Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Steffen Kotré, December 16, 2021, Nuclear Power Plants

 German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/9, pp. 423-424.

Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

Due to the world’s dumbest energy policy, we are meanwhile at five to twelve. The energy suppliers sound the alarm. EON chief Birnbaum prognosticates that an electricity shortfall can lead to shutting down entire cities and that, with the high energy prices, industry will be hunted out of our country. And Amprion, the transmission network operator, to name only one, expresses itself similarly. They all speak of considerable danger for our electricity supply due to the present situation. The electricity grid has now already reached its limit of performance, there are no more reserves.

Timon Gremmels (SPD): It is rather the AfD which has reached its limit                                   of performance!

Please now put an end, ladies and gentlemen, to the lie of a lifetime, that we would in the mid-term get along without coal and nuclear power. Since your answer to the electricity gap – gas power plants and electricity imports – is a fata morgana. Additional gas power plants are not in sight; no one will build them. Where then shall the gas actually come from if the Federal government wants to prevent Nord Stream 2, if our naïve Foreign Minister, with her clumsiness and with her childish megalomania

Timon Gremmels (SPD): For God’s sake!

shoots and acts against Russia and our gas supply?

Timon Gremmels (SPD): Have you something of substance to offer or                                   only insults?

She thereby calls to mind the greats, like perhaps Kaiser Wilhelm II, rather than a modern diplomat, ladies and gentlemen.

Germany needs an energy foreign policy and not an energy prevention policy.

            Marianne Schieder (SPD): And reasonable parliamentarians!

On another point: There will plainly not be able to be electricity imports in times of peak load because precisely then foreign countries themselves also need the electricity. The answer is therefore at hand: Further operation of remunerative nuclear power plants.

Ever more voices express themselves for this; for example, the chief of Volkswagen or the ex-chief of BASF, to name here only a few. The entire world is setting up nearly CO2-free nuclear energy. The Netherlands have certainly perceived their failures and again take up nuclear energy. A great number of nuclear power plants are in planning and in construction worldwide. Even the so-called World Climate Council proceeds thereon that climate goals without nuclear energy are just not to be attained.

Yes, many people have reservations in regards nuclear energy, fear of a total meltdown; yet this fear is unfounded. Modern reactor concepts exclude such catastrophes, ladies and gentlemen.

            Harald Ebner (Greens): Reality is just not your strong point!

In part, a self-sustained chain reaction is generally no longer necessary. Research reactors of this kind are long since under construction, yet unfortunately not in allegedly technology-oriented Germany.

The waste storage problem will be solved with transmutation, remaining material will be re-utilized. Present day radioactive times of 100,000 years diminish: Tomorrow 300 years, the day after perhaps indeed no longer. That is scientific, technological progress, ladies and gentlemen, which you want to prevent.

The left-greens want to diminish the CO2 emission. We want a good value, secure supply of electricity. Na, dann, let us nevertheless come together.

            Julia Verlinden (Greens): , we do not want to work together with you!

With modern, nearly CO2-free nuclear energy both are plainly possible. That would be an intelligent, a reconciling and a fully responsible policy, ladies and gentlemen.

Yet you, those of you who want to prevent nuclear energy – so to say, as an eternal strife – will not be able to prevent the renaissance of safe nuclear energy. What you clearly hinder is our prosperity. You are the world champions in destroying it. We will thus need to subsequently purchase technology in the area of nuclear energy later and again more expensively.

Yet let it be clear to you: We will not be able to do without nuclear energy. You can turn upside down. It is no longer to be stopped.

            Harald Ebner (Greens): You have nothing to do with reality!

 

[trans: tem]