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2012 68: 10Bulletin of the Atomic ScientistsAlexander Glaser

From Brokdorf to Fukushima: The long journey to nuclear phase-out

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Bulletinof theAtomicScientists

IT IS 5 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

®

Feature

From Brokdorf to Fukushima:The long journey to nuclearphase-out

Alexander Glaser

AbstractShortly after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, GermanyÕs government startedpreparing legislation that would close the countryÕs last nuclear power plant by 2022. But this wasnÕt an entirelynew development: Germany had been planning to leave nuclear energy behind for decades, and to understandits nuclear phase-out requires a close look at the past. Several projects and events mark the beginnings of theGerman anti-nuclear power movement: Among them are the huge protests over the Brokdorf reactor, whichbegan in 1976 and led to civil war-like confrontations with police, and the controversy over the Kalkar fast-neutron reactor in the mid-1970s. Because of these and subsequent developmentsÑincluding the 1986Chernobyl accidentÑby the 1990s, no one in German political life seriously entertained the idea of new reactorconstruction. This tacit policy consensus led to energy forecasts and scenarios that focused on energy effi-ciency, demand reduction, and renewable energy sources. By the time of the Fukushima accidents, many ofthese new energy priorities had already begun to be implemented and to show effect. Replacing nuclear powerin Germany with other energy sources on an accelerated schedule is likely to come with a price tag, but, at thesame time, GermanyÕs nuclear phase-out could provide a proof-of-concept, demonstrating the political andtechnical feasibility of abandoning a controversial high-risk technology. GermanyÕs nuclear phase-out, suc-cessful or not, may well become a game changer for nuclear energy worldwide.

KeywordsBrokdorf reactor, fast breeder reactor, fast neutron reactor, Kalkar, nuclear energy, nuclear exit, nuclearphase-out

Within days of the Fukushimanuclear accidents in March2011, it became clear that

GermanyÕs response to the disasterwould be determined and drastic; thenationÕs eight oldest reactors weretaken offline immediately,1 and thegovernment began to prepare new

legislation that would ultimately man-date closing the last nuclear powerplant by 2022. Public support for thephase-out reached almost 90 percent.Outside Germany, however, the decisionto phase out nuclear power on this accel-erated scheduleÑor on any schedule forthat matterÑhas often been depicted as

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reckless and irresponsible.2 At a timewhen climate change has risen to thetop of the political and public debate,how could a country that committeditself to nuclear power early onÑbuild-ing a large fleet of power reactors thatprovided 20 percent of the countryÕselectricity demandÑdare to walk awayfrom one of its low-carbon energysources?

Indeed, replacing nuclear power withother energy sources will require thephase-in of renewable energy sourcesat a faster rate than previously antici-pated, and the accelerated transition islikely to come with a price tag. At thesame time, however, GermanyÕs nuclearphase-out could provide a proof-of-con-cept, demonstrating the political andtechnical feasibility of abandoning acontroversial high-risk technology andtherefore creating a blueprint forothers to follow. GermanyÕs phase-out,successful or not, may well become agame changer for nuclear energyworldwide.

The idea of a nuclear phase-out didnot come out of the blue, and to under-stand it requires a careful review of thepast. The trajectory of GermanyÕsnuclear program is closely related to itspost-war history and developments inWest German society. The controversyover nuclear power has its origins in thelate 1960s and early 1970s, but mostimportant, there has been a continuityof debate over nuclear power from thattime to the present, transformed overseveral decades by domestic develop-ments and re-energized (and, in manyways, justified) by the accidents atThree-Mile Island, Chernobyl, andfinally Fukushima. When the criticalstages and events of the debate areviewed in perspective, the logicÑand

perhaps even the inevitabilityÑof theGerman phase-out decision becomesapparent. Germany has been planningto leave nuclear energy behind fordecades.

