The news magazine Cicero has been locked in litigation with Robert Habeck’s Ministry of Economic Affairs, seeking the release of documents that might shed light on the April shut-down of the final operating nuclear power plants in Germany. Ministry officials have refused to cooperate, but yesterday a court in Berlin finally ordered them to hand over whatever they could find.
Now that they have done so, their reasons for obstruction have become a little bit clearer.
Some recent history: On March 7th 2022, the Ministry published a ‘Review of the Continued Operation of Nuclear Power Plants Due to the Ukraine War‘, which made the case for completing Merkel’s nuclear phase-out and shutting down the plants despite the impending energy crisis. This review concludes with a brief “assessment” of the implications for “energy and climate policy”. If you read carefully, you’ll notice a strange thing: the two paragraphs which follow this heading abound with remarks on energy production, but say basically nothing about climate or emissions.
The documents Habeck’s Ministry have released since the court order reveal why. BILD has seen an earlier draft of this review, and notes that there was a originally a third paragraph at the very end, which Ministry officials deleted before publication.

It was here that they explained the emissions implications of phasing out nuclear power (emphasis added):
With regard to the reduction in CO2 emissions – sometimes used as an argument in this discussion – the approximately 30 TWh of additional nuclear electricity per year from 2024 onwards would result in about 2,530 million tonnes of CO2 reduction in the German electricity supply. Yet there would be no European-wide CO2 savings, as the energy industry is subject to EU emissions trading and the cap in the EU-ETS is set independently of a possible lifetime extension [for nuclear plants] in Germany.
EU cap-and-trade bureaucracy aside, keeping Germany’s last remaining nuclear plants in operation would have reduced German emissions four-and-a-half times more than Habeck’s highly controversial and idiotic Building Energy Ordinances are slated to save, under the most optimistic assumptions, by 2030.
It’s no wonder they wanted to bury this assessment.
Furthermore, since the nuclear phase-out, Germany has become a net electricity importer: 17.69% of its imported electricity is generated by foreign nuclear plants, mostly in France. These sources now represent more than 4% of all German power. In other words, the country is currently consuming more nuclear power than it was before it shut down its last nuclear plants at Isar 2, Emsland and Neckarwestheim 2.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is clown world.
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This is not at all a clown world. Habeck is a self-confessed Germany-hater and if he acts to the detriment of both Germany and Germans, that’s certainly an absolutely intentional side effect of the orders he’s supposed to execute. He supposed to force the sale of heat pumps and to further the creation of wind and solar farms. He’s not supposed to reduce German CO₂ emissions effectively, that’s just the pretext which is to be used for the three aforementioned tasks.
Are ordinary Germans going to make the same mistake as those in the thirties and say they were not aware? ——Wake up ———- How is this Energiewende working out for you?
As ordinary German, you’ll sooner or later realize that the West is composed of two kinds of people:
Those who have been brainwashed to hate you since their earliest childhood.
Those who hate you absolutely hysterically because of this.
That’s nicely shown in your text with the completely spurious Nazi-reference. So-called Germany, however, is just a large scale social lab where the recipes which will be used against you tomorrow are being tested. Hence: Wake up. It’s your leaders who are doing this.
No——Not “spurious” at all. ——-In both instances propaganda is the key. Nazi propaganda back then and Green propaganda now. So how is that “energiewende” working for Germans? Not so good huh? Propaganda is a powerful tool which is why governments love it so much. ——Ruling the world or saving the world are pretty much the same thing.
Germany decided to shut down all its nuclear plants because of a massive earthquake half a world away, an earthquake that could not possibly happen in fault-line free Germany. Madness, all done under the pathetic Frau Merkel, of course. Now the green eco-loonies in Germany won’t let the government build new plants. Energy-wise, Germany is up the brown creek without any toilet paper.
Fukashima was an industrial accident not a disaster. Very few people needed to be evacuated, they chose, or were forced to leave their homes due to a fear of radiation, not an actual danger from radiation.
Similarly after Chernobyl the leading causes of death were suicide and alcoholism due to people giving up hope in the future because they believed they were going to develop cancer due to exposure to radiation. At the time groups like Greenpeace predicted tens or hundreds of thousands of excess cancer deaths in Europe 20-30 years later. It’s now been over 30 years and these deaths haven’t happened.
Even if a nuclear power plant went into meltdown in Europe or the US with a bit of common sense it wouldn’t be a major disaster.
And a cynic might observe that the “Greens” are probably happy about the development of wildlife in the Pripyat region around the old Chernobyl plant, now that there aren’t many humans there.
20,000 (approx) died so you should not say it wasn’t a disaster. What it wasn’t was a Nuclear disaster, as almost all who died were killed by the tidal wave. Nuclear is actually the safest way to produce energy.( but you know that already) It is estimated that hundreds of thousands have suffered major lung disease and death having worked with coal. But these things are all relative. Without coal we would be in the middle ages dying young of preventable diseases and after a short life of back breaking labour. ———–Basically you cannot have it all ways. A good analogy is motor cars. Sure some people will die in accidents but overall they are a huge benefit to society. There are risks in all energy production but the world NEEDS energy
The existing stock of nuclear power plants does not look safe to me. Fukushima was spun as being due to “an old design” but pretty much all of the existing stock have the same issue that they won’t behave well if there’s a disorderly shutdown with loss of cooling system. If there’s a Carrington event could we not end up with hundreds of simultaneous Fukushimas? At this point nuclear advocates will often change the subject and talk about thorium, or small modular reactors that fail safe, and that’s fine but that’s not the existing stock of reactors.
Existing reactors are safe. Fukushima failed because its back up generators got flooded by the massive earthquake and tsunami which stopped coolant being circulated. It’s true that new nuclear plants will always be even safer than old but at this time the green eco lunatics would have you believe they’re all a menace.
As for a Carrington Event incident damaging nuclear power stations, highly unlikely, solar flares are not going to burn through metres of concrete.
Wouldn’t it be, though, that a Carrington event would essentially kill all digital means of command and control? I doubt nuclear power stations have a manual operating system available.
The complete destruction of the digital world would kill more people than hundreds of Fukushimas, seeing as how there were exactly 0 deaths from acute radiation exposure.
https://off-guardian.org/2023/09/27/major-victory-for-9-11-family-uk-attorney-general-withdraws-decision-on-application-for-new-inquest/
Not a good week for Attorney General Prentis.
Well, they didn’t do a good job of hiding it. Here’s an easily accessible site that tells it’s own story: https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electricity-data/chart/conventional_power_generation/21.08.2023/28.08.2023/today/ Where else in Europe is so much brown coal (lignite) being used?
And I’m not advertising this group as such: https://nachhaltigkeit.deutschebahn.com/en/green-transformation but if they are using up their slice of “green trading”, someone else must be losing to cross balance it there!
Hide, Omit, Deceive, Misinform, Lie, Distort, Pretend, Deny, Mislead, Exclude, Neglect, Overlook. —————But it is all for the “Greater Good” ofcourse. The end justifies the means, so a pack of lies according to Green Ideology is not just a good thing, it is a necessary requirement.
Robert Habeck has stated publicly that he hates Germany.
So keeping the nukes open – and saving more than four times as much emissions as his own Green lunacy – as well as maintaining some energy independence – is obviously the way to go.
But not for Robert Habeck.
Why isn´t he fired?