Two-Minute Talk on Nuclear Energy
Why nuclear facilities must be shut down today and why nuclear power cannot save the climate.
The mining of uranium, a radioactive heavy metal required to produce nuclear power, causes massive contamination of soil, water, and air.
Highly toxic, radioactive, and even weapons-grade materials are transported across the globe to enable the enrichment of uranium, which is needed to produce fuel elements for nuclear power plants.
Even in the day-to-day operation, nuclear power plants release radioactive substances into the environment.
The radiation they emit is hazardous to human health, even in small doses. The incidence of cancer in children is significantly higher in the vicinity of nuclear power plants.
Nuclear disasters comparable to those in Chernobyl or Fukushima could happen again at any time.
They would threaten the lives and health of millions worldwide and could make huge areas permanently uninhabitable. The risk of serious accidents increases as nuclear facilities get older.
None of the countries that utilize nuclear energy has yet come up with a solution to the challenge of storing nuclear waste safely for hundreds of thousands of years.
Nobody knows how to deal with the immensely toxic legacy. The “reprocessing” of spent nuclear fuels just adds to the stockpile of radioactive waste.
The use of nuclear energy for civilian purposes also produces the materials needed for nuclear bombs.
Building nuclear power plants, research reactors, enrichment facilities, and reprocessing plants has always been a way of concealing military nuclear programmes.
- Nuclear energy only provides slightly more than two percent of the global energy demand.
It is a niche technology that cannot save the climate. Instead. the continued operation of nuclear power plants is an obstacle to the energy transition towards renewables. Even today, Germany does not need nuclear power plants to meet its energy demand.