The origins of German nuclearskepticism

As in many other industrialized coun-tries, support for atomic energy inWest Germany was originally con-sidered a progressive position.3 In theearly years of the Atoms for Peace pro-gram, nuclear power held the promise ofmodernity and a solution to mankindÕsenergy problems. At the time, it wasthe utilities that perceived this earlyinterest in nuclear power as unwar-ranted atomic hysteria and were gener-ally reluctant to adopt a new andunproven technology that came withmany economic and technical uncer-tainties. To overcome this resistance,the German government establishedmajor research centers at Karlsruheand Ju¬lich in the mid-1950s,4 and theywould both become important hubs ofEuropean nuclear research and develop-ment. Work at these centers focused notonly on reprocessing and enrich-mentÑpursuits usually noted warily byGermanyÕs neighbors5Ñbut also on thedevelopment of a variety of novel reac-tor concepts, often advocated as alterna-tives to dependency on US technologyand fuel supply.6

In the early 1970s, however, the enthu-siasm for the technology began to wane,and by 1980, the historian JoachimRadkau was led to title his definitiveaccount of nuclear power developmentin Germany The Rise and Fall of theGerman Atomic Industry, 1945”1975:Displaced Alternatives in Nuclear

Glaser 11



Technology and the Origin of the NuclearControversy.7 Numerous examples illus-trate the early crisis that put nuclearpower technology on a downward pathfrom which it would never recover. Inhindsight, however, a few particularlyimportant projects played critical rolesin the public debate; taken together, theyhelp explain GermanyÕs phase-out deci-sion decades later.

The Brokdorf reactor

If one event had to be singled out tomark the origins of a movement opposedto nuclear power that went beyond localinterests, it would probably be theBrokdorf protests, which ultimately ledto numerous civil-war-like confronta-tions between police forces and oppon-ents of the project (Aust, 1981).8

The planning for a light-water reactorat the Brokdorf site, 45 miles northwestof Hamburg, had been underway sincethe late 1960s, but became a publicissue only in November 1973, at a timewhen several power reactors werealready operating in Germany. TheBrokdorf controversy had a lesser-known prelude at another proposedreactor site near the town of Wyhl,where the peaceful occupation of theconstruction site by local communitygroups (including clerics and wine-makers who worried that the steamfrom cooling towers could negativelyaffect wine production in the region)led to a construction stop and ultimatelythe cancellation of the project (Radkau,1983: 452). After this accidental successof an essentially local-issue movement,the German federal government decidedto set a precedent and avoid a secondWyhl at all costs. In October 1976,within hours of receiving the

construction permit, police secured theBrokdorf site with barbed wire whileconstruction workers were moving inequipment. That night, police forcesclashed with opponents who weretrying to occupy the site, just as inWyhl three years earlier. Only thistime, violence rapidly escalated, attract-ing significant national media attention.9

Four weeks later, more than 30,000people gathered to demonstrate againstthe Brokdorf project. These protests ledto a construction stop in October 1977,which was formally justified by the lackof a disposal strategy for spent fuel.Brokdorf had become a powerfulsymbol of the German anti-nuclearmovement, and, when construction wasabout to resume in February 1981, about100,000 demonstrated against the pro-ject, confronting a police contingent ofmore than 10,000Ñat the time, the lar-gest police operation in the history ofWest Germany. More confrontationsand political tugs of war followed, butthe Brokdorf reactor eventually cameonline in October 1986; ironically, itwould be among the first new grid con-nections worldwide after the Chernobylaccident.

What is remarkable about these earlyevents is that the opposition to theBrokdorf and the Wyhl projects did notexplicitly target nuclear power per se, oreven focus on particular issues ofnuclear power, such as reactor safetyor waste disposal (Radkau, 1983: 458).Instead, the early opposition movementlargely developed in response to thenontransparent and authoritarian stylein which the federal government pur-sued its big-industry projects, exempli-fied by excessive use of police force.Only later would this non-specificfocus of the anti-nuclear movement be

12 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68(6)



complemented by a technical critiquetargeting specific issues of nuclearpower. This transition begins mostclearly with the debate over the fastbreeder reactor at Kalkar.10

