Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

36 JEFF EDWARDS
“I read a white paper on Niedersachsen,” Doyle said. “They shut down
the reactor for inspection and repair. They’re going to restart it at the end
of this month.”
Brenthoven shook his head. “No, they’re not. The Green Party has
cobbled together a sort of ecologist’s coalition to block the restarting of the
reactor. In fact, they managed to whip up enough public backlash to force
their case all the way up to the Bundestag for a formal vote. It’s official:
they’re shutting them all down. Every reactor on German soil.”
Doyle pursed her lips for a half-second. “Germany was moving in that
direction anyway. Now they’ll have to do it a little faster.”
“Not a little faster,” Brenthoven said. “A lot faster. In less than a year,
the Germans are going to have one hell of an energy crunch. Nearly
thirty-five percent of their electricity comes from nuclear power, and their
per capita usage is through the roof. Over six thousand kilowatt-hours per
person, per year.”
“How bad is it going to get, Greg?” the president asked.
Brenthoven checked his notebook again. “Bad, sir. Catastrophic. We
could conceivably be looking at the collapse of the entire German
economy.”
Doyle curled a finger under her chin. “That doesn’t make any sense.
Why would the German people vote for a plan that could bankrupt their
economy?”
“It’s a classic argument,” the president said. “The pro-Earth lobbies
push for environmental safety at any and all cost; they try to frighten
people with dire predictions of impending ecological disasters. The proindustrial
lobbies counter with their own brand of scare tactics. Factory
shutdowns, loss of jobs, and the crippling economic impact of tighter
environmental restrictions. Both sides run around screaming that the sky
is falling, and the only way to stop it is to vote the way they tell you to.”
He smiled. “And the irony of it is, both sides are probably right. We are
poisoning our planet at an alarming rate. And the cost of stopping this
catastrophe-in-progress may well be higher than we can afford to pay.”
He sighed. “It comes down to a tug-of-war between the tree huggers
and the polluters. Most of the time, industry wins out. People have a hard
time picturing ecological catastrophe; but they can picture themselves
unemployed. It’s hard to get the man on the street to see past his job.
Usually, the only way to do it at all is to scare the hell out of him. I would
guess that the Green Party has been capitalizing on the recent spate of
accidents in the German nuclear power industry.”
“I would call that an understatement, Mr. President,” Brenthoven said.
“A group called Leben Zuerst, Life First, has blitzed the German media