source: IAEA

They are the EU’s two largest member-states, the countries meant to drive European integration forward as the Franco-German motor. The problem is they don’t agree on which fuel to use.

France is a world leader in nuclear power, a low-carbon energy source. About 71 percent of its electricity comes from its 58 nuclear power plants. The state-owned energy giant EDF is building another one in Flamanville, Normandy, a plant that uses an improved “third generation” reactor technology, the European Pressurized Reactor. The average French person emits 7.2 tons of CO2 equivalent per year. Electricity in France costs €0.18 per kilowatt hour.

Germany has given up on nuclear power. It gets less than 12 percent of its electricity from nuclear, and that figure is falling: Germany plans to shut its remaining nuclear power plants by the end of 2022. The average German emits 11.3 tons of CO2 equivalent per year. Electricity in Germany costs €0.31 per kilowatt hour, nearly double the price in France.

The two countries’ differing positions on nuclear power mirror the divide within the EU and within the global environmental movement. As usual with the Franco-German motor, culture and history help explain the differences.

Is Nuclear History?

France made a big push to switch to nuclear power in the wake of the 1973 oil shock—at the time, most French electricity came from oil-burning plants. Because France has relatively small fossil fuel reserves, the idea of switching to uranium, a fuel so potent that one half-inch pellet of it contains as much energy as a ton of coal, had its attractions. There is a proud French tradition of large, centrally directed technological projects, like the high-speed TGV trains that were redesigned to run on electricity rather than gas in the 1970s. State-owned French firms have led the way in exporting technical know-how and building nuclear reactors abroad, and nuclear advocates around the world admire France’s practice of recycling spent fuel to reduce waste. Nuclear power has been broadly popular in France.

It is the problem of storing nuclear waste for the long term that has aroused the most opposition; support for nuclear has fallen over the past few years. A 2018 Odaxa poll found that 53 percent of French opposed nuclear power, up from 33 percent in 2013—though only 28 percent were willing to pay more for their energy to avoid using nuclear.

France, like every other country, is still seeking a permanent underground repository to bury its spent fuel in. It hopes to open one in 2022, but these dates are rarely set in stone: lawsuits from environmental groups and NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) have prevented the opening of storage facilities everywhere from the United States to Sweden. It appears that Finland will be the first country to open such a permanent repository, and it’s a good thing too. Regardless of how many new nuclear facilities humans build, the world needs somewhere to store existing radioactive waste, which is currently kept in increasingly overcrowded temporary storage, i.e. in deep pools of water until it cools, and then in casks of thick metal.

And Germany? Nuclear power used to be a big part of the German electricity mix too, peaking at about 30 percent in 2000, but there was always more public opposition east of the Rhine. There were major protests in 1979 after the (non-fatal) meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island in New York, and the anti-nuclear movement was a major player in the formation of the Green Party the following year. Fears that Germany would be the battleground for nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, combined with the relative proximity of the meltdown at the dreadfully mismanaged nuclear plant in Chernobyl in 1986, did nothing to persuade a skeptical public.

Germany built no new plants after 1989, and the Social Democrat-Green government decided in 1998 to exit nuclear power by 2022. Then in 2011, the Bundestag roundly supported Chancellor Angela Merkel, who initially had wanted nuclear plants to run longer, when she made a U-turn after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. A quicker end to nuclear power and a big shift to renewable energy, the so-called Energiewende, became the German consensus. Remarkably, the climate-conscious country will now end nuclear power production by 2022—the same year France will stop burning coal—but continue to burn dirty coal for electricity until 2038.

The upshot is that Germany’s impressive expansion of renewables over the last decade has not reduced emissions as fast as it could have, because one form of low-carbon energy has replaced another: before the coronavirus shutdown, Germany was on track to miss its climate targets for 2020. Although groups within Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the opposition pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) question whether quitting nuclear was the right move, the issue is dead and buried for much of the population, especially the ascendant, religiously anti-nuclear Greens.

The Price of Power

So France has cleaner, cheaper energy than Germany, though the story is more complicated than that—nothing about splitting nuclei is simple. Those cost/kilowatt hour statistics will have raised the hackles of people on both sides of the nuclear power debate. “How can one put a price on avoiding a Chernobyl-like nuclear disaster?,” a German climate activist might ask. “What is the value of getting out of nuclear energy if the result is higher dependency on Russian gas?” a French bureaucrat might retort.

Both would have a point. The fact that the price tag for energy does not reflect its true cost is central to the climate debate, indeed at the heart of it. Those figures do include the high taxes and fees Germany levies on electricity in order to support the expansion of renewables. But they do not fully capture all sorts of other costs, from the cost of emitting deadly air pollutants and greenhouse gases, to the cost of building a grid that can get renewable power where it’s needed on cloudy, calm days, to the cost of spreading around nuclear technology.

Reasonable people can have different opinions on the extent to which nuclear power should be part of a decarbonized future, and that’s exactly what’s happening with Germany and France, and with their allies within the EU.