The Kalkar fast-neutron reactor

Between 1957 and 1991, West Germanypursued an ambitiousÑand ultimatelyunsuccessfulÑfast breeder reactor pro-ject. After an initial research and devel-opment phase, the project envisionedthe construction of a 300-megawatt elec-tric prototype reactor, the SNR-300,which would be followed by a full-scaledemonstration reactor (Keck, 1981;Marth, 1994). Construction of the SNR-300 near the city of Kalkar in NorthRhine-Westphalia began in April 1973.In the wake of Wyhl and Brokdorf,

protests against the Kalkar reactorbegan to escalate in the mid-1970s. Alarge demonstration in September 1977involved a massive police operationthat included the complete closure ofautobahns in northern Germany andidentity checks of almost 150,000people.11

But along the way, a new dimensionemerged. In the course of a court casefirst initiated by a local farmer againstthe Kalkar reactor in 1972, independentexperts began to testify on issues relatedto proliferation and security risks ofseparated plutonium and, more import-ant, the unique safety risks of fast bree-der reactors. One particular scenario,the hypothetical Bethe-Tait acci-dentÑin which, after a loss of coolant,the core of a fast breeder reactor col-lapses and leads to a small-scale nuclear

Police stand guard outside the Brokdorf Nuclear Power Plant in 1981.Photo credit: Gunter Zint/panfoto.de

Glaser 13



Top: The autobahn is closed for identity checks because of protests of the Kalkar fast-breeder reactor in September 1977.

Bottom: Police await protests near Kalkar in North Rhine-Westphalia.Photo credit: Gunter Zint/panfoto.de




explosion (Bethe and Tait, 1956)Ñlaterbecame fateful for the Kalkar project.

During hearings that started in 1978,a group of independent experts, origin-ally based at the University of Bremen,pointed to the possibility of a Bethe-Taitaccident and supported their analysiswith estimates of the energy releaseassociated with it. In response, theKalkar project leaders tried to arguethat such an accident could be con-tained, which ultimately proved difficultto demonstrate, given that the reactorhad not been designed with this particu-lar type of accident in mind. Moreover,by the time of the hearings in the late1970s, major concrete and steel struc-tures were already in place and impos-sible to modify or replace. The decisionto proceed with the project was reachedin 1982,12 but for the first time, outsidetechnical experts made critical contribu-tions to a safety evaluation as part of thelicensing process of a nuclear reactor inGermany. In hindsight, the Kalkar casehelped establish independent nuclearexpertise that would later be calledupon in many other circumstances,13

and some of the experts who begantheir work as outsiders in the 1970s and1980s would eventually become mem-bers of the Federal Reactor SafetyCommission (RSK), the RadiationProtection Commission (SSK), and theSociety for Reactor Safety (GRS)Ñallinvolved in regulating nuclear power inGermany.

Construction of the Kalkar reactorwas complete in mid-1985, but a newlyelected state government was clearlyopposed to the project, and theChernobyl accident in April 1986 madeit effectively impossible to let such acontroversial initiative go forward. InMarch 1991, the German federal

government announced that the facilitywould not be put into operation.14 Bythat time, the costs of the project hadescalated from an original estimate of$150 to $200 million to about $4 billion.The site now hosts an amusement park.15

Two additional projects of that erastand out: the proposed Wackersdorfreprocessing and mixed-oxide fabrica-tion plant and the Gorleben final reposi-tory. These projects are notable becausethey mark the shift of attention to fuel-cycle facilities and the back-end of thefuel cycle. The Wackersdorf reprocess-ing plant was eventually canceled in thespring of 1989. It was clear to everyonethat breeder reactors would not play arelevant role in the foreseeable future,and the main customer of the plantsigned an agreement with the Frenchindustrial group Cogema to reprocessspent fuel in La Hague, France, instead.About $5 billion had been spent on theproject since its beginnings in 1980.Cancellation of the Wackersdorf plant,however, put further emphasis on thefinal repository site near Gorleben,which had been selected in 1977 andwas located in the eastern-most cornerof West Germany.16 The project played aparticularly significant role because itremained a focal point of the anti-nuclear movement throughout the1990s; it also is the only controversialnuclear project in Germany that is stillrelevant todayÑits ultimate fate androle are still open.

