Nei til Atomvåpen - Dorothee Menzeners foredrag

The dangers that nuclear power harbours for mankind, both in war and in its so-called peaceful use to generate energy, cannot be overestimated. The fight against nuclear power and, with it, the fight against nuclear corporations and their lobbies is a worldwide, international concern. As these corporations operate globally, local and non-networked initiatives against them will achieve little. I am therefore very pleased to see that, at least since the terrible disaster in Fukushima, those involved in the many anti-nuclear movements throughout the world are increasingly communicating with each other. They are working together to increase the pressure on their governments and on the nuclear industries in an effort to ensure that we all take joint responsibility for future generations and raise awareness of the dangers of the radioactive heritage we are leaving behind. Just this summer, I had the opportunity to make close contacts to Japan, where I participated in an event similar to this one. Talking to like-minded people in Japan, many of whom are still in shock after the nuclear disaster last March, brought home one thing above all: It is hugely important that we do more to share our experiences, exchange information and coordinate the anti-nuclear movement beyond national borders and beyond the official channels of media and information. After all, neither the global corporations that are driving nuclear technology nor the dangers of radiation are constricted by national borders. Therefore, on behalf of The Left Party in Germany and its parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, I would like to extend my warmest thanks for this invitation and the opportunity to speak to you today.

The Left Party in Germany, my party, is a social movement that stands for the fight for peace, social justice and for the preservation and protection of our biosphere. We are therefore fighting for a social order that must overcome the unbridled force of global capitalism and its exploitation of people and natural resources.

In 2007, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), based in East Germany, and the mainly West German Electoral Alternative for Work and Social Justice (WASG), merged to form The Left Party. We have been represented in the German Parliament, the Bundestag, since 2005. In the 2009 federal elections, we won a solid 11% of the votes and gained 76 of the 621 seats in the Bundestag.

This weekend, The Left Party is holding its party conference, where it will adopt its provisionally final agenda. It was therefore not easy to decide who would represent us here. As you can see, I was the candidate we chose and I am very pleased it was so. I just hope that my English is good enough for us to have an in-depth discussion.

I am a Member of the German Bundestag and the energy policy spokesperson of the Left Party parliamentary group. I come from the federal state of Lower Saxony, where three "final storage sites" for nuclear waste are either already in operation or being planned. A fourth site is located just beyond the state border, in Saxony-Anhalt. I got involved in anti-nuclear policy at an early age. Just like peace policy, it is an issue that I have been committed to all my life. I grew up within sight of a nuclear power plant, or to be more precise, the construction site of the Biblis nuclear power plant in Hessen. Even though we children were just 6 or 7 years old, it was a big issue in our lives, and unlike our parents we were sceptical about it and asked lots of questions. Furthermore US nuclear weapons were, and still are stored close to my home town. That was a major concern for us young people in the early 80s. I was 20 when the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl happened. When I moved to Lower Saxony the following year, the dispute surrounding Gorleben, the planned final storage site for high-level radioactive waste, had been going on for ten years, but was still as active, diverse and lively as ever. It continues to this day.

I am a member of the Lüchow-Dannenberg citizens' initiative, which is the group that helped ignite the German anti-nuclear movement with its fight against the storage site Gorleben, located in its district. The group has organised many mass protests and still has the power to do so today. I am also a member of x-tausendmal-quer, an initiative that organises sit-ins and blockades against the increasing number of Castor containers bringing high-level radioactive waste to the Gorleben interim storage site. I am also part of the Schacht Konrad working group, which aims to raise awareness about two final storage sites: the authorised final storage site for low and medium-level nuclear waste in Schacht Konrad, an old iron-ore mine in the major industrial city of Salzgitter in Lower Saxony; and the damaged ASSE II final storage site for the same kind of nuclear waste, located a few kilometres away.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, we, The Left Party, were invited here today to speak about the situation in Germany regarding its phase-out of high-risk nuclear energy and to present our party's position on this matter.

To do so, I would like to explain the developments that have taken place in Germany in recent years. The lifetimes of our nuclear power plants were tied to virtually unlimited operating licenses from the very start. It was only in 2000, with the SPD-Green coalition government's legislative proposal (the "nuclear consensus"), that each nuclear power plant was limited to an average operating life of 36 years. It was called a nuclear consensus, not because it was a consensus between the government and its citizens but because it was a consensus between the then Federal Government and the nuclear corporations. The proposed law was heavily criticised by many people from the anti-nuclear movement, including me. After all, it was also a guarantee for the continued operation of all nuclear power plants until they had used up their legally guaranteed residual electricity volumes. This nuclear consensus, which envisioned that the civilian use of nuclear power in Germany would come to an end by 2023, was in effect until the federal elections of 2009.