Far from Atomized

This isn’t the usual split between “old” and “new” member states, or between the North and South. Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland have decided to ditch nuclear energy. Denmark, Ireland, Portugal, and Austria never had any commercial nuclear reactors. On the other side stand France, Poland, Finland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, as well as former member the United Kingdom, which all plan to build new reactors. Within the EU as a whole, renewable energy accounts for 14 percent of energy, nuclear energy for 12 percent.

This doesn’t mean the pro-nuclear camp thinks reactors are a silver bullet—even France wants to close some old reactors and increase renewable production so that nuclear power’s share of electricity generation falls to 50 percent by 2035. But some European leaders are determined that nuclear be a part of their low-carbon future. “Nuclear energy is clean energy,” Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš argues. “I don’t know why people have a problem with this.” The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia could only be persuaded to sign up for the European Green Deal in December 2019 because the European Council agreed to respect the “right of the member states to decide on their energy mix… Some member states have indicated that they use nuclear energy…”

Germany disagreed, as it had in September 2019 when EU ministers decided not to exclude nuclear from a sustainable finance classification scheme. “Nuclear energy is neither safe nor sustainable nor cost-effective,” said German State Secretary for Energy Andreas Feicht. “So we reject the idea of EU money to extend the life of nuclear power stations.”

Yet it was the German co-leader of the Green group in the European Parliament, Ska Keller, who broke from her party colleagues to vote for the November 2019 resolution declaring a climate emergency in Europe. Forty-six of her fellow Greens voted against the resolution because of a clause saying that nuclear energy could “contribute to the achievement of climate goals,” resulting in the strange optics of Greens rejecting a measure that for decades they could only dream of passing. Clearly, nuclear reactors have the power to split the environmental movement down the middle. 

The Wrong Enemy

One reason that decarbonizing energy systems is so hard is that it isn’t enough to simply replace all current fossil fuel power plants with low-carbon sources. The world needs much more than 100 percent of current electricity, for the millions of people in poor countries who struggle to access electricity, for the electrification of the automobile, for creating carbon-free hydrogen to heat homes.

It’s not for nothing that in every IPCC scenario for limiting global warming to 1.5 Celsius, nuclear power supplies more energy in 2050 than it does now. Nuclear has its drawbacks, especially the massive cost of storing waste. There’s no such thing as a free lunch with energy, however. Fossil fuels are reliable, but they are melting icecaps and clogging lungs. Modern renewables like wind and solar are ideal, safe energy sources, but today—nearly 30 years after the first UN treaty on climate change, as country after country misses its climate targets—they still account for only around 10 percent of total final energy consumption.

Perhaps the next generation of nuclear reactors—meant to be cheaper, smaller, safer, and standardized—will succeed beyond expectations, making nuclear energy the backbone of future low-carbon energy systems. For all the talk of China’s construction of coal power plants, the country is also building 15 new nuclear reactors. Nine years after the Fukushima disaster, Japan is restarting some of its nuclear reactors too.  Or perhaps nuclear will fizzle out as the cost of renewables and batteries continues to fall. After all, that French plant at Flamanville is even more over budget and behind schedule than Berlin’s long-delayed new airport.

The next generation of climate activists, who come to the issue with fresh eyes, might give nuclear another chance as the cost of the energy status quo gets higher and higher. Greta Thunberg has said she is “personally against nuclear power, but according to the IPCC, it can be a small part of a very big new carbon free energy solution.”

Good for Greta. Those concerned about climate change have a responsibility to watch carefully the development of nuclear power and make unbiased, evidence-based decisions. They must, to paraphrase Thunberg again, listen to the scientists, even when they don’t like the answer.

The post Carbon Critical: The Franco-German Nuclear Motor appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

(c) REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

Alfred Hitchcock used to call it a “MacGuffin”: a goal that serves as an impetus to action, yet does not possess any particular significance itself to the plot. When eminent political realists like Henry Kissinger were looking for a way to contain the global spread of nuclear weapons, they took their cues from the British master director and introduced a “MacGuffin” – the vision of a nuclear-free world – in order to trigger small, achievable steps. Whether the vision could ultimately be realized was of secondary importance. The key was to catalyze a process that would gradually reduce nuclear dangers.

Alas, many advocates of a nuclear-free world are not into Hitchcock movies. While a “MacGuffin” is meant to advance a story, ardent nuclear abolitionists are mistaking it for the actual plot. Accordingly, the tone of the Western nuclear debate is getting rougher. And the confusion that has characterized the nuclear discourse for quite some time continues to grow. Caught between abolitionist rhetoric and “realpolitik” deterrence considerations, the Western nuclear narrative appears to have lost its way.

