In Germany we have the highest electricity prices in Europe and we just blew up our largest-capacity nuclear plant on live television.

Also open thread.

Source.

The nuclear plant at Gundremmingen once produced a quarter of all the power generated in Bavaria. That was before we shut down its reactors in 2017 and 2021, in the course of our insane and totally purposeless nuclear phaseout. In theory anyway, we could have reactivated Gundremmingen in as little as four years. Instead, yesterday at noon exactly, we detonated the plant’s cooling towers. As the ecologically-minded Bayerischer Rundfunk reminds us, we can be grateful that light rain kept the dust pollution to a minimum.

RWE, Gundremmingen’s erstwhile operators, have all kinds of plans for the site. When they finally conclude dismantling the plant in the late 2030s, they want to put a 400-Megawatt battery storage facility there, and also maybe a natural gas power plant and a smattering of solar panels too. If it sounds good they’ll build it in Gundremmingen, but nothing they build there will ever prove remotely capable of producing the 20 TWh that the Unit B and Unit C reactors churned out at their peak.

Germany is presently deindustrialising, in large part because it has the most expensive energy in Europe. Our Economics Minister is begging the EU Commission to green-light more natural gas electricity generation. And we literally just blew up a power plant on live television. A weird clique of freaked out activists, sour schoolmarms and intellectually confused people are dragging Germany into the abyss, while our elected politicians stand around and make tepid suggestions. Our leading industrial city just voted for its own complete deindustrialisation in fifteen years. One in five municipal utilities in Germany hopes to decommission its entire natural gas network by 2045. We are headed straight for disaster.

The truth is that the shrieking media personalities and activists leading the charge don’t want to have good jobs or to bequeath our children a nation full of prospects. Sometimes it seems like they don’t even want to heat their homes in winter. They hope to trade comfort and prosperity for self-denial, for the passing thrill of feeling that they’re doing the right and the virtuous thing. Sometimes I fear they’re going to keep doing this right up until the lights go out.