OPINION | JEREMY GORDON
Jeremy Gordon is an independent communication consultant with 15 years of experience in the international energy industry. His company Fluent in Energy supports partners of all kinds to communicate matters of clean energy and sustainable development.
New year, new nuclear industry
Jeremy Gordon looks ahead to some of the industry milestones expected in 2022. Will it be a year remembered for more than just Germany’s nuclear phaseout?
THE UNIT: Illustration copyright Alexy Kovynev The German closures at the end of this year will be a
painful waste of resources and an insult to science. They will result in deadly clouds of pollution that the activist and author Rauli Partanen estimated to amount to some 1 billion tonnes of excess carbon dioxide. But after the last nuclear plants in Germany are closed, there will be nothing much more to lose there. The Greens will have ‘won’ and the industry will have ‘lost’ — that is, if the industry ever really fought at all. Anti-nuclear advocates will probably focus on forcing
Urenco to pack up its enrichment site at Gronau and move the jobs elsewhere. Pro-nuclear advocates will focus on fighting for nuclear in other places where the industry is passively awaiting its own destruction — like Belgium and California. Meanwhile, in South Korea we can look forward to the
hen you mention 2022, the first thing on a lot of people’s minds would be the infuriating and senseless closure of Germany’s last reactors — the Greens’ final ‘winning’ move in the phase
out that started in 2000 and accelerated in 2011. But that is by no means the whole story. As that door closes, other doors are opening for a new nuclear energy sector in 2022.
12 | January 2022 |
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opposite. A presidential election in April will most likely see incumbent Moon Jae-in and his anti-nuclear policies defeated at the ballot box. National newspapers have long been running editorials that point out the very obvious folly of his policy to get rid of Korea’s main source of electricity and his election rivals all are clear about nuclear’s role as a strategic national industry for Korea. The global nuclear industry is small and can ill afford to
lose competent and independent players like South Korea. I eagerly await takeover by a new president who will turn the ship of policy to double down on nuclear — potentially before the end of the year. After all, there is a more than one good reason that Korea made the effort to build nuclear and master it. Not just to reduce energy imports, which previously ran at over 90%,
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