Germany torn over energy policy as nuclear plants shut down

Germany’s last remaining nuclear power plants will be switched off on Saturday, marking a watershed moment in a country that has long harboured deep scepticism of atomic energy.

Anti-nuclear campaigners have hailed the shutdown of three reactors as a triumph, following a temporary delay after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year forced Berlin to seek alternatives to Russian gas. Critics see the shutdown as an act of madness at a time when Europe’s energy supplies remain precarious and the world is striving to wean itself off fossil fuels.

Almost everyone, however, agrees that there is no going back.

“We are shutting down world-class plants that have been operated safely and reliably for decades by world-class staff and experts,” Leonhard Birnbaum, chief executive of the German utility Eon, told Handelsblatt newspaper last month. But the chief, whose company owns Isar 2 in Bavaria, one of the three being shut down, conceded that “the era of nuclear power is finally over” in Germany.

After decades of anti-nuclear protests, the decisive moment came in 2011 when chancellor Angela Merkel — a trained physicist who had previously been a vocal advocate of nuclear power — performed a dramatic U-turn after a tsunami caused the meltdown of three reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

Merkel reversed a previous decision to extend the life of the country’s nuclear plants to 2036, bringing forward the phaseout date to 2022.

“Before Fukushima . . . I was convinced that it was highly unlikely that [an accident] would occur in a high-tech country with high safety standards,” she said in a speech three months after the disaster. “Now it has happened.”

The anti-nuclear movement in the former West Germany dates back to the 1970s, when a grassroots campaign successfully halted the construction of a nuclear power plant in the south western hamlet of Wyhl. Nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979 and at Chernobyl in 1986 fuelled that movement and generated a lasting scepticism of the technology across swaths of society.

Dolores Augustine, author of Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present, said that some outside observers saw Germany’s anti-nuclear stance as an inevitable product of a country sometimes stereotyped as a place full of “Birkenstock types”.

But she said that the success of the anti-nuclear campaigners was far from guaranteed given that they were challenging Germany’s powerful industrial giants and many of its politicians and scientists.

Other factors that played into the success of the German movement were the state’s inclination towards lighter touch policing after the excesses of the Nazi period and a decentralised, consensual political system. The movement also gave birth, in 1980, to what would go on to become the most successful Green party in Europe.

“Most movements fizzle out,” said Augustine. “But with the [German] anti-nuclear power movement, there’s an amazing continuity where one generation hands it over to the next.”

Yet Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year blew open the debate over the merits of nuclear power. Having previously imported more than half of its natural gas from Russia, Germany faced soaring energy prices and warnings about the risk of blackouts. Other countries in Europe, notably France and central and eastern European nations, remain avowedly in favour of atomic power as a way to solidify their energy independence while lowering carbon emissions.

Public opinion in Germany also shifted after Putin invaded Ukraine. An August 2022 survey commissioned by Der Spiegel magazine found that 67 per cent of Germans were in favour of a five-year extension of the country’s nuclear plants. Forty-one per cent supported building new plants. In a similar poll three decades earlier, just 3 per cent said yes.

Still, the German Greens, now part of the three-way coalition government led by Olaf Scholz, dug their heels in and only agreed to delay the shutdown by a few months to bridge any gap caused by the winter energy crunch. The Green economy minister Robert Habeck argued that the three remaining plants — which in early 2022 generated about 6 per cent of the country’s electricity supply — would have made little difference to efforts to save natural gas.

The way that Germany has chosen to phase out nuclear power, falling back on fossil fuels as a stop-gap even while massively increasing renewables, has been highly contentious.

The country reopened mothballed coal plants in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion — a decision seemingly at odds with pledges to phase out coal by 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2045.

British environmental campaigner George Monbiot last year compared Germany’s nuclear shutdown to Brexit, describing it “as a needless act of self-harm, driven by misinformation and the irrational allocation of blame”.

Domestic critics of the shutdown include Jens Spahn, a member of parliament of the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU), who said it had been a “mistake” for his party, under Merkel, to phase out nuclear power before abandoning coal. But those errors had been compounded, he said, by Scholz’s government.

“If I had to decide which to keep — coal or nuclear — in these times of crisis when we need something to substitute gas, I would always choose nuclear,” he said.

Defenders of the shutdown point to the long-term impact on investment.

While “it might be necessary to use a little bit more coal”, said Ottmar Edenhofer, director of the government-funded Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, extending the lifetime of nuclear plants would “cause enormous political costs” and discourage investors from putting money into renewables and gas-fired plants.

Instead of rehashing old debates, he argued, Germany should focus on new technologies such as hydrogen, efuels and carbon capture.

Germany still has its work cut out to dismantle the power stations in Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and Lower Saxony that will cease operation on Saturday, as well as close to 30 that had already been taken offline. The process of dismantling a nuclear power plant takes around 15 years and authorities have still not found a solution for the storage of radioactive waste that can remain lethal for several hundred thousand years.

The German government had planned to select a site by 2031, but in November officials admitted they were likely to miss that deadline.

“As soon as the decision is made about where the location will be, there will be an outcry,” said Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, an environmental historian at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. “I’m not sure we will find an easy solution.”