Czech law mandates the increased use of nuclear energy.

[NNadir]

Austria built a nuclear reactor, the Zwentendorf reactor, which was completed in 1978 and never operated, owing to a plebiscite, in that year, whereupon 50.8% of voters said the reactor should not be operated ever.

By 2020, Austria had completely shut its reliance on coal, having switched to gas; shortages of gas with other countries following suit has led to a surge in European electricity prices and dangerous natural gas prices; we should expect the same in the United States.

Austria does however, import electricity from the Czech Republic where electricity is still produced by burning dangerous coal.

Austrian activists have long opposed the Czech nuclear plants at Temelin, consisting of the usual bourgeois types with poor educations, and organized groups called "Stop Temelin."

Some Czechs responded by organizing an amusing "activist group" group called "Start Zwentendorf"

Some text from the site:

...Closed Zwentendorf is dangerous

Austria imports about 20 TWh of electricity per year. Czech Republic, the only net exporter of electricity in middle Europe, is and will be the supplier. Production of electricity in Czech thermal power plants results, besides the radioactive emissions mentioned above, in the following dangerous emissions:

solid particles, which cause lung cancer and other severe illnesses
heavy metals, which are the cause of severe illnesses
sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rains and damages health
carbon dioxide, which is the most important greenhouse gas which cause global climate changes
oxides of nitrogen, which cause smog and contribute to global climate changes

Closed Zwentendorf in numbers

Inactive Zwentendorf, which was replaced by coal burning power plants, results in the following yearly consumptions and emissions:...

Austria is "going green," and in Europe, as elsewhere, but particularly in Europe, "going green" means being dependent on burning dangerous natural gas, dumping the dangerous natural gas waste carbon dioxide directly into the waste dump, the planetary atmosphere, and muttering all kinds of rhetoric about how "by 2030" or "by 2040" or "by 2050" one's country will rely on 100% so called "renewable energy." The year chosen after the "by" is usually - almost always - a year in which the speaker will be absolutely not involved in the task of providing energy.

I'm an old man, a veteran of "by 1990," and "by 2000" and "by 2010" rhetoric.

The rising gas prices resulting from Austria (and Germany) going green do not, of course, effect the people carrying on about "going green," by substituting dangerous natural gas for dangerous coal - so called "renewable energy" is completely dependent on access to gas - although coal prices are also spiking around the world. The people who suffer are poor people.

Going "green" means different things to different people. For example, I find this news item in the scientific journal Nature to be more worthy of The Onion than Nature:

Climate change to loom large in talks to form new German government. (Quirin Schiermeier, Nature News, September 27, 2021.)

The amusing - it would be amusing if it weren't so tragic - subtitle is this:

Strong results for green and liberal parties mean climate and energy policies are expected to feature heavily in upcoming coalition talks.

It contains this absurd text:

Climate change was a key issue in this election, and the new government will need to lay out a plan to achieve the country’s climate goals — a 65% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions relative to 1990 levels by 2030, and becoming carbon neutral by 2045. “Greens and liberals have different preferences as to the mix of market-based instruments, subsidies and regulatory law to achieve carbon neutrality over the next few decades,” says Ottmar Edenhofer, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

There's that "by 2030" language, coupled with obscene "percent talk," followed by "by 2045" promises that show contempt for the people who are now children but will be adults - should they survive energy poverty coupled with climate change - in 24 years.

The so called "Green" party in Germany was instrumental in being sure that no realistic policy for phasing out dangerous fossil fuels in Germany is possible. They demanded, and got, government agreement to shut the only source of energy that had any practical possibility of addressing climate change, nuclear energy. According to the Green Party, Chernobyl proved that nuclear energy is "too dangerous" even though the radiation death toll related the event over the last 35 years in Germany, and in fact everywhere else on the planet is dwarfed by the number of people who will die today from dangerous fossil fuel waste, aka "air pollution," between 18,000 and 19,000 people. Germany has a declared policy of phasing out coal "by 2030." They will phase out nuclear energy next year.

Do tell me, if you care, which form of energy is "too dangerous," coal or nuclear? Is it true on a planet where nuclear reactors have operated for well over half a century that nuclear energy is "too dangerous" but climate change isn't.