As those federal elections drew nearer, the conservative (CDU) and liberal (FDP) parties made it clear in their campaigns that they would relax the lifetime limitations and extend nuclear power plant lifetimes. Immediately after the elections, in which these two parties gained the governing majority, the law was effectively suspended and the scheduled shutdowns did not take place.

During the 2009 election campaign, the lifetime extensions announced by the CDU and FDP met with wide-scale resistance. Farmers from the region around Gorleben and members of the Lüchow-Dannenberg citizens' initiative spent a week driving in tractors from Wendland near Gorleben to Berlin, to protest against the extension. That was one of the many campaigns I have taken part in over recent years. I participate in this kind of action because I firmly believe that neither parliamentary activities nor government action alone will be sufficient to end this nuclear madness. The power of the corporations behind this technology will only be broken when there is enough resistance on the streets and among the public. Over 50,000 people took part in the closing rally. In April 2010 about 120,000 people formed a human chain between two nuclear power plants in protest against the government's nuclear policy. In September another 100,000 people took part in a mass demonstration in Berlin against the lifetime extension. There were also large demonstrations in other cities. Even groups that had never before been involved in this issue joined in the protests against the lifetime extension - one such group is the association of municipal energy suppliers, including the CDU members involved.

But all these protests were in vain. In October 2010 the lifetimes were legally extended by an average of 12 years, in blatant contradiction to the wishes of the clear majority of the population. This whole process was an extreme example of lobbying, with representatives of the energy corporations forcefully asserting their interests and those of the nuclear industry in parliamentary and government circles. Even Norbert Röttgen, Germany's conservative environment minister, later commented on this period in an interview by saying, and I quote: "That was an experience of lobbying and the representation of economic interests… It was very clear, extremely intense, and had a lot of money behind it."

Officially, the Federal Government justified the lifetime extension with its Energy Concept. This concept said that nuclear energy was needed as a bridging technology to prevent electricity shortages until renewable energies had expanded sufficiently to cover supply. You may well ask: "Why nuclear power, of all things?" If you did, you would undoubtedly hear the wrong answer: "It is environmentally friendly and has a small carbon footprint." A look at the indigenous peoples in uranium mining areas, at the contaminated regions in Chernobyl, Majak, Fukushima and at any interim storage site proves that this is an absolute lie. The dangers of nuclear energy and possible accidents in technologically completely outdated nuclear power plants were of as little interest to the Federal Government as the unresolved issue of what to do with nuclear waste. It paid no attention to the expert knowledge of all the environmental associations. It even ignored that of the German authorities and official government advisors who have shown time and again that the justification for the bridging technology is absurd, and that the lifetime extension of nuclear power plants is actually counterproductive to the switch to renewable energies. Not a single voice was heard - a nonsense beyond compare.

At this stage I should emphasise that the lifetime extension of the nuclear power plants was one of the most unpopular decisions this Federal Government has made. It caused icy opposition not only from the majority of the population but also from among the government's own ranks. And this was in the immediate run-up to five state elections.

That was the situation as it stood on 11 March 2011, the day of the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan.

Appearing in front of cameras the next day, Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel, the environment minister and the economics minister suddenly appeared profoundly shocked that the disaster in Fukushima had proved that the residual risks of nuclear energy could actually become reality - even though they had been warned of this possibility repeatedly in the months before. The Federal Government decided to shut down the eight oldest nuclear reactors for three months and ordered stress tests to be carried out at all nuclear reactors. They effectively abolished their own lifetime extension on that day, and announced that they would draw up a new Atomic Energy Act with new lifetimes for all nuclear power plants by the end of June.

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This initiated a wide-scale social debate that involved calculations of how quickly nuclear power could be phased out - which came to very different results. The Left Party long ago took a clear stand against nuclear energy. We called for a prompt, irreversible phase-out of nuclear energy. Greenpeace called for the last nuclear power plant to be shut down in 2015, the Greens were for 2017, the Social Democratic Party said 2020. A media battle started between the lobby groups of the nuclear and large-scale energy industry on the one side and the environmental associations, municipal energy suppliers and ecologically motivated parties on the other. The German Atomic Forum, the nuclear industry's main lobby group, and the main lobby group of German industry attempted to turn media sentiment back in their favour with ridiculous arguments and threatening behaviour and tried to save as much profit as they could from the maelstrom of public rejection. Thus, Germans had to put up with fear-mongering from the energy corporations, who claimed that in winter Germany would be hit by widespread power cuts if the lifetime extension was reversed. At the same time, the industry tried to reassure the public that a disaster like the one in Japan could not possibly happen in Germany, as the country could never be hit by a tsunami of that size.

