Today in Germany, nuclear power is barely significant. For starters, electricity only represents 20 percent of the energy consumed. The remaining 80 percent is drawn from oil and gas for heating houses and driving cars. In addition, only 33 percent of the electricity consumed is produced by means of nuclear power. The largest share, 63 percent, results from burning coal, lignite and gas and the remaining 4 percent from renewable energy sources. As a result, only about 7 percent of today's total energy consumption in Germany is supplied by nuclear power.
Electricity is essential for lighting, cooling, and running machines and
household equipments. The two other
fundamental outlets for energy producers, heating and transportation, are areas
where the use of electricity is extremely limited or non-existent.
CO2 emissions, the scarcity of natural resources, and the cost of oil
and gas are three problems that can be solved by the use of electricity
produced in an environmentally-friendly manner. The use of electricity should
thus be extended and used to heat houses and
run motorized equipments such as cars as well. This is what the German Party
"Alliance "90/The Greens" is rightly demanding. The electricity driven heat
pump for heating and the electromotor with highly developed batteries for cars
show it is possible and it is going to be more and
more economic.
The development toward an electricity economy such as described above,
however, would involve a heavy increase in demand for electricity, from 20%
today to 50% or more in the future.
The following questions arise:
- Can the separation of CO2 from gaseous emissions during the burning process be achieved in a cost-effective manner and can this energy be stored safely and permanently?
- Will we succeed in making renewable energy processes economical, i.e. no longer needed to subsidize them?
- Will we successfully solve the problem of storing electrical energy?
- Will we succeed in building nuclear power plants that operate continuously and economically and use the energy produced by nuclear fusion?
- Will we succeed in devising catastrophe-proof nuclear power plants where the storage of spent fuel is easy based on nuclear fission, in order to make nuclear power acceptable?
The first four questions are still open. The fifth question, on the
other hand, has already been answered with a resounding YES. However, many of
our contemporaries, especially in Germany, have not come to terms with this
yet. The high-temperature gas cooled reactor with spherical fuel elements
(pebbles) provides an answer to the fifth question. Internationally, this type of reactor is referred to as the PBMR (Pebble
Bed Modular Reactor).
The high-temperature pebble bed reactor is a German invention, a device
which was first created in the 1950s, with the integration of know-how from the
United States and the United Kingdom and some additional research pursued in
Italy, Sweden and Switzerland and mainly financed by EURATOM. The industrial
development of this future-oriented technology, directed towards market launch
with two pilot power plants in operation, was discontinued in Germany at the
end of the 1980s. One could say it was "killed" by political decisions, mainly
those of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
It was very successfully continued, and is still going on today, in
China, South Africa, the US, Japan, Russia, South Korea and Germany's
neighboring countries, the Netherlands and France. The high-temperature reactor
is recognized as the most promising option in the international project GENERATION IV, a project which analyzes future
nuclear power use and was commissioned by the US
Department of Energy (DOE) in Washington. All of the countries that use
nuclear energy are participating in this project apart from Germany. So the mentioned homepage of that project is published in
all important languages, but not in German. Germany is also the only G8
country that has not affirmed the necessity to use nuclear energy.
It is imperative that the Germans, as a high technology society, rethink
their attitude toward nuclear energy and with this also toward the German high-temperature pebble bed reactor, a
versatile future-oriented system, developed mainly in Germany,
but cancelled, and thankfully already in
China in operation and in the phase of engineering of further plants.
The prolongation of the running time of the nuclear
power plants in operation in Germany is only the very first and very small step
in the right direction.
Dr.-Ing. Heinrich Bonnenberg is the chairman of the
supervisory board of Energiewerke Nord, Lubmin, Germany.
Related materials from the Atlantic Community:
- David Francis: Energy Insecurity in the EU
- Michaele Schreyer and Ralf Fuecks: The Next Big Project for the EU is Energy
- Thomas Speckmann: Buying Ourselves Into Poverty
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August 7, 2008
Richard Wales, MEI Network, Silver Contributor (55)
Even if we were able to completely automate the operation of nuclear plants to eliminate human error and human ill will there is the problem of the handling of nuclear materials. There is no monitoring of nuclear material transportation routes. There is no design for the long term storage of nuclear waste. France dumps nuclear waste in the ocean and hopes that everything will turn out well. The U.S. dumps waste on the reservations of Native Americans. And everyone knows about the two sets of books kept by the Jucca Mountain “scientists”. None of this is very reassuring to any of the general public who care to look.
The whole nuclear push has nothing to do with “clean energy” needs. If it did, then there why the huge effort by the oil and energy companies to stifle any and all efforts to develop solar, tidal wind and other forms of energy? The push for nuclear energy has to do with control, that’s why laws were passed to allow corporations to own nuclear material. My goodness, what if we developed a distributed system that the energy companies couldn’t put a meter on?
So now the business interests are pushing nuclear power which their brothers in the insurance industry won’t even insure; no, that’s left to the public. It’s interesting that some of these shy insurance companies are partially owned by the same companies who are pushing nuclear power. They don’t even think it’s safe enough to insure their own boondoggle.
I’d like to see a solid plan for nuclear waste disposal, but there is no such thing. The truth is the waste is stockpiled for short term storage and then the mess is left for the public to clean up. Hunters Point in San Francisco is a good example. Hunters point is an old shipyard that was used for storage and handling of nuclear material during World War ll. The more the site is cleaned up, the worse it gets and of course the expense is all on the backs of the public. In this case a company known as Lennar is standing around for a handout. Lennar expects the public to cleanup the parcels and then make a gift of the land to lennar for development – which is another story.
I’m asking to see the plan. I’m asking to see exactly how industry plans to store nuclear waste for a minimum of half a million years. Ten thousand? Ok, how about a thousand? Five hundred? It’s a ridiculous assertion to claim that long term storage of nuclear materials is a solved problem. Every bit of evidence in existence makes manifest the exact opposite.