Germany shut down its last three nuclear reactors on Saturday, the culmination of more than 20 years of phasing out atomic power in the country, despite controversy and the recent energy crisis in Europe.
The Isar 2 (southeast), Neckarwestheim (southwest) and Emsland (northwest) power plants were disconnected from the electricity grid before midnight (22:00 GMT), as planned, said their operators, the energy company RWE speaking of “the end of an era”. Europe’s leading industrial power has respected, within a few months, the timetable for the energy transition set in the early 2000s and accelerated in 2011, after the Fukushima disaster, by a spectacular reversal of former Chancellor Angela Merkel.
This strategy of abandoning nuclear power, which is perceived as dangerous by large sections of the population, is disconcerting to many of Germany’s partners who believe that nuclear power has a role to play in decarbonizing electricity production. The gas crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine has put additional pressure on Berlin. And re-launched the debate, in the political class as well as in public opinion, on the advisability of closing the power plants.
The exit from nuclear power “comes too late, not too early”, said Jürgen Trittin, a member of the Green Party, at a rally in Berlin on Saturday.
“Bias”
April 15 is a “historic date,” he said. This is the culmination of the decades-long struggle of the powerful German anti-nuclear movement against “a dangerous, unsustainable and expensive technology”. In front of the Brandenburg Gate, this farewell to the atom, symbolized by a dinosaur corpse, gathered a few hundred people, just like in Munich and in other German cities.
Since 2003, the country has already closed 16 reactors. The invasion of Ukraine marked a break. Deprived of Russian gas, the flow of which has been interrupted by Moscow, Germany has found itself exposed to the darkest of economic scenarios. The government of Olaf Scholz has extended the operation of the reactors by a few months, compared to the shutdown initially set for December 31. The winter finally passed without shortages, Russia was replaced by other gas suppliers, but the consensus around the exit from nuclear power has crumbled: in a recent poll for the public television channel ARD, 59% of respondents see it as a bad idea in the current context.
“It is a strategic mistake, in a geopolitical environment that is still tense,” said Bijan Djir-Sarai, secretary general of the liberal FDP party, which is a partner in the coalition government of Olaf Scholz and the ecologists. For the leader of the conservative opposition (CDU), Friedrich Merz, the abandonment of nuclear power is the result of an “almost fanatical bias”. “(…) The founding myth of the Greens triumphs over all reason,” he tweeted. The last three plants supplied only 6% of the electricity produced in Germany last year, whereas nuclear power accounted for 30.8% of the mix in 1997. In the meantime, the share of renewable energies has reached 46% in 2022, compared to less than 25% ten years earlier.
Charcoal
But in Germany, the European Union’s biggest CO2 emitter, coal still accounts for a third of electricity production, with an 8% increase last year to cope with the absence of Russian gas. “Boosting fossil fuel energy to compensate for the exit from nuclear power is not in line with climate action,” the French Ministry of Energy Transition slammed this week. France, with 56 reactors, remains the most nuclearized country in the world per capita.
At the European level, there are sharp differences between Paris and Berlin on the role of the atom. Germany prefers to focus on its goal of covering 80% of its electricity needs with renewables by 2030, while closing its coal-fired power plants by 2038 at the latest. “Over the past ten years, Germany has not advanced the development of renewable energy as much as it would have been necessary for climate protection and energy transition,” Simon Müller, director Germany of the study center Agora Energiewende, tells AFP. It will be necessary to install “4 to 5 wind turbines every day” over the next few years to cover the needs, warned Olaf Scholz.