In June this year the Federal Government positively whipped a new Atomic Energy Act and several bills that affect all existing energy legislation through the Bundestag at unprecedented speed.

Ultimately, The Left Party was unfortunately the only party in the German Bundestag to weigh up all the problems associated with nuclear energy: from the billions in subsidies that nuclear power has received in the past decades, to the scandals surrounding the final storage of nuclear waste, to the costs for society as a whole, to the risks of a nuclear disaster, to the fact that in the vicinity of nuclear power plants there are significantly increased rates of cancer, to the outrageously inflated and consumer-hostile electricity prices, to the billions in profits being raked in by the energy corporations - the list goes on and on. And of course we must not forget the fatal impact of the completely outdated European treaty EURATOM. All that the Federal Government has done, in effect, is to agree with the Greens and the Social Democrats to revert back to the previous situation on nuclear phase-out - which is to retain nuclear electricity until 2022. What a lazy compromise. Not even the Greens, the party that evolved from the environmental movement and had just recently been pushing for a phase-out by 2017, remained true to themselves. They let themselves be exploited by the Federal Government so that it could secure this compromise.

But what does the phase-out of nuclear power actually mean? Every year that nuclear power plants continue operating, they remain a threat and increase the mountain of nuclear waste. There can therefore only be one reasonable claim: phase-out nuclear energy fast. Or even immediately.

The Left Party has coined the phrase "a prompt and irreversible nuclear phase-out". In contrast to the anti-nuclear movement in Germany - which has every right to call for an immediate nuclear phase-out - a political party, and especially a socialist party that represents the interests of workers, must weigh up the situation carefully. As long as the majority of the German population, not even just our supporters, are unwilling or unable to cope with electricity shortages (particularly in the highly industrial south) and as long as they fear with good cause that factories could relocate as a result, it is our duty to say what kind of phase-out is possible. It should be as fast as possible, avoid gaps in supply and not require imports of nuclear energy. We have shown that the last nuclear power plant in Germany can go offline not in 2017, not in 2020 and definitely not as late as 2022 - but by the end of 2014. And that without causing power cuts, without importing expensive electricity and without driving electricity prices to exorbitant heights. That is what we mean by prompt. It is not an immediate phase-out; it is a compromise for which we have understandingly received criticism from the anti-nuclear movement. Because in view of all the problems and dangers, calling for an immediate phase-out is entirely justified and makes perfect sense. We have presented a seven-point plan which details the exact steps necessary to achieve a phase-out by 2014. And we have not just produced this out of thin air, but have carefully calculated it with experts from environmental associations. The plan starts off by specifying shut-down dates for all nuclear power plants. This should be accompanied by building up the necessary, efficient capacities of natural gas power plants, which can really function as a bridging technology, based on combined heat and power generation and active load management to regulate electricity demand. If renewable energies continue to advance at the same pace as they are today, there will not be any supply shortages.

In Austria, the ban on nuclear energy is laid down in the constitution. As we have had first-hand experience in Germany of the short-term political arbitrariness that our government applies to these decisions, and because the current Federal Government has already reversed a nuclear phase-out decision once, we call for the ban on nuclear energy to be laid down in Germany's constitution, the Basic Law. We have already tabled just such a bill in the Bundestag. But it was rejected by all other parties. So much for the reliability of politics. Laying down in our Basic Law the ban on nuclear technology for military use and for generating energy is what we understand by a truly irreversible nuclear phase-out. It is highly unlikely that there would ever again be enough public and therefore parliamentary support to provide the two-thirds majority needed to eliminate this passage from the Basic Law.

But we also need to take further steps which require a solid political will. We need a democratic energy supply. For us this means, above all: having municipal and regional power companies that use renewable energies, nationalising the whole power grid, and stripping the assets of the four large German energy corporations, whose unfair price and infrastructure policies have for decades been blocking progress in efficient and renewable energy supply and ripping off consumers. Advisory councils formed by environmental and consumer groups, trade unions and elected representatives could oversee the process and, with binding codetermination rights, help to drive forward the switch to renewable energies on the federal, state and municipal level. If we combined that with a shift in the employment policy of the renewable energy industry towards collective wage agreements and securing trade union rights and good jobs, then we in Germany would have the opportunity to revitalise our structurally weak regions with regional value-added. We could have wind and solar farmers instead of Vatenfall destroying whole swathes of land to get its hands on more lignite. This is all feasible and, in our opinion, urgently necessary from an environmental and a social perspective. Indeed, if we want to achieve intergenerational justice there is no alternative.

