German government looking to insure new quake-vulnerable Brazilian nuke

Despite Fukushima the German government intends to use tax funds to secure the construction of a Brazilian nuclear power station in the middle of an earthquake area.

The Campact online action organization (similar to our GetUP! Or Aaaz) is calling on people to protest against the imminent decision.

The support the German government is considering is in the form of 1.3 billion euros export insurance, that is if the deal goes sour, the German exporters to the project will be reimbursed from tax revenue.

The nuke in question is Angra 3, located directly on the Atlantic in an area vulnerable to earthquakes and landslides, a few hundred kilometres from the mega cities Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo with millions of populations each.

Practically replicas of the Fukushima situation. Angra already has two reactors in operation.

The chances of stopping the export insurance for Angra 3 and hopefully the entire project are rated as not bad. French banks involved have recently expressed doubts.

The German economics minister, Rainer Brüderle has said he’ll look at the proposal again; his pro-business FDP Liberal party has just been pitched out of a crucial regional parliament, due largely to his raucous touting of nuclear power. Together with the German finance, foreign and foreign aid ministers, Brüderle is to make a decision on the issue within weeks.

Since Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU conservatives and the FDP Liberals won government in September 2009 they have approved several export insurance packages for supplies of nuclear technology, including to China, Japan, Slovenia and Russia. Applications and inquiries are in the pipeline for Britain, Finland, Vietnam and South Africa. That has to end!

Together with their partner organization Urgewald, Campact is canvassing for 100,000 signatures to hand to the government.

Last Saturday more than a quarter of a million people took to the streets of Germany’s four largest cities to demand an end to nuclear power production, the biggest such demo ever in the country.

“A mighty signal that Chancellor Merkel cannot ignore,” Campact comments. “We citizens don’t want a non-binding ‘switch-off moratorium’ but a final closure of all nuclear reactors.”