpoint, is the GEOCOGEN Power Plant which is supposed to produce 1 GW (1’000 MW) of elecricity in addition to 3 GW of thermal energy for district heating or perhaps producing an additional 400MW of electricity. The count in Germany, if I am not mistaken, is 8 reactors are already out of service, 6 more that will be stopped by the end of 2021, and a final 3 that will be stopped at the end of 2022. Assuming a round number of 1GW electricity per reactor, and also assuming that the 8 reactors that are already out of service have already had their production replaced somehow, that leaves an additional 9 GW of electricity that must be replaced or saved by the end of 2022.

On the basis of a major power plant, the capital cost should be somewhere around €6’000 million (€6G) each, or about €40-50G over 11 years, probably peaking in 2018-2021. Can we do that? I think it is possible – replacements and major repairs and overhauls for the existing nuclear facilities would most likely have consumed close to the same amount of money, but it may have been planned as expenses (and would be written off against profit for tax reasons) instead of capital. That probably depends on how “creative” the accounting advisors have been.

In any case, it will be a challenge that the German economy has not really faced up to since the post-war reconstruction era. I think it will be an exciting time to be living and working in Germany!