I would like to look at this important point of intergenerational justice in more detail by using the example of the problem of nuclear waste - a problem that is also currently a subject of debate for you here in Norway. First of all, however, I would like to encourage you to do everything in your power to reject a nuclear energy programme here in Norway. Even if there isn't a single incident during a plant's entire working life, the waste of your research reactors alone shows you the plague this technology leaves in its wake. In Germany we have hundreds of containers (Castors) full of high-level radioactive waste - many thousands of spent fuel rods that are still several hundred degrees hot, that permanently emit all kinds of radiation and that nobody knows how to store safely for the thousands of years they will continue to emit radiation. Every country that operates nuclear power plants faces the same situation.

Medical waste, waste from research reactors, whole sections of buildings, radioactive sewage, even every glove and towel that has been used in a radiation area of a nuclear power plant is radioactive waste and has to be stored somewhere. Despite the threshold values for radioactive emissions it must always be borne in mind that any dose, no matter how low, has the potential to destroy genes and endanger our health. It is not a question of whether radiation is harmful or not; it is always harmful. The probability of actual harm is greater with larger doses, but the danger is always there. That is why even minimally contaminated waste, such as waste from research reactors, must be stored safely.

In Germany this problem has been solved in a simple, grossly irresponsible manner that has produced an imminent environmental disaster. Without much ado, ASSE, an old salt mine, was declared a test mine, and nuclear power plant operators were able to sink their weak and medium-level radioactive waste there at ridiculously low prices. The barrels used to store the waste are simple sheet-metal barrels. Some even broke open as they were tipped into the deep shaft from a wheel loader. The operators of this pit were supposed to carry out technological research into the final storage of nuclear waste in salt. In actual fact, however, the mine became an illegal, uncontrolled waste dump for nuclear power plant operators. There isn't even a clear inventory to tell us what has been dumped there over the years. It is a scandal of unparalleled proportions. The operators always insisted that the mine was safe and that they were absolutely sure that the waste stored there could never become a threat to the biosphere. The mine is now in danger of collapsing, and a huge amount of groundwater is penetrating the mine structure and washing through the storage chambers. Radioactive brine has to be intercepted in the mine. An emergency plan had to be drawn up that foresees filling the mine with cement. But before that happens, the authorities want to try and remove all the waste to prevent the long-term contamination of the whole area. The estimated costs are at least €6 billion, and it obviously won't be the nuclear power plant operators who foot the bill but the taxpayers. Studies that were carried out last year provided evidence that there is already an increased rate of childhood leukaemia in the area around the damaged storage site. Official reports claim, however, that radioactive particles in groundwater around the mine and in the outgoing air of the mine are currently below the threshold values. The Federal Office for Radiation Protection is unable to explain this phenomenon. Another so-called final storage site in Morsleben, not far from the ASSE salt mine, also has problems with incoming water.

A salt mine was also chosen to store the high-level radioactive waste from German nuclear power plants. In the 70s, the location for a future final storage site was decided, not based on geological and scientific considerations, but on opportunistic reasons of structural policy. Geologists and other experts had come up with a choice of several possible locations, based on technological and safety-related aspects. This selection was then to be scrutinised in more depth to find out whether the sites were theoretically suitable for final storage. The location that was finally selected was not mentioned in any of these lists. Gorleben was close to the border with East Germany and a structurally weak region. In the eyes of the government at the time, this made it the perfect place for nuclear waste, since public resistance was expected to be low. This turned out not to be the case. The opaque and seemingly arbitrary manner in which the government selected the storage site in close collaboration with the nuclear industry incited the wrath of the people in Wendland.

Gorleben has become a symbol of the people's distrust of the proponents of nuclear power and the nuclear industry. A Committee of Inquiry in the German Bundestag is currently investigating the mysterious circumstances in which Gorleben was selected as the storage site in the 70s, and trying to find out in what way the geological and scientific reports were manipulated to back up this decision. I am a member of this committee. Many of our suspicions are being confirmed as we work our way through the thousands of files and notes, and question the people who were involved in this decision and worked on the reports. At times, we are so shocked by what we hear that words fail us. Geologists were bullied out of their departments for making statements on the salt mine in Gorleben that the government did not want to hear. Scientists were pressured into deleting from their reports passages that spoke against the site, or told to cast the information in a different light.

