Abstract
Tickets, placards, and pestering didn't work. So nuclear activists in Germany now hope to stymie plans to sell to China a never-used nuclear fuel plant built near Frankfurt by buying it themselves–lock, stock, and barrel. Or at least that's what they say, sort of.
In what must be the world's first campaign of its kind, the activists have joined with various German politicians and celebrities to launch a Web site (hanauselberkaufen.de), asking for donations to help them buy the Hanau Fuel Element Factory.
Hanau selber kaufen, or “Buy Hanau ourselves,” is the name they've given the campaign, which is spearheaded by the German branch of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Campaigners hope to raise 50 million and one euros to buy the plant from German engineering goliath Siemens AG, which has long been trying to unload it. The offer is exactly one euro more than China's bid for the plant.
Construction of what was technically called the Hanau 2 plant began in 1991. Together with an already built structure, Hanau 1, the complex was designed to reprocess plutonium to make mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel for nuclear power stations. If completed, the plant would have been the biggest such facility in Europe. But Hanau 2 was mothballed in 1995 without ever going into service. (Hanau 1 operated from 1972 to 1991, but was closed after a long string of mishaps and accidents.) The Hanau plant itself does not include a nuclear reactor.
Nevertheless, German anti-nuclear activists say that even if China purchases the plant for peaceful purposes, a by-product of the MOX-making process is the separation of plutonium from spent uranium-fuel rods. “China could use the plant to create nuclear weapons, and we want to prevent that,” contends Ute Watermann, spokesperson for IPPNW and the Hanau campaign.
The interior of the plutonium processing plant in Hanau, Germany.
Critics also charge that the deal–which requires the okay of the German government–smacks of hypocrisy, since Berlin itself is committed to phasing out nuclear plants on German soil.
Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is under pressure from the Green Party, a junior coalition partner, to nix the deal. Social Democrat lawmaker and winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize Hermann Scheer has been another critic, saying the nuclear trade needs to be stopped: “The government needs to live up to its responsibilities,” he told Deutsche Welle radio.
Others don't see what all the fuss is about. They point out that China has had the nuclear bomb for about 40 years now. Stopping the sale of Hanau won't make a dent in China's nuclear program, they contend.
And some in the anti-nuclear camp also question the wisdom of IPPNW's campaign. They say such a public relations ploy simply makes the anti-nuclear movement a laughingstock. One German anti-nuclear campaigner told me it was just the latest in a series of “questionable” actions undertaken by IPPNW's German branch.
But people at IPPNW say these critics don't get what their effort is all about. “The action is satirical, but the subject matter is deadly serious,” wrote Xanthe Hall, an atomic weapons specialist at IPPNW, in response to questions from the Bulletin.
Hanau has long been an albatross around Siemens's neck, costing the conglomerate $630 million a year just in maintenance costs. Plans fell through in September 2001 to sell the plant to the Russians as part of a U.S.-Russian agreement in which each country agreed to dispose of at least 34 tons of military plutonium, a substantial portion of it through MOX fuel fabrication. The deal fizzled after the G-8 failed to pick up the $2 billion tab for Russia's MOX program. (Only the United States and France agreed to contribute, pledging a total of $225 million.)
But Siemens's hopes of selling Hanau were resurrected last December, when Schröder paid a state visit to China. Tagging along with the German leader was Siemens head Heinrich von Pierer, who, during the trip, confirmed that talks had begun with China on the sale of the plant.
Schröder said that he didn't see any reason why it could not happen. “It doesn't look like there is anything that will prevent it,” he said in China.
On the trip, Schröder did his utmost to act as cheerleader for the Chinese leadership, calling for lifting the European Union's arms embargo against the country. That embargo was imposed after the bloody crackdown on student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But “the new China is no longer the Tiananmen China,” Schröder opined, to the obvious pleasure of his Chinese hosts.
Back in Berlin, Schröder got an earful from his Green governing partners, who were incensed over the news. To mollify them, Schröder's party agreed that government approval of the Hanau sale would hinge on their demand that China formally agree to let the plant be supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Mark Gwozdecky, a spokesman for the IAEA, said the checks demanded by the Greens and the Social Democrats didn't make much sense. “I don't know what such controls onsite are supposed to achieve,” Gwozdecky told the Financial Times Deutschland in December. “China is a nuclear state and has sufficient fissile material for its arms program. So, why the controls?”
While Berlin waited for China's response to the demand for IAEA supervision in February, activists at IPPNW launched their stop-the-sale campaign.
Supporters who want to contribute are not asked to send money or give credit card numbers; instead they fax in their pledges to contribute a certain amount of money in case the 50-million-euros-plus-one goal is reached and the purchase can go ahead.
As of March 19, IPPNW had received pledges of 750,000 euros, which the organization said ought to be enough to put a “deposit” on Hanau.
As Hall puts it, IPPNW holds no illusions that it will actually purchase Hanau. “This is not a serious effort to buy Hanau. On the other hand, the action would not work (and the humor of it would be lost) if we were to say this in people's faces.”
Hall adds that even if sufficient funds were raised, Siemens would be unlikely to sell them the plant. “They are only interested in selling it to China because of the business in the nuclear field that would ensue as a consequence of the deal. The price is ridiculously low, less than a third of what it cost to build it.”
She says the IPPNW campaign has catapulted the proposed Hanau sale into Germany's media spotlight, sparking a public debate on a topic that otherwise would have been relegated to a dark media corner.
Susanne Ochse, a Greenpeace spokeswoman in Germany, agrees, saying the “fun” IPPNW effort has sparked “public awareness” about Hanau and increased media coverage. Ochse said Greenpeace Germany supports the campaign.
The increased scrutiny may just scuttle the sale. At first, the European Union turned a blind eye to the Berlin-Beijing nuclear deal–indeed, China is now the EU's third-largest non-European trading partner, with bilateral trade amounting to 115 million euros in 2002. But uproar among German Greens forced the EU's executive arm, the EU Commission, to probe whether the deal violates its export rules. EU law states that exporting materials that could be used for military purposes requires a permit–and Green European Parliament member Daniel Cohn-Bendit has written to the EU Commission arguing that the planned deal would “threaten military and other security interests of Europe and its allies.”
Spoof or serious, IPPNW's campaign has at least thrown a wrench in Siemens's works.