Chernobyl: The idea of aphase-out goes mainstream

By the time of the 1986 Chernobyl acci-dents, the skepticism about the future ofnuclear power in Germany was alreadywidespread; the Green Party had been in

Glaser 15



the Bundestag since 1983, and the nuclearphase-out was a key element of its polit-ical agenda. In March 1986, four weeksbefore the Chernobyl accidents, morethan 100,000 people protested againstthe Wackersdorf reprocessing plant.Even if the Chernobyl accident furtherintensified the debate, it was not theturning point it perhaps was in otherwestern European countries. In theaftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl acci-dent, however, the notion of a nuclearphase-out became mainstream in thepublic and political debate. Mostimportant, the Social Democratic Party(SPD), then the major opposition party,formulated a new and critical positiontoward nuclear power.17 The idea of anuclear phase-out and a ban on repro-cessing were first articulated in a newSPD policy statement in late 1989,shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall:ÒWe want to achieve a secure and envir-onment-friendly energy supply withoutnuclear power as soon as possible. Weconsider the plutonium economy amistake.Ó18

The conservative federal governmentremained in power until 1998 and, inprinciple, government support ofnuclear power was still a given. Severalimportant pre-Chernobyl projects, how-ever, began to fall apart. The notion ofbuilding new nuclear reactors inGermany became completely unrealis-tic. Given that the climate changedebate was still in its infancy and theeconomics of nuclear power unattract-ive, new nuclear construction wasessentially a non-issue.

Surprisingly, in the 1990s the criticalattitude toward nuclear power inGermany did not dissipate, even thoughfew nuclear issues were relevant in thisperiodÑexcept for one. In April 1995, the

first shipments of nuclear waste to theinterim storage facility at the Gorlebensite began. They included spent fuelfrom various German reactor sites andhigh-level waste from reprocessing facil-ities in France. These shipments pro-vided a focusÑarguably, the only oneavailableÑfor public political debateon the future of nuclear power inGermany. The anti-nuclear movementwas able to concentrate its energy onthese so-called Castor transports,19

using them to transform otherwiseinnocuous operations into mega-eventsthat would dominate national mediacoverage for several days at a time.

The first transport in April 1995included a total of just two casks butmobilized 4,000 protesters and 7,600police; the second transport in May1996 included a single cask comingfrom the La Hague reprocessing plantand required a police force of 19,000.The third transport in March 1997included a total of six casks, and itfaced 10,000 protesters and 30,000police.20 As their forerunners from the1970s and 1980s, these events turnedextremely violent. The governmentÕshandling of these protests was often per-ceived as disproportionate and, in theunified Germany of the 1990s, increas-ingly anachronistic, even in the eyes ofthe broader public. In hindsight, theCastor-transport controversy wouldbuild a bridge between the early debateover nuclear power, when new facilitieswere actually planned or built, and aforthcoming change in the federalgovernment.

The nuclear phase-out

When the Social Democratic Partywon the 1998 elections, forming a




government with the Green Party, one ofthe much-anticipated key provisions inthe coalition agreement was the nuclearphase-out. It took two years to reach anagreement between the government andthe utilities, and new legislation enteredinto force only in April 2002. The lawprohibited the construction of new com-mercial nuclear power plants inGermany, limited electricity productionfrom plants already in operation, pro-hibited sending spent fuel for reprocess-ing after mid-2005, and required theconstruction of dry-cask storage facil-ities at reactor sites. Among these provi-sions, the end of reprocessing and theon-site dry-cask storage have beenimplemented on schedule and withoutmuch controversy, which is in and ofitself a remarkable accomplishment.Beyond that, the major opposition par-ties (and future Chancellor Angela

Merkel) formally maintained their dis-approval of the nuclear phase-out.

