No Dresden-Ahaus nuclear haulage before May

This despite the apparent extension of the transport licence by the Federal Office for Radiation Protection, BfS, for which the national environment minister, Jürgen Trittin, of The Greens, is responsible. The present licence expires with the year.

The paper quoted the state secretary (junior minister) of the NRW interior ministry, Hans Krings, telling the Social Democrat group in the Düsseldorf-based state parliament that the haulage was not to be expected before the May election.

After the winter, which made trucking difficult, in March and April before the election demonstrations had to be expected which would tie up police forces, the state secretary is quoted by a Social Democrat spokesman.

It appears that the probable postponement until after the election on 22 May greatly pleases the Greens in the state government, the paper writes. One party leader is said to have quipped, “This time winter in North-Rhine Westphalia lasts until May”.

But The Greens in the Düsseldorf state assembly are angered by the permission to truck the waste for more than 600 km from east to west, saying it ignore all concerns and risks.

The state Greens blame Trittin for this because the BfS licensing authority is part of his portfolio. Parliamentary group members reports that the NRW environment minister, Bärbel Höhn, “was very amazed by the decision”.

The nuclear policy spokesman of the Greens group in Düsseldorf, Rüdiger Sagel, said it was incomprehensible how the BfS could have issued the permit without looking into the details. NRW put forward well-considered arguments with respect to the safety of the transport and the necessary continued storage of the Castors in Saxony.”

Saxony as the applicant for the licence had entangled itself in contradictions and that too required a new assessment.

Trittin has contradicted a prognostication by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that “by 2050 the median estimate from the long-term analyses is that nuclear power will quadruple its total output”.

“The long-term perspective thus presents a larger role for nuclear than the near-term perspective,” the IAEA said in a June press release.

There are more than 400 nuclear reactors in use around the world.

As guest author in the business daily, Handelsblatt, Trittin wrote that nuclear energy has no future worldwide.

Trittin wrote that among the 27 reactors the IAEA cites as proof of an imminent global atomic power renaissance, almost half have been under construction for between 17 and 29 years.

That left only eight construction projects in India, two in China, two in Taiwan, two in Japan and one in South Korea.

Worldwide not even every sixth country used atomic power, Trittin wrote. "And even a country like China wants to produce no less than 10% of its power from the sun, wind and small hydro stations. That’s ten times China’s present nuclear power capacity and 30 times as much as the two nuclear power blocks now being built.”

Trittin went on that in the USA, the leading nuclear power country, no reactor had been ordered for 30 years, nor in Britain. No country without atomic power stations so far is seriously considering the technology, Trittin wrote.

"Hence the future does not lie in the revival of a hazardous technology from the middle of the last century. It lies in a sustainable energy economy based on efficiency and ever increasing regenerative sources.”