German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced on Monday that he would extend the operation of Germany’s last three nuclear power plants, a “slap in the face” for the Greens in his coalition government, in the context of an unprecedented energy crisis.
“The legal basis will be created to allow the operation of the Isar 2, Neckarwestheim 2 and Emsland nuclear power plants beyond December 31, 2022, until April 15, 2023,” states a letter from the chancellor to the government that AFP was able to view. Its coalition government had so far only agreed to keep two of the three power plants operating beyond the end of 2022, the date originally planned for a nuclear phase-out.
The Emsland power plant, in the north of the country, was at the heart of a tug of war within the ruling coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals, which was torn over the solutions to be found to the energy crisis resulting from the war in Ukraine.
The chancellor finally made his decision on Monday, in a context of urgency, where Europe’s largest economy is trying to reduce its dependence on Russian energy imports, especially gas.
Justice Minister Marco Buschmann and Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the FDP welcomed Chancellor Scholz’ decision on Twitter.
“Common sense prevails,” Buschmann said, even though nuclear power currently generates 6% of Germany’s net electricity production.
“It is in the vital interest of our country and its economy that we maintain full power generation capacity this winter,” Lindner tweeted. “We will also work together to develop viable solutions for The Winter 2023/2024,” he wrote.
But this decision is a new blow for the German Minister of the Economy, the ecologist Robert Habeck, whose frictions with the liberal Christian Lindner are becoming more and more obvious.
Camouflet for the Greens
The chancellor’s decision is “a slap in the face for Habeck,” commented Bild on Monday. Environment Minister Steffi Lemke of the Greens believes that Scholz’s announcement is merely a setback to the nuclear phase-out.
“Germany will finally phase out nuclear power on April 15, 2023,” there will be no “life extension” of the plants,” Lemke said confidently on Twitter. Ricarda Lang, co-leader of the Greens, criticized Scholz’s decision to keep the Emsland plant open as “not necessary for grid stability.” “The last word on the matter has not yet been said… We will have conversations about this,” she assured on Twitter.
The NGO Greenpeace called Scholz’s decision irresponsible. “The extension of the life of nuclear power plants exposes us all to an unjustifiable risk,” said Martin Kaiser, executive director of Greenpeace Germany.
Initially, Germany, where a large part of the population is hostile to the atom, planned to close its last three operating nuclear reactors at the end of 2022. But Olaf Scholz’s government reversed this decision after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and decided in September to extend two of the three power plants still in operation until the spring of 2023, blaming France for its poor grid, in a context of energy shortages orchestrated by Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Some 20 of the 56 reactors in France are unavailable due to maintenance or corrosion problems. EDF has promised their gradual restart by February 2023.
Go further
The German Liberals would like to go further than the spring of 2023 and keep the three plants in operation longer, while the Greens are historically deeply anti-nuclear.
Faced with the threat of an energy shortage this winter, the German government has already decided to increase the use of coal, a particularly polluting energy, by extending the operation of several coal-fired power plants until the spring of 2024, even though it has set itself the goal of abandoning this energy by 2030. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg had considered it preferable to continue using the nuclear power plants currently operating in Germany rather than turning to coal, in a recent interview on German television. The timetable for nuclear phase-out was decided by Angela Merkel after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.
