SPECIAL REPORT | DECOMMISSIONING DECISIONS
Above: Analysis found that while economic conditions – strength of their respective nuclear industries and resource potentials for rival technologies, for example – would suggest that the UK would be more likely to phase out nuclear than Germany this is the opposite of the actual picture
The proportional representation system made it easier
for Germany’s Green Party to win seats in parliament and a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1998 was pivotal in implementing the German Nuclear Exit Law of 2002. That was not necessarily the outcome of the national
conversation. The authors note that Finland is another European country with prominent participation by the Green Party in political life – including service in government. But this has not affected the status of Finland as one of the few countries in Europe that is still constructing new nuclear power. In any case, the prominence of a counter- incumbency party like the Greens cannot easily in any setting be entirely divorced from the wider issues discussed here concerning ‘qualities of democracy’.
The authors considers particular events, such as German
regional elections where Chancellor Angela Merkel was vulnerable to losing votes if she did not reaffirm a nuclear phase-out previously agreed. But that decision was taken within a broader long-run picture of trends and pressures across a range of economic, political and technical issues, among them the countries’ low-carbon pathways. They say that the criteria that are relevant are a range of
issues that might broadly be characterised as the ‘qualities of democracy’ – general governance institutions, political discourse and representational processes and practices.
Right:
A significantly larger and more active grassroots nuclear opposition movement formed in Germany than in the UK Photo credit: 360b/
Shutterstock.com
Diverging fates in the Northeastern US Two other authors compared the fates of two plants in the USA: Vermont Yankee and New York State’s James A. FitzPatrick (Geographical political economy of nuclear power plant closures, by Angelica Greco and Daisaku Yamamotu, published in Geoforum in 2019). The two plants are separated by just 250 miles are in the northeastern USA. But Vermont Yankee’s owner Entergy carried through closure plans announced in 2013 that saw the plant stop operating the following year, although at the time the plant could cover 35 per cent of the state’s electricity needs.
The plant had won a 20-year licence extension from the
NRC but it also needed approval from the State of Vermont to operate beyond 2012. The company sought the necessary Certificate of Public Good but instead came to an agreement with the state that allowed operation only into 2014. The company blamed economic factors, notably the lower cost of electricity provided by competing natural gas-fired power plants – these might correspond to the ‘internal’ technical factors discussed in the paper on Germany.
18 | October 2024 |
www.neimagazine.com
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