Translate
GPA Store: Featured Products
Showing posts with label electricity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label electricity. Show all posts
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Friday, June 3, 2011
Why is the United States so obsessed with nuclear power?
![]() |
| Wiki Image |
Arne Jungjohann
Grist
This is part one in a series on the United States and nuclear power. Read parts twoand three.
After the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima, as a German living in the U.S., I often get asked these days: What's going on in Germany with the shutdown of nuclear power plants -- is that all mass hysteria? There are good reasons why Germany is moving away so quickly from nuclear power. Certainly, fear is a factor. However, this angst in the face of a nuclear catastrophe has a rational core. Fukushima provides enough grounds to take every single nuclear power plant on the face of the Earth off-line. Regardless of whether the cause is an earthquake, a tsunami, a flood, a plane crash, a terrorist attack, or simple human error, failure of the emergency power system leads to uncontrollable consequences.
There is also an energy reality in Germany that differs from the United States. In Germany, the economic success of the renewable energy economy is visible between the North Sea and the Alps. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs have been created for steel workers, carpenters, technicians, architects, bankers, and farmers. Foreign companies have heavily invested in manufacturing plants for wind turbines, biogas systems, and solar panels in Germany. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is viewed as a constraint on this development. Nuclear and renewables are not perceived as allies, but as conflicting and competing energy sources. One is centralized, capital-intensive, ponderous, outdated, and anti-democratic, whereas the other is flexible, smart, labor-intensive, and open for community participation. Thus, in recent polls an overwhelming 85 percent of Germans favor a nuclear phaseout as fast as possible or at most within 10 years. To them it seems simply outdated to stick with a 1950s technology like nuclear that is risky, dirty, and blocking new investments in better technologies. It is like to holding on to your rotary phone instead of switching to a cell phone.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
