OPINION | JEREMY GORDON
Jeremy Gordon is an independent communication consultant with 18 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.
The great break-up
Antinuclear politics finally got its big victory with the German shutdown in April. It is the end of an era for the country as well as for nuclear, which now has the opportunity of a fresh new start
THE UNIT: Illustration copyright Alexy Kovynev
Greenpeace were celebrating. On the other side was an event by plucky pro-nuclear voices from Germany and around Europe under the ‘Stand Up For Nuclear’ banner. Their slogan was ‘Kernkraft gewinnt’, meaning ‘nuclear power wins’, and they presented a message that it will inevitably return to the country. At first it is hard to to see how that can possibly be
What are we going to hate now?
FTER MORE THAN TWO DECADES of being a punchbag for successive German governments, the country’s nuclear power sector was finally closed ostensibly for good on 15 April, having given a few months extra service to ease the energy shortages caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The day was marked by two events at Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate. On one side of the landmark,
14 | May 2023 |
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a suitable slogan on the day of the final closure, but in one sense at least, the nuclear demonstration did win. The big international NGO created a set piece of nuclear as a dinosaur lying dead with its legs in the air and surrounded by – you guessed it – yellow drums of ‘nuclear waste’. The same stuff it has been doing for ever, but not many supporters turned up to their tired display. Despite miniscule budgets and on behalf of the supposedly most unpopular energy source on earth Stand Up for Nuclear mustered more people than Greenpeace did. The debate is not where it was when the phase out
began. Today, many people see the Greenpeace position as an antinuclear emperor with no clothes. They know the supposed benefits of closing nuclear are not real, while the consequences of not having it as an energy source most certainly are. People now know that the antinuclear offer represents billions in wasted infrastructure and carbon dioxide emissions weighed against nothing more than a minority’s satisfaction in holding on to their antinuclear identity. That’s perhaps why so few people actually turned up for Greenpeace’s party and why its announcement of victory was ultimately swamped by a multitude of pro- nuclear comments calling out the stupidity of the move they so fervently advocated.
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