In the 1990s, however, a new and moresubtle process gradually took hold: Noone, including the parties opposed to aphase-out, seriously entertained the ideaof new reactor construction in Germany,in spite of growing concerns about cli-mate change. Based on the lessonslearned in the 1970s and 1980s, such aproposal would have been impossibleto defend, and so, a de facto policy con-sensus in favor of a decreasing role fornuclear power in Germany emerged.This general perspective has determinedthe scope of every significant energyoutlook for Germany published sincethe late 1990s (Glaser, 2011).21

Assessments produced over the yearsmay have disagreed on the best strate-gies to meet certain climate targets, butthey all worked from the fundamental

Police protect a Castor transport in 1997.Photo credit: Gunter Zint/panfoto.de

Glaser 17



starting point thatÑsooner or laterÑnuclear power would no longer be avail-able in Germany. For this reason, evenwhen Angela Merkel became chancellorin November 2005, government policytoward nuclear power did not funda-mentally change.

In the first years in coalition with theSocial Democratic Party, Merkel and herChristian Democratic Union avoided theissue of the phase-out.22 After 2009, anew Conservative”Liberal coalitionunder Merkel was in principle able toreverse the phase-outÑwhich was,after all, the flagship accomplishmentof a political opponentÑbut this didnot happen immediately. In fact, it tookMerkelÕs majority a year to decide whatto do, exactly. It is worth noting that, atthe time, public opposition to nuclearpower in Germany remained surpris-ingly strong. In April 2010, about120,000 demonstrators formed a 75-mile-long human chain between tworeactor sites to commemorate the 1986Chernobyl accident and to protest thewidely anticipated federal governmentplans to extend the operational life ofthe remaining nuclear power plants.

Based on a number of options pro-posed in a government-commissionedreport in late 2010 (Federal Ministry ofEconomics and Technology, 2010), theMerkel government opted for an averagelife extension of 12 years for nuclearpower plants, now framing nuclearenergy as a Òbridge technologyÓ thatwould be necessary until renewablesfully penetrated the electricity market.Most important, howeverÑand it ishard to overemphasize the significanceof this factÑthe revised law of 2010 didnot fundamentally challenge the core ofthe atomic energy law of 2002. The pre-vious government had changed the

purpose of the law from promoting thedevelopment and deployment of nuclearpower for peaceful purposes to a quali-tatively different aim: the structured ter-mination of its use. This remained thebasis for GermanyÕs atomic energy law,even after the 2010 revision.23

Fukushima and the road ahead

For Germany, the Fukushima accidentshappened at an awkward politicalmoment. The government had just nego-tiated a fragile compromise thatextended the lives of the existing plantswhile retaining the fundamental idea ofthe phase-out, including the prohibitionof new construction. It was a comprom-ise that reactor operators were happyto accept, while it avoided a publicuproar. In the German political calculus,Fukushima made that compromiseinstantly obsolete.

Perhaps the most remarkable impactof the accidents on GermanyÕs energyfuture is that they consolidated thebroadest conceivable consensus for thephase-out in the public, a consensus thatreached across the entire political spec-trum,24 and even to many parts of theindustry.25 The future of nuclear powerin Germany is no longer a contestedissue, while the energy debate hasmoved on to other questions. Foreigncommentators sometimes suggest thatGermany will rethink its decision forthis accelerated phase-out once the dustof Fukushima has settled. This view over-looks the long and complex history ofnuclear power development inGermany, which has been dominated byconfrontation and failure. The decisionto abandon nuclear power is inconveni-ent andÑin the medium termÑcostly,leaving tens of billions of euros worth




of assets stranded, and it has by no meansbeen taken lightheartedly.

Time will tell whether what somehave called GermanyÕs Ògreat energyexperimentÓ (Talbot, 2012) will be con-sidered a success.26 For those who findGermanyÕs model appealing, the lessonsto be learned are complex, and they arenot easily transferred to other countries.

