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nanotimes

Editor‘s Letter

“hermetic locking method” over a nuclear unit in the case of a core meltdown? We use the most expensive and super-designed mobiles, but if a nuclear power plant explodes tomorrow, we would still throw lead into the open reactor from a helicopter. These are methods from the Stone Age. Today’s oil industry with its present-day orientation is more than 150 years old. Over this long period of time, no company has been able to come up with a solution to quickly, effectively and securely clean up oil spill?

It is a huge market, though. If a company had offered BP a solution with its technology right after the explosion, BP would have saved not only much money but also the brand would have kept its reputation. Now, BP caused America’s Chernobyl.

Governments, large corporations, and venture capital companies partly seem to have made the wrong investments for decades.

If countries like China, India or Russia just pre- vent the mistakes e.g. Europe made over the last 20 years (and has intensely repeated those mistakes for the last nine months) these countries will overtake Europe with a smile.

There are European personalities with charisma and strategic vision – as Churchill, Thatcher or Kohl used to be – however, most of them are literally sidelined such as the (ex-) politician Wolfgang Clement and Friedrich Merz in Germa- ny. EU officials say it for a good reason that their main job is to prevent obvious nuisance – either judicial or economic nonsense – of others. That

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is Europe today. Abandoning nuclear power is very exemplary for Germany on the long run. However, do we at the same time have to loose our existing leading position in nuclear energy research? We used to qualify the best nuclear energy researchers in the world. The thought of a German company building a nuclear power plant with German technology and security measures in China is far more calming than building a plant with an unknown construction company. Isn‘t it?

According to the Brussels Thinktank CEPS, Ger- many will be listed in the lower third of the EU ranking by 2040, and even Poland will have a bigger GDP. That’s just a forecast. We have another 20 years to change that, also for whole of Europe. But we must act not talk.

Thomas Ilfrich