Nuremberg (dpa / lby) – The chairman of the Bund Naturschutz in Bayern considers the continued operation of nuclear power plants in the Free State to be an “incalculable risk”. “We have 600 nuclear power plants worldwide, six of them are damaged – Harrisburg, Chernobyl and four blocks in Fukushima,” Richard Mergner told the “Nürnberger Nachrichten” (Saturday edition). “We also don’t have a repository. It’s like getting on a plane and we don’t have a runway.”
Every longer day that the Lower Bavarian nuclear power plant Isar 2 is in operation “represents a safety risk,” said Mergner. “The risk of a nuclear accident is there.” It is “as cheap as it is wrong to stir up fears that people will have to freeze”.
In view of rising prices and the threat of energy shortages, a debate has broken out about the further use of the remaining German nuclear power plants. It is actually planned that the Meiler Isar 2 in Lower Bavaria, Emsland in Lower Saxony and Neckarwestheim 2 in Baden-Württemberg will go out of service at the end of the year.
In April, the Technical Monitoring Association (TÜV) Süd wrote in a paper entitled “Assessment” that it had no safety concerns about continuing to operate Isar 2 beyond the end of the year. A restart of Block C in Gundremmingen is also “possible from a technical point of view”.
The Federal Ministry for the Environment had strongly criticized the paper regarding the methodology of the TÜV investigation. The statement commissioned by the Bavarian Ministry of the Environment does not meet “basic requirements for reports and serious expert statements and should therefore not be used for state decision-making,” the ministry wrote in an internal memo that is available to the German Press Agency in Berlin. The Bavarian Ministry of the Environment rejected the criticism.
