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meA woman, a man, a long fight. The woman is technology historian Veronika Wendland, born 1966, witty, combative, sparking with bad jokes. They call themselves green and left, but there is something about them that the left and green can hardly bear: they want nuclear power because, in their opinion, climate change cannot succeed without nuclear power. And she sits on the board of the pro-atom Nuklearia association. For some Greens, it could be in the AfD right away, that’s so bad.
Konrad schuller
Political correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.
The man is nuclear technician Rainer Moormann. He’s half a generation older than Wendland and very different. On the phone he speaks in a low, gentle voice, like someone who would rather listen than tell. I would never interrupt anyone, but that shouldn’t fool anyone. He can fight too, and not for nothing is one of the greats of the anti-nuclear movement.
His trophy is one of the great projects of the era of nuclear euphoria at the beginning of the Federal Republic of the last century: the Jülich pebble-bed reactor, which he shot down in 2008 with a devastating safety report. So it’s no wonder he had a long discussion with Veronika Wendland.
But now the two have come together. In July they called for the German nuclear phase-out to be postponed. Both together, “one defender of nuclear energy, the other critic of nuclear energy.” This is how they describe themselves in the opening credits of their appeal. The heart of the matter: The remaining six German nuclear power plants will not be shut down as planned by the end of 2022 at the latest, but will continue to operate until around 2030. Reason: Technically, renewables are still in their infancy.
Above all, there is a lack of large energy storage facilities in winter, and if it continues like this, you will be stuck in coal and gas without nuclear power. Wendland and Moormann therefore demand that the nuclear power option be kept open until 2030. Then you need to check how far green technology is and you can decide: shut down when everything looks mature, or continue nuclear power when there is no country in sight.
They both go to the limit of pain. Veronika Wendland agrees that this could really take down the atom that she is so passionately fighting for. Rainer Moormann agrees that he could continue.
Sudden change of direction as the beginning of life
Before that, the dispute had escalated. In January, Wendland tweeted that uranium can also be extracted from seawater for nuclear power plants, and Moormann replied wryly: Sure, after all, the Nazis would have wanted to distill gold from seawater. From Wendland’s point of view, that was the nasty old slander equation: Atomic friend equals Hitler fan, that’s a standard shitstorm saying. So he let the club rock backwards: What about wind power, the son of the green? “May I remind you,” he tweeted to Moormann, that the Nazis, for their part, “loved the plans for the Reichswindkraftturm.” Nazi for Nazi, poison for poison. So it went on. Wendland accused Moormann of “Murphy primitivism” and mocked the “radiation scare scene panic speech.” Moormann chided her for being a “cheering propagandist in the nuclear lobby,” and then hit the fascist notch again. “I come more and more to the assessment,” she wrote, “that your articles critical of the left on the AfD are only tactically motivated.” High-energy particles on a collision course in an irradiated atmosphere.
