Will Japan Follow Germany’s Path to Green Energy? - Miller-McCune
Japan is shutting down the last of its nuclear power plants. While the closure is slated to be temporary, popular opinion has shifted, and no one is certain when or if the reactor will be brought back online. Prior to the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, Japan counted on nuclear generation for 30 percent of its electrical needs. After the disaster, they turned off 53 nuclear plants, with the last one scheduled to go offline this month.
Miranda Schreurs, professor of comparative politics and director of the Environmental Policy Research Centre at the Freie Universitat Berlin, says Japan is closely watching Germany’s shift to green energy, a transition Miller-McCune has followed closely.
Depending on green energy will be harder for Japan than Germany, which currently generates 23 percent of its electricity with nuclear power.
Japan was able to turn off its nuclear plants without blackouts due to emergency energy-saving programs and use of more fossil fuels (with very little help from renewables). But Japan doesn’t want to miss out on the boom in technological innovation this forced transition will foster.
“Although Japan is way behind Germany on renewables and was slipping in energy-efficiency advances before Fukushima,” Schreurs argues that Japan has the technology and the willpower to move from nuclear power to green energy.
Schreurs is a member of the German Advisory Council on the Environment and served on Germany’s Ethics Commission for a Secure Energy Supply. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Chancellor Angela Merkel had this 17-member panel consider the implications for Germany’s energy future through a prism of society, environment, ethics, and risk. The commission recommended last May that Germany move away from nuclear power.
Summarizing the panel’s thinking, Schreurs said, “Even though German nuclear plants are among the safest in the world, there is no way to be able to imagine all the problems that could occur.” Many of Germany’s plants were built in the 1970s, before 9/11, before airplanes became so large, before scientists considered the double whammy like a major earthquake and tsunami. “Recent events are far worse than the worst-case scenarios considered three and four decades ago,” and so “the commission concluded there is no way to guarantee that existing plants are safe.” (Miller-McCune’s John Perlin reported on a similar conclusion reached by nuclear-engineer-turned-solar-apostle Cesare Silvi last June.)
When Schreurs was in Japan recently to share the commission’s report, she saw her Geiger counter kick into the danger range in a public train station. The commission recognized that health risks at Chernobyl and Fukushima will persist for centuries. “It’s hard to imagine cleaning up plutonium in the mountains that could wash into streams every time it rains,” Schreurs reflected. As a result, regions surrounding these power plants will remain uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
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The lack of a solution for housing nuclear waste also figured prominently in the panel’s conclusions. “There are still no high-level radioactive waste storage sites anywhere in the world, and leaving future generations with a major and dangerous waste problem so that we can enjoy a good life today, is not an ethical policy.”
But among the most persuasive conclusions the commission reached was its last. “Other forms of energy are less controversial and less divisive, and it is possible to move away from coal, oil, and eventually gas and nuclear to a much more energy- and resource-efficient society that takes planetary boundaries into consideration. We can move to a new modern energy system that is good for the climate and less ethically questionable.”
As Miller-McCune has noted, these conclusions on energy proved appealing across the German political spectrum. “It’s remarkable that Germany accepted the commission’s recommendations,” Schreurs said.
After Fukushima and the commission’s report, Germany’s right-wing parties joined the former red/green coalition to advance the existing deadlines for phasing out the remaining eight nuclear power plants by 2022. They also agreed to reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent (from 1990 levels) by 2020. While some questioned German’s ability to reach this goal, Schreurs points out that Germany already cut carbon emissions 27 percent even as electricity use rose by 14 percent. And while skeptics predicted that Germany would end up buying nuclear-generated electricity from France, in a cold snap last winter, the French bought power from Germany.