Two Czech intellectuals who escaped the former nation of Czechoslovakia during the Communist era have profoundly affected my thinking despite striking me as libertarians - I reject libertarian ideology - the first more strongly than the second. The first was a guy named Petr Beckmann, who was an electrical engineering professor at the University of Colorado, Petr Beckmann, who embraced the ideology of that nutty old biddy Ayn Rand, and claimed he knew more about Physics than Albert Einstein, but nonetheless wrote a book in 1970 that I read probably in the late 1970's or early 1980's, called "A History of Pi," that I found highly stimulating, if only because of its hilarious take downs of things like the Roman Empire, religion, and of course, communism. It also had a very enlightening discussion of what the title promised, the discovery and role of the constant Pi in human history. He also wrote a book devoted to the premise that opposing nuclear energy kills people, and although I never read it, I agree with the general premise. In 2021, I agree with the verifiable statement that opposing nuclear energy does indeed kill people. Petr Beckmann, who reified the concept evoked by the cliched idiom "thinking outside the box," sometimes to the edge of crazy, died in the 1990's. The "History of Pi" changed my thinking inasmuch as it made me do it, made think at all, as opposed to regurgitating the ideas of other people. I was a lazy little brat when I was young.

The second Czech intellectual who has had a far more profound influence on my thinking is Vaclav Smil, who is one of the clearest thinkers on the subject of energy and materials there is. I have not read any of his works without a deep appreciation of his realism; unlike most of the noise one hears as we face the interface between energy, climate, poverty and wealth, Smil states he "has nothing to sell." He is something of a free marketeer, and he is skeptical that governments can legislate technology. Although my admiration of Smil's thought is generally unbounded, and I agree with him that economic "growth" must stop, albeit naturally because of physical limits, I am glad that the Czech government disagrees with him on legislating technology while rejecting the role of the "market forces" that have become cultishly worshiped beginning in the last 5th of the 20th century well into the first 5th of the 21st.

To wit:

Czech support for nuclear becomes law

The subtitle:

Support for new nuclear build at the Czech Republic's Dukovany power plant has been signed into law by President Miloš Zeman. It is designed to remove market failures that stand in the way of the Czech Republic's goal to rely on nuclear energy for secure supply of power and heat.

Some more text from the brief news item:

The new law, approved by a large majority in the Chamber of Deputies on 16 September, allows a state-owned company to purchase electricity from new nuclear plants at a fixed rate for at least 30 years, with the possibility of extension. The power will be resold on the wholesale market and any profit or loss translated into an adjustment to power bills, although the government said it will set an upper limit on any extra cost. It is known as Lex Dukovany, after the power plant site where new build is planned. Zeman officially signed the law yesterday, bringing it into effect.

The Czech government and the International Energy Agency have both said this addresses market failures that inhibit the construction of both nuclear and renewable capacity.

Major drivers of the Czech Republic's pro-nuclear position are that the country needs to reduce the amount of coal it uses without prompting security of supply issues, such as an over-reliance on imports. The government has noted that renewable sources are limited by geographic factors. "In addition to stable electricity supplies," Lex Dukovany reads, "nuclear power plants also enable the provision of stable heat supplies, which is another advantage due to the extensive system of central heat supply in the Czech Republic."

Therefore, "Nuclear energy has been identified as the primary means of ensuring energy security in the Czech Republic in the context of achieving the goal of a climate-neutral EU by 2050 due to its ability to ensure low-carbon, stable and cheap electricity supplies..."

The "by 2050" rhetoric is depressing. It's way too late. The Czech policy also calls for getting 25% of its electricity "by 2038" from so called "renewable energy," at which time it will have, according to the plan, phased out coal and getting 58% of its electricity from nuclear - albeit with reduced dependence on dangerous natural gas than "green" Germany and "green" Austria - if there is dangerous natural gas available in 2038. I personally think the Czech could save money and time by foregoing the so called "renewable energy" and relying solely on nuclear energy. It alone is sustainable.

[John ONeill]

1. Belgium

Another bunch of Green vandals in Belgium - the country's politicians went about 500 days wrangling over a new coalition government, finally giving the Green Party its condition of support, the Energy Ministry. Belgium gets over half its electricity from nuclear, as a result of which its grams CO2/KWh figure is almost always far below that of its neighbours, excepting, of course, France's. https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/BE?wind=false&solar=false
The new Energy Minister is trying to ram through a deal to close all the reactors by 2025, and replace them with gas.
https://www.decouplepodcast.org/podcast/episode/22ec2915/the-belgian-greens-climate-own-goal-feat-rob-de-schutter

[NNadir]

2. European "greens" are generally uneducated bourgeois assholes...

...who are doing their best to work to make climate change even more intractable than it already is.

History will record them as the equivalent of medieval types who thought the best approach to the plague was to crowd into rat infested cathedrals to pray.