More Distant Than Ever: Nuclear Abolition

Despite lofty rhetoric about a nuclear-free world, nuclear abolition looks far more distant today than ever. The latest blow was dealt by Russia’s breach of the 1994 Budapest memorandum, in which Russia committed to uphold Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine transferring former Soviet nuclear weapons back to Russia. Some Ukrainians are now wondering whether they should have kept the weapons they once inherited, rather than giving them away in exchange for a worthless promise. And there is more. Although not in the public limelight, Russia is also sending nuclear signals to the West by stepping up nuclear exercises, by having Russian bombers flying closer to NATO’s borders, and by boasting about the development of new nuclear weapons. In fall 2014 Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin even promised that Russia’s military modernization would contain a “nuclear surprise” for the country’s potential adversaries. All this reveals that Russia’s thinking, both politically and militarily, is far more “nuclearized” than most Western observers believed.

Russia’s current nuclear activism is not entirely unique. Pakistan is just introducing tactical nuclear weapons into its arsenal. North Korea continues to conduct nuclear tests and to accumulate fissile material. The rise of China has prompted several countries in the Asia-Pacific region to seek shelter under the so-called “nuclear umbrella” of the United States. The rise of Iran is having the same effect on the Gulf States. And while Iran is not yet a nuclear power, there is no deal in sight that would reliably foreclose this possibility in the long term. Saudi Arabia, for its part, has publicly declared that if Iran goes nuclear, it will follow.

In short, the world is becoming more nuclear, not less. Globalization, technological progress, and a shift of geopolitical rivalries towards Asia have created a landscape that has little to do with the late 1960s, when the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) was opened for signature. Today, a large part of proliferation is proceeding outside the NPT-regime. Private enterprises have delivered centrifuges, warhead designs, and even scientists to countries with nuclear ambitions. As a result, these countries no longer require technical support by like-minded nuclear powers. The continuing interest in civilian nuclear energy will also mean that more and more countries will become “virtual” Nuclear Weapons States, i.e. states that could convert their civilian programs into military ones at short notice. All these developments proceed independently from Western policies.

Western attempts to re-gain the initiative have been disappointing: President Obama’s famous 2009 Prague speech did not produce a more favorable political climate for non-proliferation, and other attempts to draw attention to the urgency of safeguarding nuclear materials, such as the Nuclear Security Summits, have been overshadowed by real-life crises. For example, the 2014 Nuclear Summit in The Hague was completely eclipsed by the Crimea crisis. And Russia has announced that it will not participate in the preparations for the next Nuclear Summit.

What Went Wrong?

First, many in the West believed that the end of the Cold War also meant the obsolescence of nuclear deterrence. The role of nuclear weapons as tools of deterrence and war-prevention was pushed into the background, while stressing instead the dangers of nuclear possession. Despite warnings about the emergence of a “second nuclear age”, the intellectual curiosity to examine this new age and its implications was woefully missing. Hence, the frequently used term “nuclear renaissance” is actually a misnomer: nuclear weapons are not coming back. They had never gone away in the first place.

Second, since the end of the Cold War, and even more since the 9/11 attacks, there has been an obsession with non-state actors. The spectre of “nuclear terrorism” was a healthy reminder of the limits of nuclear deterrence when dealing with adversaries who are willing to die for their cause. It also helped to galvanize international attention on nuclear security, resulting in initiatives to secure fissile material. Yet it remains doubtful whether the threat is really that serious, particularly when compared to chemical or biological ones. Above all, the focus on “undeterrable” non-state actors further diverted attention away from classic inter-state conflict scenarios.

Third, the non-proliferation community has become increasingly intertwined with anti-nuclear activism. Since the end of the Cold War, non-proliferation has become the central refuge for ideological or religious activists and wayward “peace researchers”, who had failed to attract continued interest in their various causes after the demise of the Soviet Union. As a result, the community has grown larger, but certainly not better. A considerable part of today’s non-proliferation research amounts to little more than blaming nuclear proliferation on Western policies and advocating Western nuclear disarmament as the principal solution.

What Needs to be Done?

First, the West must fundamentally re-think means and ends: if international relations will continue to be shaped by nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence and reassurance must again be given their rightful place. Rather than dismissing such concepts as relics of a bygone era, or as obstacles to nuclear disarmament, they need to be appreciated – unapologetically – as important means to cope with a volatile security environment. This is particularly true for US extended deterrence.

Second, Western security policies should refrain from raising unrealistic expectations about global nuclear disarmament. Sweeping visions of a nuclear-free world have never gathered more than rhetorical support by other nuclear nations. Instead, the focus of Western policy should be on discussing the conditions for such a world. This means focussing on the disease rather than the symptoms. And it means overcoming antagonisms and security dilemmas through alliances, widespread security cooperation, arms control, and non-proliferation. There are no shortcuts.

Finally, the non-proliferation community, much like the nuclear strategy community, must get back to basics. The blurring of lines between serious research and anti-nuclear activism has contributed to a profound intellectual confusion about the relative importance of nuclear non-proliferation versus nuclear deterrence. Both concepts are valid instruments for safeguarding national security. Even if tension between them is inevitable, they must not be pitted against each other. In the multi-nuclear world of the 21st century, self-inflicted confusion is something the West can ill-afford.

NB. The author expresses solely his personal views.

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