Lieber Hannes: Atomenergie mag wohl vergleichsweise ‘sauber, effizient und sicher’ sein. Man braucht freilich kein Wirtschaftsliberaler zu sein, um zu verstehen, dass Atomenergie - vor allem die Dekommission alter Atomkraftwerke und die Lagerung des Atommülls - noch immer sauteuer ist - und zwar sehr viel teurer als fossile Brennstoffe, die der Menschheit noch für viele Jahrhunderte zur Verfügung stehen werden. Der Grund, warum wir mit diesem Quatsch weitermachen, ist ganz einfach: alle Leute und alle Unternehmen begehren billige anstatt teurer Energie. Und das ist genau was die Leute wollen, d.h. der Markt wählt, wenn der Staat ihnen die Wahl lässt.

Ich empfehle Dir zur Erhellung den Kommentar von Lawrence Solomon “Why Jews like climate policy”, der mich an Deine Philosophie erinnert. Larry beschreibt den naiven Enthusiasmus für die keynesianische Energie-Planwirtschaft - und warum diese Begeistung Fehl am Platz ist:

“Jews are pro-nuclear because of Israel,” a Jewish colleague and former federal energy official told me near the beginning of my environmental career, to help me in my puzzlement as to why so many Jews supported this technology. Nuclear reactors, from my perspective, had nothing going for them — they produced ruinously expensive electricity, they were an environmental pariah, and they were being built by dictatorial regimes — at the time by the military junta in Argentina, by Ceausescu in Romania, and by Zia in Pakistan — as a cover to develop nuclear bombs.

The penny dropped for me the instant my colleague finished his sentence, as it would have for many Jews like me, who have an instinctive desire to protect Israel. This was in the early 1980s, after two OPEC oil embargoes had sent the Western world into recession. The Arab states had been using the “oil weapon” against countries that had relations with Israel, with the explicit goal of destroying Israel.

And it was working. Poor countries in Africa and Asia, to avoid being cut off from oil, had fallen in line with the Arab states by severing diplomatic relations with Israel and supporting anti-Israel resolutions in the United Nations. Western countries, though they maintained diplomatic relations with Israel, were beginning to resent the costs of their relationship. Many Western Jews, hoping to lessen their countries’ dependence on Middle East oil, saw nuclear as the answer. These Jews supported renewables and energy conservation, too, but wind and solar were then seen as technologies of the distant future. Only nuclear seemed to hold the large-scale energy potential needed to wean the West off oil.

The view that nuclear power plants could replace the West’s need for Middle East oil, or in any way protect Israel, proved a fantasy. Being wildly uneconomic, the industry was doomed to fail, costing ratepayers and taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Even if endless subsidies had been able to perpetuate the nuclear industry, the West would have remained reliant on the Middle East because nuclear reactors produce electricity, not oil. Weaning off oil would have entailed replacing the internal combustion engine with electric motors and an overhaul of the West’s entire transportation system. That didn’t happen. More here

(Dr. Benny Peiser)