Unofficially it has long been known that Gorleben is not suitable as a final storage site. And yet, year after year, millions of euros are poured into further research and exploratory work - in 2012, the total will come to €75 million. And why? Because the nuclear industry needs this exploration mine as proof that the government is looking for a final storage site, which in turn is a prerequisite for all nuclear power plants in Germany to receive operating licenses. Gorleben is therefore still being explored and every year several Castor containers arrive at the public interim storage site from the French reprocessing plant in La Hague. The population rightly still believe - despite all avowals of the Federal Government that this is an open-ended process - that facts are being made up, and that the final storage site will be set up illegally. When the annual Castor transports arrive at the interim storage site set up in Gorleben, around 50,000 citizens meet 20,000 policemen. This large public campaign against nuclear power is made up of school children, students, farmers, academics, senior citizens, environmental groups and whole communities in the vicinity of the planned final storage site for high-level radioactive waste. And we are now beginning to experience the dangers that this interim storage site alone represents. Radiation levels at Gorleben are barely under the permitted annual dose of radiation, even though only a small part of its capacity is being used. What's more, recent studies have revealed that significantly more boys than girls are being born in the area around Gorleben. This effect is generally connected to radioactive emissions from nuclear power plants and clearly shows the dangers of even just interim storage sites. The responsible authorities claim (as authorities everywhere do) that there is no proof of a connection between this anomaly and the interim storage site.

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The scandals surrounding our damaged final storage site and the lack of transparency and manipulations surrounding Gorleben have created a deep sense of distrust. In fact, it runs so deep that the anti-nuclear movement, which is of course now calling for a new search for other locations and other concepts for final storage, is unwilling to accept those that have been involved so far (the nuclear industry and the Federal Government) to head this procedure. So we believe that there is an urgent need here to fundamentally restructure the whole issue of storing nuclear waste and to make it democratic. If Germany is to ever have confidence in a storage concept for nuclear waste, it must be one based on public debate.

Of course, The Left Party has also given the matter of permanent storage a great deal of thought. The responsibility we have to future generations alone means that we must take a realistic approach to dealing with this issue, even though we are against nuclear power.

We call for a new public debate on how to deal with nuclear waste. It should begin by analysing the mistakes that were made in the past that have led to today's disastrous state of affairs. That also means that all those who have made the decisions on this issue so far must be disqualified from the start. The second step would be to find a way of dealing with nuclear waste, and to reach this decision transparently and with full participation. There are many questions that have to be clarified: Must it be possible to retrieve nuclear waste from a storage site or not? Should we store the waste close to the surface, in bunkers for example, or in deep geological formations? What kinds of host rock are suitable? And so on. The current state of scientific and technological knowledge is clearly decisive in this matter, but there is also an ethical side to be considered. Can we assume that future generations will have other and better methods available to them than we have today? Do we then leave it up to them to make nuclear waste safe much more quickly? Or perhaps we do not trust in future generations to have the necessary social stability (considering this stability would need to last for thousands of years). That is, do we view this approach as irresponsible, and should we put our faith in geology instead? Once we have reached a conclusion on these criteria, then we would have to look for possible places throughout the country that would meet all the necessary criteria. We would then have to get the consent of the local municipalities, retaining their right to appeal, to further investigate whether exploration would be possible here or not. Only when these processes have been completed could we then decide on one or several locations. In all cases, the only option is to include the population in the process because this is the only way that trust can be gained and that we can avoid repeating past mistakes. We believe that it is not acceptable to store waste produced in Germany in a different country.

Ladies and Gentlemen, as you can see, the problem of nuclear waste is a mammoth task. To truly do justice to the debate, I would have to go on for hours and we would then have to share our experiences and opinions. But unfortunately this is not possible in the time I have for this speech.

I would therefore like to address a different point, one that is the root of the anti-nuclear movement all over the world.

