Expensive electricity and bankruptcies: Does Germany need to go back to nuclear power?

[NNadir]

From Euronews: Expensive electricity and bankruptcies: Does Germany need to go back to nuclear power?

By Zara Riffler & Donogh McCabe 5/23/25.

Germany's new minister of economy wants more natural gas power stations and electricity subsidies. But is that enough to boost the economy?

Once a world market leader, today, Germany is considered the "sick man of Europe", as the country remains mired in recession for the third year in a row.

Economic experts predict zero growth for this year, as the figures continue to show a dramatic decline. Last year, almost 200,000 companies shut their doors, according to a study by Creditreform, the highest figure since 2011.

The numbers will continue to plummet in 2025. A new high in insolvencies was reported in April. According to the Leibniz Institute, 1,626 company insolvencies were registered — 21% more than in April 2024 — exceeding even the figures from the 2008 financial crisis.

The high electricity prices in particular are causing problems for industry. Some steel giants now have to temporarily shut down their production on a single day to protect their company from financial damage...

For now the answer is fossil fuels, but don't worry, be happy, they'll burn natural gas, someday, even if for now it's coal.

Reiche also wants new gas-fired power plants as a solution to the problem — but the price of gas is also higher than ever. Does the minister have the right recipe to save the German economy?

Stelter explains that Minister Reiche is taking the right step.

"When the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, we need a secure supply. Now that we have switched off nuclear power plants and we also want to switch off coal, the only thing left is gas-fired power plants," he said. Only with renewable energies, "it just won't work...

"

Let's be clear: The "renewables will save us" movement was never, ever, not for a second, concerned with the collapse of the planetary atmosphere. It was always about attacking reliable and clean sustainable energy, nuclear energy.

There's an argument that it won't work, gas and renewables, any better than the current situation of coal and so called "renewabes" is working:

"Anyone who believes that renewable energy in combination with gas-fired power plants will lead to cheap electricity is living in a dream world," Stelter told Euronews.

"...Many people only ever look at the costs of solar cells and wind turbines. Only when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining is it favourable. In reality, we have to include the system costs such as storage and batteries - then renewable energies are the most expensive," he explained...

Really? No kidding? You don't say...

[Vogon_Glory]

1. I'd long suspected that the renewables movement was an outgrowth

of the nuclear disarmament movement. The idealistic dears assumed that each and every fuel rod could be converted into weapons-grade plutonium by some evil axis or by terrorists in someone’s garage using mail-order machine tools.

I admit that I was a liberal arts major with poor math skills. But even twenty-odd years ago, I was concerned about coal strip mining, mountaintop removal, and acid rain. I also suspected that renewables were being pushed by hucksters the same ways snake-oil salesmen sold quack cures out of their medicine wagons.

[hunter]

2. I was recruited into the anti-nuclear movement by Helen Caldicott herself.

As I recall this was before Three Mile Island.

The anti-nuclear groups I was affiliated with ( not her "Physicians for Social Responsibility" ) got into quite a bit of mischief.

Here's a "C-class" wikipedia article on Helen Caldicott:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Caldicott

It's difficult to find neutral sources.

Some of the personality conflicts between leaders of the anti-nuclear movement then were completely

I'm no longer an antinuclear activist. Over the years I've described some of my transition to nuclear advocate here on DU.

I enjoyed your quip about "the idealistic dears."

[Vogon_Glory]

3. I'm one of those people who prefers to believe my lying eyes.

Case in point: photos of unremidiated strip-mined terrain (for coal) versus Pacific Island sites for nuclear weapons tests. While I am opposed to using and testing nuclear weapons, I can’t help but contrast the strip-mined desolation with the. Roaring jungles of those Pacific islands and the fact that so many of the ships sunk during operation crossroads are now (2010 onwards) splendid diving sites overrun with colorful reef fish undermine a lot of the death-lands forever-and-ever hysteria ginned up by anti-nuclear activists.

[NNadir]

4. Over the years, I have come to believe, that the antinuclear movement - to which I confess when I was young, stupid...

...and uneducated, I once subscribed - like many other things, hydrogen fantasies, battery fantasies, reactionary so called "renewable energy" fantasies were nothing more than sophisticated efforts to entrench the use of fossil fuels, at which all of the above have been spectacularly successful. We are now more dependent on fossil fuels than we have ever been, and certainly the bullshit about energy storage being "green" is making things worse, faster, since the energy "stored" is generally primary energy generated from fossil fuels with exergy destruction.

I have convinced myself, through oodles of study, that nuclear energy is the only sustainable form of primary energy that is capable at providing clean carbon free energy at a scale of many hundreds of Exajoules per year.

This said, I do believe that there needs to be serious efforts to minimize the risks of nuclear weapons, particularly because in modern times, insane people, notably the orange thing infecting the White House, Vlad the Puppeteer, and possibly others can gain control over these weapons.

It is technically feasible to minimize the risk, the probability of nuclear war by using nuclear energy, a subtle but widely discussed technology involving the control of plutonium isotopic vectors. However, nuclear war cannot be made impossible, because uranium exists. Humanity has no technology capable of consuming all of the Earth's uranium.

The first nuclear weapon ever used in war did not require access to nuclear reactors. It was made from naturally occurring materials by the use of powerful electromagnets. The first nuclear weapon detonated, the famous Trinity test, did require the use of a nuclear reactor, one operated in a way that would not be economically viable in a power reactor scenario. It was a very challenging device to build, and the people who built it felt it needed to be tested to prove that it would work. The first nuclear weapon used in war, the ²³⁵U bomb used on Hiroshima was far simpler to build (in that time), and the people who built it were so confident that it would work that they did not even bother to test it. They delivered it to a city untested, and it worked exactly as designed.

I explored these issues of proliferation minimization in a guest post on another website, over a decade ago, this post: On Plutonium, Nuclear War, and Nuclear Peace

It is notable that the only path to nuclear weapons disarmament in a technical sense, goes through nuclear reactors. Tiny progress toward such a goal was achieved by Al Gore as VP, working with the Yeltsin era Russian government. For years, the fuel for American nuclear reactors contained ²³⁵U from dismantled Soviet era nuclear weapons, weapons once aimed at American heads, diluted with so called "depleted uranium."

The path to eliminating much of the need for energy mining of all types, goes through depleted uranium in fast plutonium (or neptunium or americium) fueled reactors, along with mine tailings from lanthanide ores, which contain significant quantities of thorium. We have mined enough uranium and thorium, via transmutation into ²³³U and ²³⁸U into mixed plutonium isotopes, to supply all of humanities energy needs for centuries.

Fear of radiation was whipped up to ban nuclear testing, which was a positive result of employing questionable science, the "LNT" hypothesis that may well have involved scientific fraud, the absurd belief that there is "no safe level of radiation." That is clearly nonsense, since life is impossible without mildly radioactive potassium, and all living things also contain the congener rubidium, which is also radioactive. In the case of radiation, as in many other non-nuclear chemical cases, the dose makes the poison.

There is some evidence, still unproved to my mind, but actively studied in the era of advanced molecular biology, that small amounts of radiation may actually be beneficial via a mechanism of stimulating certain cellular repair and immunological mechanisms. Obviously genetic damage takes place spontaneously or by chemical insults; cancer was a known disease throughout human history well before nuclear reactions, and even chemical reactions or the periodic table, were even dreamed about. This area is called "radiation hormesis." Again, I am not educated enough to assert that hormesis is positively true, but it is a serious avenue of research of which I've done some monitoring.

Thanks for your comment.