Expert: Surgery of nuclear power plants in Germany can be a serious obstacle to the country's economic growth in the medium term

As a result of a stop after an accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Germany is forced to import, according to the head of the federal network agency Matias Kurt, about 2500 MW of energy per day. Electricity comes from France, where atomic energy is given to 78% of energy generation, from the Czech Republic (34% of all electricity are produced at nuclear power plants) and Poland, where up to 94% of energy is produced on coal.

Sergey Kondratyev , head of the sector of the Economic Department of the Institute of Energy and Finance Foundation:

When analyzing the situation at the Fukushima-1 NPP, a very important factor is timely access to complete and reliable information, which allows to avoid inflating rumors, to involve the IAEA experts and other countries to the analysis of what is happening. Unfortunately, representatives of the TEPCO generating company, responsible for the operation of nuclear power plants, employees of relevant departments in Japan did not always provide the necessary information about the situation at the nuclear power plant (especially in the first days after the accident). However, this was more due to the desire to hide the information, but with the large scale of destruction as a result of the earthquake and tsunami. After accidents at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the USA in 1979 and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, companies operating in the nuclear industry seriously revised their information policy.

So, in Russia in cities near the nuclear power plants, information centers tell about the device of the nuclear power plant, information about the radiation background in real time is displayed on a special site on the Internet, etc. These measures provide the population with reliable information about the situation at the nuclear power plant, and avoid the spread of rumors. Largely precisely thanks to a focused information policy pursued in recent years, Rosatom Group of Companies managed to avoid panic among the population. Unlike a number of regions of the PRC and even many EU countries (for example, Finland), where the population, despite the preservation of the radiation background, began to stock up on iodine -containing drugs, a calm situation is maintained in the regions of the Far Eastern Federal District of the Russian Federation, which is not only a consequence of objective factors (preservation of the radiation background at normal), but also explanatory work carried out by the Rosatom Group profile departments.

When making a decision on the withdrawal of the old nuclear power plants, it is necessary to be guided not only by the general conditions (the life of the nuclear power plant, the characteristics of the installed equipment, etc.), but also the situation at each particular object. It is hardly possible to say that the accident at the Fukushima-1 NPP in Japan seriously changed the situation at German nuclear power plants (at least their operation did not become more dangerous). At the same time, the suspension of the nuclear power plant (without a serious preliminary analysis of their work) has already led to a deterioration in the situation in the German economy - the need to increase the purchase of electricity abroad, downtime of equipment, etc. In the case of a temporary prohibition into permanent and decision-making on the accelerated dispensing of the nuclear power plant, Germany may face the need to introduce restrictions on electrical consumption, the problems associated with the VES (non-expert load due to weather vibrations) will increase. Given the absence of a sufficient amount of reserve capacities, this can be a serious obstacle to the country's economic growth in the medium term.

Over the past years, the leading development of atomic energy has been considered as one of the most important measures to reduce the level of greenhouse gas emissions and generally reduce environmental loads. In fact, nuclear energy remains the only market alternative to the energy of fossil fuel, because Renewable energy sources in most countries are subsidized either at the expense of other consumers or at the expense of the state. Therefore, a decrease in the inputs of new objects in the nuclear energy (and an increase in the withdrawal of the deadline of the old nuclear power plant) will be compensated by an increase in thermal generation capacities (mainly coal), which may extremely negatively affect the environmental situation, and will not allow the goals established by the world community to reduce the anthropogenic load on the climate.

Problems at the Japanese Fukushima-1 NPP began after a destructive earthquake that occurred on March 11, which caused failure of reactors cooling systems, which led to fires and explosions at the station and a radiation leak. From next week, American drones are supposed to be used to measure radiation over Fukushima-1.

On April 6, the leakage of infected water from the Fukushima-1 NPP was completely stopped. Water flowed into the Pacific Ocean through a crack in the foundation of the second power unit “Fukushima-1”. Specialists Tokyo Electric Power Company cracked, pumping about 1.5 thousand sodium silvers, also known as “liquid glass” into the damaged foundation. On April 7, the TEPCO NPP operator began pumping gaseous nitrogen to the first reactor to prevent hydrogen explosion.