Due to unresolved safety issues, the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz in Deutschland (BUND) categorically rejects the continued operation of nuclear power plants.
“Energy from nuclear power is unsafe, unprofitable and unnecessary,” explains BUND chairman Olaf Bandt when presenting a nuclear power study. The BUND officer responsible, Angela Wolff, added that the benefits of longer terms are disproportionate to the risks and costs.
The report, which the physicist Oda Becker prepared on behalf of the BUND, criticizes the low energy efficiency and insufficient protection of the power plants against floods and terrorist attacks. The safety checks carried out last in 2009 were based on a set of rules from the early 1980s, in which the nuclear accidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima were not even taken into account.
Security check failed
The three remaining German nuclear power plants Emsland, Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim 2 have to be shut down by the end of the year according to current law. Because of this date, the safety check that was actually required every ten years was dispensed with in 2019.
Because there is a risk of gas shortages in winter, there has been discussion for weeks about letting the power plants run longer, which the BUND report sees extremely critically: “The German nuclear power plants that are still in operation no longer correspond to the current state of science and technology,” it says. “In any case, a comprehensive and transparent safety review must be a prerequisite for the discussed extension of the lifetime of the three nuclear power plants that are still in operation.”
BUND boss Bandt considers it “devastating” that the demand for a longer term is not only raised by the CDU, CSU and FDP, but also by parts of the Greens. This calls into question the “founding consensus” of the party. Due to impending supply bottlenecks, the Bavarian Greens parliamentary group leader Ludwig Hartmann had not ruled out continued operation beyond the end of the year.