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.”
In 1998, the then-coalition government led by the Social Democrats and the Greens agreed to phase out nuclear power over a period of 20 years. The agreement, which became law in 2002, banned the construction of new nuclear power plants and limited the lifespan of existing plants, putting the country on track to shutter its final plant in 2022.
Years later, following elections in 2009, a new government led by the conservative Christian Democratic Union opted to push back the phaseout, extending the lifespan of Germany’s existing 17 nuclear plants by up to 14 years. This move, called the “phaseout of the phaseout” at the time, would have pushed Germany’s exit from nuclear power to 2036. However, the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan occurred shortly after. That incident prompted then-Chancellor Angela Merkel to reverse the previous decision to extend the nuclear plants’ operation and revert back to the original 2022 end date.
“Fukushima called into question all the arguments for the continued use of nuclear power plants,” said Miranda Schreurs, a professor of climate and energy politics at the Technical University of Munich. “After Chernobyl, the argument was always that it was a catastrophe in a Soviet nuclear power plant and that something like that could never happen in a highly developed industrial country like Germany or Japan.”
That Fukushima was caused by a natural disaster no one could predict—an earthquake followed by a tsunami—was a reminder that even highly regulated nuclear plants could pose safety risks. “That’s ultimately the argument against nuclear power: that you never know when a catastrophe like that could happen,” Schreurs, who served on a post-Fukushima committee to help plot Germany’s exit from nuclear power, told FP.
Since then, all but three of Germany’s remaining nuclear plants were shuttered one by one as planned. But last summer, fears of a European energy crisis—particularly in Germany, which had been heavily reliant on Russian gas and oil imports—put German officials under pressure to extend operations at the last three plants. The government eventually agreed to keep the three remaining plants online for a few extra months, until April 15; it also made plans to reopen several coal-fired power plants. Both moves were a significant departure from Germany’s long-term plans to meet its ambitious climate goals for 2030 and beyond.
The war, and the resulting questions about energy supply and energy security in Europe, have brought not just political opposition to the phaseout but also a fundamental shift in German public opinion. A recent poll from the broadcasters RTL and ntv found that two-thirds of the population opposes the decision to phase out nuclear energy: Forty-three percent of those surveyed said the remaining plants should stay online for the time being, and 25 percent were in favor of restarting previously shuttered nuclear plants. (By comparison, in 2019, 60 percent of Germans backed a quick exit from nuclear power.)
Energy experts say keeping Germany’s nuclear power would be a costly move that ultimately would have a minimal impact on Germany’s overall electricity supply. Nuclear power has in recent years made up just a small fraction of Germany’s grid, and keeping the remaining plants online would have required significant planning, safety inspections, upgrades, and investment, meaning that a snap decision to do so isn’t feasible. “If we were to prolong the operation of these [nuclear] plants, we’re not speaking about simply just keeping them running,” said Simon Müller, the Germany director of Agora Energiewende. Doing so “is a strategic decision that also takes a lot of lead time. At this point the window has essentially closed.”
What’s more, Müller said, Germany’s major steps away from nuclear power have come hand in hand with plans to expand investments in renewable energy infrastructure—meaning the country is well-positioned to make up the missing nuclear energy with things like wind and solar energy in the future. “If you look at the history of renewable energy and its scale-up, it is actually closely linked with the debate around the use or the phaseout of nuclear power,” Müller said. “And there was a connection between the two, because the systematic buildup and support of renewables was seen as a necessary precondition to phase out nuclear—while at the same time not increasing the reliance on fossil energy sources.”
Still, given the looming concerns about Europe’s energy supply next winter, opposition parties have made it clear they don’t consider the issue as closed—and, with the German public warming to nuclear energy, they see it as a potent topic going forward.
“We think that’s not the last word,” Markus Söder, leader of the conservative Christian Social Union and state premier in Bavaria, which is home to one of the three closing plants, said this week. “Honestly, I believe that we may have a new debate as early as winter.”