In Japan, where Fukushima shatteredthe decades-long political consensus infavor of nuclear energy, officials maywell look to the German example. Forthe first time, there is now considerablepublic support for a phase-out policy,and leading politicians and political par-ties are scrambling to respond. InSeptember 2012, the Japanese govern-ment agreed to consider plans to phaseout its nuclear program on the basis of acap on existing reactor lifetimes andprohibition of new reactor construction.The German experience suggests, how-ever, that Japan may struggle to reachthis goal within the next 20 years froma standing start. As a result of GermanyÕsoriginal decision in 1998 to phase outnuclear power, energy planners pro-duced a barrage of energy forecastsand scenarios with a strong focus onenergy efficiency and demand reduc-tion. By the time the Fukushima acci-dents occurred, many of these newenergy priorities had already begun toshow their effects. Germany also hadalternative energy scenarios available,already understood nuclear power as atechnology that would have a decreasingrole in the countryÕs energy portfolio,and considered a clear direction forenergy policy more important than aparticular phase-out schedule. This isperhaps the most important lesson tobe learned from the German experience:Countries ought to develop energy

alternatives early on, so they canrespond flexibly when new opportu-nities and challenges arise.

Acknowledgements

This article is part of a three-part series on the impli-cations of phasing out civilian nuclear power inGermany, France, and the United States. Additionaleditorial services for this series were made possibleby grants to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists fromRockefeller Financial Services and the Civil SocietyInstitute.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from anyfunding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. One of the reactors was temporarily shutdown at the time of the accident.

2. This is especially true for perspectivesfrom international commentators. See,for example: ÒGermanyÑInsane Or JustPlain Stupid?Ó at www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/08/31/germany-insane-or-just-plain-stupid; ÒGermanyÕs PanickyReaction to the Japanese Earthquake isDangerously Irresponsible,Ó at blogs.tele-graph.co.uk/news/davidhughes/100079891/germanys-panicky-reaction-to-the-japa-nese-earthquake-is-dangerously-irresponsi-ble; or ÒShunning Nuclear Power Will Leadto a Warmer World,Ó at e360.yale.edu/feature/shunning_new_nuclear_power_plants_ will_lead_to_warmer_world/2510/.

3. For the period until 1990, the following dis-cussion focuses on West Germany.

4. Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe (KfK)and Kernforschungsanlage (KFA). Bothinstitutes have different names today.

5. It is worth noting that, in the mid-1950s,Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and DefenseMinister Franz Josef Strauss openly con-sidered the acquisition of tactical nuclearweapons for the German Bundeswehr. Towhat extent such an independent effortwould have been linked to GermanyÕs fissilematerial production capabilities acquired for

Glaser 19



its nuclear power program (e.g., at theKarlsruhe and Ju¬lich research centers)remains uncertain and contested. For a dis-cussion, see Radkau, 1983: 185”195, andKraus, 2007: 37”41.

6. At the time, there was a debate overwhether to adopt US light-water reactortechnology, which requires enriched fueland implied a dependency on foreign fuelsupply, or to pursue the natural-uraniumpath combined with an early transition tobreeder technology. Research and devel-opment also included, for example, thepebble-bed high-temperature reactor andan organically moderated reactor.

7. The 1983 version of this book, even thoughit has 580 pages and more than 3,200 end-notes, is a shortened and updated versionof RadkauÕs 1981 habilitation treatise, sub-mitted to the department of history andphilosophy at the University of Bielefeld.Radkau identifies two distinct periods ofnuclear power development in Germany.The first ÒspeculativeÓ period lasted untilthe mid-1960s and was characterized by afocus on the future and the many possibi-lities of nuclear power; it was quickly fol-lowed by a second period, however, inwhich interest shifted to the present. Thefirst reactors were under construction,technology choices were largely locked-in, and advances in science and technologyalready were meaningless. According toRadkau, the early loss of focus on thefuture made nuclear power vulnerable topublic and political opposition.