There is a research reactor in Berlin called the BER-II reactor. I submitted an interpellation to the German Federal Government a few weeks ago to get information on the state of the reactor and on what happens to its fuel rods. In doing so, I found out something that has so far not been made public. This research reactor (and evidently others as well) have a trade agreement with the US regarding the fuel rods it uses. The reactor operators get the fuel rods from the US and transport the spent fuel rods back there - to the nuclear plants in Savannah River Site, Colorado. As I am sure you all know, the nuclear plants in Savannah River Site were part of the US nuclear weapons program and also supplied tritium for atomic bombs. This plant is allegedly only used for civilian purposes today but the agreements that the reactor's operating company have with the US are decades old. I have so far been unable to find out exactly what purpose these agreements serve, and why unnecessary Castor transports are being shipped across the Atlantic. You all know that in the past, the civilian use of nuclear energy was always the prerequisite for military use. Civilian nuclear power plants act as plutonium and tritium factories, both of which are used in atomic bombs. I cannot assume that since the German reunification any ambitions of this kind have been pursued with the research reactor in Berlin - and the switch to low-enriched fuel rods would speak against it, since plutonium is not produced when they are burnt. But the matter does throw up a number of unanswered questions.

When the Iron Curtain fell, it removed the need to maintain the highly militarised zones in West and East Germany. But although the Warsaw Pact is now defunct and the former Soviet launches to fire nuclear weapons have disappeared from German territory, NATO, which essentially lost its purpose with the end of the Warsaw Pact, has expanded further and further to the East. The former GDR has officially been free of nuclear weapons since 29 June 1991. But the US still have nuclear weapons stationed in western Germany to this very day.

At the the Bundeswehr air base in Büchel in the Eifel region there are very probably between 10 and 20 B61-type atomic bombs. For reasons of confidentiality the Federal Government will not provide more detailed information, not even to Members of Parliament. A number of actions have been brought against the stationing of these bombs here, but the administrative court in Cologne established the "legitimacy" of these weapons again this year. On 24 March 2010 the German Bundestag tabled a motion urging the Federal Government to campaign hard for the withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from Germany in the course of drawing up a new strategic concept for NATO. However, at the NATO summit in Strasbourg/Kehl on 3 and 4 April 2009, the heads of state and government declared that deterrence based on nuclear and conventional weapons would remain a core element of the NATO strategy. We believe that the Federal Government is not doing nearly as much as it could to achieve the objective which it has set itself, to work towards the withdrawal of these weapons. At least, it is not prepared to put "nuclear participation" up for debate. That means no progress will be made on this matter as long as the US is officially of the opinion that it must keep nuclear weapons on German soil to act as a deterrent. According to a report of the German working group on peace research, the Pentagon even plans to modernise these weapons and build a new bomb, the B61-12. Even as Members of Parliament, we cannot use the official channels to find out how much truth there is in this, because everything is classified as confidential. All in all, I can only say this much: I believe that it is unacceptable and illegal to have to put up with nuclear weapons stationed in our country, no matter who they belong to. That is unacceptable under international law. The US has no right to station nuclear weapons anywhere in Europe. There is no secret that the US has geostrategic ambitions for resources. We all know full well what the real reason is behind these nuclear weapons on European soil, and it is extremely worrying. I would therefore like to thank all of you here today for your commitment. I can assure you that the peace movement in Germany and with it the anti-nuclear movement and The Left Party will not rest until the last piece of nuclear technology - whether it is used for allegedly civilian purposes or openly as a military threat - has disappeared. There should be nothing surprising about that statement at all.

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This year I visited Hiroshima for the second time. I spoke to survivors and visited the Hiroshima Memorial. They underline what you and I well know: that nuclear energy and atomic bombs are two sides of the same coin. And we have to make more people aware of this. That is why I am currently working with a friend of mine who is a journalist on a film with the working title From Hiro- to Fukushima. It is scheduled to be released on 11 March 2012. To work on this film and to support the nascent Japanese anti-nuclear movement, I will be going to Japan again in February. There is still much to do, which is why we never tire of protesting. In November we will once again be joining thousands of others to block the next Castor transport - a demonstration that will be peaceful, colourful and filled with imagination.

In a democracy we cannot simply stand back and let things happen. It is our duty to make sure that people get involved. And even if we sometimes tend to see only the things we still have to do, we should recognise that we have already achieved so much. Had it not been for the anti-nuclear movement, there would not have been 17 nuclear power plants in operation in Germany in March 2011 but over 50. That's how many were once planned for our country. In the 80s we stopped more nuclear weapons being stationed in Germany - against the NATO Double-Track Decision.

And in the midst of today's global crisis, more and more people are realising that they have to get involved. The Occupy movement gives cause for hope - it is making more and more people inform themselves and challenge the idea that there is no political alternative. And when I see what has begun to take shape around the world in recent months, I feel a real sense of optimism. What we make of it, is up to us - together!