Can Germany Nuke General Winter? Will It?
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
For at least the second time (that I know of) since the start of the "hot" phase of Putin's War, Germany is "reconsidering" its foolish decision to shutter its nuclear plants. This comes about after Russia used a transparently false declaration of force majeure to excuse itself from honoring its agreements to supply natural gas to Germany, which it started breaking a month ago.
John Sexton of Hot Air notes a peculiar mirror-image excuse by Green apologists in Germany for why nuclear wasn't adopted the first time:
[T]he pushback to this view is that Germany's problem isn't a lack of electricity it's a lack of heat. Even if you kept the nuclear plants operating all winter, unless every German home has electric space heaters to replace the gas they usually rely on for heat, it's not going to matter.
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| Image modified from work by Louis Bombled of La Petite Journal, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain due to publication date. |
Greens are at best catastrophically unserious people.
Sexton is not unaware of the irony:
In the end it's almost a mirror image of Russia claiming there's a technical problem when really there's a political problem using a technical problem as a fig leaf.Indeed. On top of that, while an unprofitable infrastructure would have to be built to support electric cars, space heaters -- the technology to alleviate the gas deficit -- can be readily supplied by even Germany's semicapitalist economy.
Anyone with a grain of sense can tell that Russia -- with the aid and comfort of the environmental movement -- is using Germany's energy dependence as a weapon, diabolically reassigning General Winter from his erstwhile defensive duties.
Germany may have time to step back from the brink of a winter catastrophe, but I am no expert on resurrecting mothballed or retired power plants. Either way, Germany will learn that Green energy policy is deadly. Whether that is a lesson learned just in time or too late at at the expense of German lives remains to be seen.
I hope they change their minds and that they still have time to act.
-- CAV
3 comments:
Yo, Gus, it's worth bearing in mind any time you think antinukes might get some sense (I used to in my more callow youthful days) that their leaders are on the whole like this, and indeed self-selected for that. The article has the same nonsense that's been debunked for decades (not that you'd ever learn that from our worthless press establishment), combined with the latest flavors of the rainbow-colored snowcone of eco-unreason.
Yo, Gus, pursuant to the preceding, I should add that there was one slightly less musty old antinuke point in the screed I linked to, the supposed connection of German nuclear power plants with childhood leukemia. I first ran across it back around 2010. At the time it was clear that the connection might well have been spurious (and was largely due to one single leukemia cluster in the vicinity of one plant, Krümmel). It has continued to be investigated, natch, and there's a good recent paper on the association. The limitations the authors point out in the Discussion section are pretty stark, and as they themselves point out, there's no obvious causal link because the added radiation is so very much smaller than both the natural background levels and the variations in natural background levels, and there are no recorded leaks. (Interestingly and perhaps relevant, perhaps not, they note, "The authors’ analyses show that living in a rural area is associated with a higher risk of leukemia, but this has no decisive influence on the main conclusion of the study.")
However, we're talking about what might well be the Green homeland, and the Greens hold an essentially magical worldview in which science, reason, humanity, and technology are bad and nature without conceptual faculties, reason, and human impact is good. After reading their crap for decades, I have no qualms in saying that nothing they say can be trusted--it must be checked, and in every case you find something like this.
I would add that I suspect that many "progressives" who claim to be seeing the light on nuclear are doings so -- safe in the knowledge that it has been pretty well crippled by regulations that amount to criminalization and that make it artificially expensive -- but not wanting to appear to be as anti-energy as they actaully are.
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