8. For a short chronology, see www.ndr.de/geschichte/brokdorfchronik2.html.

9. See, for example, the 30-minute televisionfeature Brokdorf ÑEin zweites Wyhl?, dir-ected by K. Biehl and E. Hollweg,Norddeutscher Rundfunk, 1976; excerpt atvimeo.com/38842591. For additional his-toric video footage, see vimeo.com/38842883.

10. In response to the US WASH-1400 reactorsafety study from 1975 and the 1979 ThreeMile Island accident, there is a paralleleffort of this emerging community of crit-ical experts to focus on light-water reactorsafety.

11. It has to be emphasized that the largestdemonstration against the Kalkar reactortook place in what became known asthe ÒGerman Autumn,Ó during which aprominent industry official was kidnappedand later murdered by the Red ArmyFaction, and a Lufthansa plane was hijackedand diverted to Somalia. The periodcan be considered one of the tensesttimes in GermanyÕs post-World War IIhistory.

12. For a perspective on these events by theproject leaders, see Marth, 1994.

13. In parallel to the Kalkar hearings, the so-called ÒPhase BÓ of the German Risk Studyon Nuclear Reactors (DRS), which had beenoriginally commissioned by the federal gov-ernment as a counterpart to the US WASH-1400 report, also offered the opportunity forcontributions by independent nuclearexperts.

14. Note that the post-1990 situation inGermany was dominated by the reunifica-tion of East and West Germany and therelated costs of such an endeavor.

15. For the parkÕs website, see www.wunderlandkalkar.eu.

16. The location of the repository near theborder with the former East Germany wasnot primarily selected on technicalgrounds; little if any local opposition wasexpected in this remote area of WestGermany. Until 2007, the government esti-mated the costs of the project to about$2 billion (1.5 billion euros).

17. The Green Party, of course, had (and stillhas) an even more critical position towardnuclear power than most other partiesalong the political spectrum.

18. For the full text of the policy statement, seewww.spd.de/linkableblob/1812/data/berliner_programm.pdf.

19. Castor is a contrived acronym for Òcask forstorage and transport of radioactive mater-ial.Ó In parallel, Germany also developed aÒPolluxÓ cask for final disposal of spent fuelin a geologic repository.

20. The costs for the March 1997 Castor trans-port have been estimated to total more than$50 million (mainly for security personnel),excluding costs of the damages that




occurred during the transport. Furthertransports to the Gorleben site resumedmore than four years later.

21. This is discussed in more detail in Glaser,2011: 27”35.

22. This is explicitly articulated in the May2009 coalition agreement; see www.cduc-su.de/upload/koavertrag0509.pdf (inGerman).

23. For the full text of the law, see www.ge-setze-im-internet.de/atg/index.html.

24. All six parties that currently have thepotential to have representatives in theBundestag (CDU, FDP, SPD, the GreenParty, the Left Party, and the Pirate Party)support a phase-out of nuclear power.

25. For example, the German Association ofEnergy and Water Industries(www.bdew.de), which represents 1,800companies, including the major utilities,released a statement in early April 2011advocating a Òfast and complete phase-outÓ of nuclear power by 2020.

26. Predictably, electricity imports from neigh-boring countries increased in the aftermathof Fukushima, but the typical annual pat-tern of electricity imports and exports hadbeen re-established by September 2011.Even in 2011, Germany remained a netexporter of electricity, and in spite of theimmediate post-Fukushima shutdowns,GermanyÕs greenhouse gas emissions didnot increase that year. It is now likely tomeet its Kyoto budget, which mandates a21 percent average reduction (relative to1990) of carbon-dioxide equivalent emis-sions for the years 2008 through 2012.

References

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Author biography

Alexander Glaser is a member of the BulletinÕsScience and Security Board, and assistant pro-fessor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Publicand International Affairs and in theDepartment of Mechanical and AerospaceEngineering at Princeton University. He directsPrincetonÕs Nuclear Futures Laboratory andserves as co-editor of the journal Science &Global Security. Glaser is also a member of theInternational Panel on Fissile Materials.

Glaser 21



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