The Elysee wants to launch the construction of new nuclear power plants. Emmanuel Macron said so in his speech on Tuesday, November 9. A decision against the tide of the choice made by Germany after Fukushima in Japan in 2011.
Germany already well on the way to phasing out nuclear power
Ten years after the Japanese disaster, Berlin’s plan to end nuclear power has been fully implemented, on schedule, 2022. Of the 17 existing plants, eleven are already closed, the last six will be out of service by l next year. Three of them, even before the end of this year. This is Grohnde near Hanover in Lower Saxony. The Brokdorf power station very close to the large city of Hamburg on the Elbe estuary. As well as the last Gundremmigen tower in Bavaria.
Next year, final shutdown of another Bavarian reactor, another plant near the Netherlands and the last near the French border, near Alsace, Neckarwestheim north of Stuttgart. A survey conducted this year on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of this phase-out of nuclear power shows that three quarters of Germans welcome this decision. Two thirds of the population questioned agree on the risk of using this energy. There is therefore no debate and there is no question of going back over it. The choice has been made and Germany severely judges its European neighbors to be pro-nuclear.
Half of the Member States of the European Union have never used this energy, this is the case of Austria, Luxembourg or Denmark, and others like Belgium and Spain want also get out of it. Also on the occasion of this tenth anniversary, the German Minister for the Environment, in June, considered nuclear energy to be a thing of the past. It is worried about ever more dilapidated reactors on the continent, the lifespan of which is continually being extended well beyond 40 years, without being able to really modernize them. It is a danger, she said, for all European citizens. The question of producing more nuclear energy should first be opposed to the question of increasing nuclear safety. This necessarily involves the dismantling of the oldest plants, the question of the storage of waste which is a subject for all of humanity and which is a subject in Germany which has still not found a place to do so. No one wants a nuclear dump near their home.
Going out of nuclear power also represents a cost, that of dismantling of course and an ecological cost since it has often been explained that Germany had to compensate for the quantity of electricity that was no longer produced by resorting to old coal-fired power stations. Scientifically and technically, Germany should have left coal first and then nuclear power. Almost everyone agrees on this. Except that there was the accident in Fukushima, that the German public opinion was deeply shocked and politically, it is the decision which was taken. It was therefore necessary to do with the existing, gas, coal, a little renewables already at the time but not enough. This has led Germany to accelerate the energy transition like no other of these neighbors, or almost, to develop wind power first on land and then at sea, which is called “offshore”, and then solar energy. . This turning point took almost 10 years to take place but now Germany can also claim to get out of coal in 2038. Perhaps even before 2030 or 2035 it will be according to the choices of the future coalition government in which we should find environmentalists and that are pushing for a faster exit from this old fossil fuel.
In Japan, nuclear power in the harbor
In Japan, then, the Fukushima trauma is still on everyone’s minds, nuclear energy is still slowing down. There were 54 reactors operational at the time of the Fukushima disaster, and to date only 33 remain, of which only seven are currently in service. About twenty units, including the ten sacked from Fukushima 1 and 2 power plants, will be dismantled. Before the accident of March 2011, nuclear energy represented between a quarter and a third of electricity production in Japan, it is now only 6% and the gap has been filled mainly with coal-fired power plants. or gas and renewable energies. According to the government’s plans, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the share of nuclear energy must rise to around 22% by 2030.
The Japanese government dreams of doing like France and deciding to build new slices. THENHK public television did not fail to report the announcements of French President Emmanuel Macron, explaining that this was aimed at energy independence and compliance with greenhouse gas reduction commitments, two arguments which also apply to the French government. Japan.
In theory, Japan cannot meet its objectives without building new sections. Because the park, which only works at a quarter of its capacity, is very old. Four reactors are over 40 years old, twelve between 30 and 39 years old and only 17 under 29 years old. The government has decided to extend operation under working conditions to 60 years, but taking into account the maintenance periods, the 33 reactors still in use will never be able to all run at the same time.
In fact, three reactors were under construction before the Fukushima disaster and 6 others are planned, but everything is de facto frozen since this disaster and no commissioning date is planned. In addition, most of the facilities that were supposed to enable Japan to master the nuclear cycle, including a fuel reprocessing plant, have never worked and some will even be dismantled without ever having been used.