That’s the headline at the online Die Welt. This according to former German Green Party member Rezzo Schlauch.
And when a Green party member says that, you know it’s going to be really costly – especially for the German state of Baden Württemberg, where the Greens swept into power in last Sunday’s state elections and are set to rapidly shut down the state’s nuclear power.
This is going to be fun to watch, but will be painful for the taxpayers.
Rezzo Schlauch was a German Parliamentarian from from 1994 to 2005, and Green Party Faction Chief from 1998 to 2002 in the Bundestag (Federal Parliament). In the year 2000 Gerhard Schroeder’s SPD/Green coalition government pushed through a law that mandated the winding down of nuclear power.
After Fukushima, everybody wants to shut down the nuclear power plants rapidly, especially the southern German state of Baden Württemberg. But the hitch is that the Baden Württemberg owns a 45% stake of energy giant EnBW. Shutting down EnBW’s nuclear power plants is going to hurt the state – big time. Why is it these things never get communicated before all these fuzzy warm green save-the-planet schemes get put into action?
According Die Welt:
In an interview with the internet portal Entermagazin Schlauch said: ‘When you are a shareholder of a company that is up to 50% dependent on nuclear power, and the nuclear power is radically stopped, which is the goal, and must be the goal – then you are destroying capital’.”
Economics learned the hard way. Baden Württemberg ‘s state elections of last Sunday will put a Green Party governor in the capital of Stuttgart – Winfried Kretschmann, who is adamant about shutting down all the nuclear power plants as quickly as possible. Baden Württemberg is Germany’s largest producer of nuclear power.
Schlauch says that the state now faces huge challenges. They have to make up the huge atomic power shortfall quickly, and that is going to be expensive. No problem though. Where there is a state, there are also taxpayers. Schlauch warned:
Of course this is going to cost money that is going to have to be paid by the taxpayer.”
Really? I always thought the sun didn’t send power bills and that money was blowing in the wind. Looks like lots of money is going to get blown. Dear citizens, you voted for this – now live with it.
The future of BWR’s and PWR’s is finished. No doubt about it; they just don’t fail gracefully. Big chance for Thorium, whether it’s the pellet HTR’s or the Oakridge liquid fuel designs…
The other positive aspect of Fukushima is that we can now watch the green movement splinter along the fault line of “We must reduce CO2” against “The world is becoming a radiating hell”.
The Greens will wreck BW financially; big chance for Lower Saxony (with its powerhouse VW) to run rings around BW. There’s a chance that the Greens will demolish BW so fast that they fall out of favor with the electorate come the next federal election.
There’s one expensive adventure the Greens are already committed to; they must stop Stuttgart 21 (otherwise their radicalized fan base would run amuck), a long planned rebuild of the Stuttgart central railway station. Deutsche Bahn is about to sue for damages of 1.5 billion Euros over this, as all the contracts are in force.
I do own stock in E-On… not in EnBW… so i smugly watch the demolition from the sidelines…
B-W will become Germany’s New South Wales. A basket-case economy. The infrastructure falls apart because public monies are frittered away on useless schemes of friends of the “powerful” while highways devolve to a quilt-work of bodgy patches on pot-holes.
In the recent NSW elections, the left were almost wiped off the map and the Greens didn’t get a single seat in Parliament.
BTW: In addition to Lower Saxony, the “brown fields” of the South-East are continuing to embrace new industries. They can always run an extension cord over the border for some Czech nuclear power.
This is not correct. There is one Green (out of 93) in the new NSW Legislative Assembly (the lower house): Jamie PARKER in Balmain, with 50.1% of the vote, and there will be two Greens (our of 21) in the new NSW Legislative Council (the upper house). Green vote was around 10%, which is, if I am not mistaken, a significant drop from previous elections.
Sorry, the Green vote increased from 9% to 11%. Nevertheless, given the collapse of the pro-Labor vote, means that most people who normally would vote Labor refused to support the Greens. The carbon tax introduced at the federal level played an important role in the collapse of NSW Labor; people just don’t want it.
Yes, you’re correct. One “snuck in” while I wasn’t looking.
Japanese mayor disgusted with Government crises response appeals for help to the entire world
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/japanese-mayor-disgusted-governments-crisis-response-appeals-help-entire-world
Having cut its throat be shutting off functioning, safe nuclear power plants, Germany is now a substantial nett importer of electricity according to ENTSO data graphed at http://www.wilfriedheck.de/ (Scroll down to “Mit dem Abschalten seiner Kernkraftwerke”)
And it that’s not enough, Germans are pushing for the Swiss to shut down their safe nuclearpower plants as well.
http://www.20min.ch/news/schweiz/story/Deutsche-fordern–Schweiz-muss-AKW-abschalten-26075863