BERLIN—When Germany powers down the last of its nuclear power plants on Saturday, it will mark a historic shift decades in the making—and comes in the midst of fierce debates about how Germany and Europe will ensure their energy security for tough winters ahead and meet their ambitious climate goals.
Originally slated to shut down at the end of 2022, German officials made the decision last fall to keep the country’s three remaining nuclear plants—Isar 2 in Bavaria, Neckarwestheim north of Stuttgart, and Emsland in Lower Saxony—online for a few extra months. Facing potential energy shortages as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, German leaders said it was a “necessary” step to ensure the country had enough energy to make it through the winter.
Now, Germany’s government is pushing ahead with the nuclear phaseout, despite calls from opposition parties—and members of one party within the current coalition, the pro-business Free Democrats—to keep the plants online longer. “The nuclear phase-out by April 15, that’s this Saturday, is a done deal,” Christiane Hoffmann, a spokesperson for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said this week.
Critics say turning off the last three plants amid high energy prices, potential shortages, and a continent working to wean itself off Russian energy imports is irresponsible, without even taking into account nuclear power’s role in helping Germany meet ambitious climate targets. As Germany has reduced the amount of nuclear power it produces, that has led to a slight increase in the proportion coming from coal: Brown coal represented 20.1 percent of Germany’s electricity generation in 2022 (up from 16 percent in 2020), while nuclear power dropped from just over 11 percent to 6 percent.
“The shutdown of the world’s most modern and safest nuclear power plants in Germany is a dramatic mistake that will have painful economic and ecological consequences for us,” Wolfgang Kubicki, co-chairman of the Free Democratic Party, told German media this week. Jens Spahn, deputy leader of the conservative Christian Democrats, called it a “black day for climate protection in Germany.”
The debate over nuclear power in Germany has long been a contentious one. In the 1960s and ’70s, Germany rapidly expanded its nuclear power fleet, becoming a global leader in the field; at the same time, the German public has long been highly skeptical of nuclear energy. The 1970s saw the emergence of a strong anti-nuclear movement—one that led in part to the founding of the Greens, now one of three parties in Germany’s governing coalition. In the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, those calls to stop the use of nuclear power in Germany became even louder. As a result, Germany hasn’t completed any new nuclear plants since 1989.
“The discussion has been going on for decades, actually since the beginning of Germany’s use of nuclear power: In the early 1960s there were already the first big critical discussions about nuclear energy, and that intensified in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Manfred Fischedick, president and scientific managing director of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy. “There were always two camps, but the German public has always had a very critical attitude toward nuclear energy.”
Source: foreignpolicy
