Residual Risks of the 13th Amendment to the German Atomic Energy Act

The 13(th) amendment to the German Atomic Energy Act, which was adopted by the German federal parliament on June 30 and entered into force on August 6, 2011, must be judged in the light of its genesis. Federal Chancellor Merkel, in her government declaration of June 9, 2011, had mentioned topics such as residual risk, safety standards, and risk assumptions, on which the federal government, in the week after the event of March 11, 2011, had commissioned the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (RSK) to conduct a comprehensive safety review of all German nuclear power plants, and appointed an Ethics Committee to write an opinion on safe energy supply. On the basis of quickly drafted reports, the federal cabinet, without any international harmonization (EU, IEA), adopted a draft opt out law on June 6, 2011. How should the declarations by the Federal Chancellor on June 9, 2011 be classified in terms of atomic energy law? In her words, it all revolved around the residual risk. The debate, which has been shifted to the realm of constitutional law, is open to considerations and steps to attack the new opt out law on grounds of material unconstitutionality (violation of the property guarantee under Sec. 14 or the principle of equality under Art.3 of the Basic Law). As far as final storage is concerned, the amendment to the German Atomic Energy Act announced still for this year, also for transposition of the EURATOM Directive of July 19, 2011 about nuclear waste management, the "re-assessment of the residual risk" is not likely to play a role. All these events are reminiscent of a sentence by former Federal Chancellor Schmidt: "The history of the NATO dual-track decision remains a textbook case showing that even in a democracy emotions using ethical arguments, mixed with demagogy, can become strong enough to cast aside balanced reason." There is also a distinction by Max Weber between ethics of ideology" and "ethics of responsibility."