Germany: goodbye to nuclear power, stop the last 3 plants by today
While Italy thinks about restarting the reactors, in Germany the commitment will be kept: by today Berlin will close its last three nuclear reactors. By midnight at the latest, the power plants at Isar 2 (southeast), Neckarwestheim (southwest) and Emsland (northwest) will be disconnected from the electricity grid. “The risks associated with nuclear energy are definitely out of control,” said Environment Minister Steffi Lemke. The path out of atomic energy was not short. After an initial decision by Berlin in the early 2000s to phase out the atom, former Chancellor Angela Merkel accelerated the process after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Since 2003, Germany has already shut down 16 reactors.
The invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 could have called everything into question. Deprived of Russian gas, the flow of which was essentially cut off from Moscow, Germany found itself exposed to worst-case scenarios, from the risk of factory closures to running out of heating.
Eventually the winter passed without shortages, Moscow’s gas was replaced with that of other suppliers, but the consensus around nuclear abandonment has crumbled in the meantime: In a recent poll for public broadcaster ARD, 59% of respondents said that abandoning nuclear power in this context is not a good idea.
Criticisms have also come from entrepreneurs and political forces. Germany should “expand its energy supply, not restrict it further,” complained the president of the German chambers of commerce, Peter Adrian. “It is a strategic mistake in a still tense geopolitical context”, echoed Bijan Djir-Sarai, general secretary of the liberal FDP party. However, the last three plants that will be closed today supplied only 6% of the energy produced in the country last yearwhile nuclear power accounted for 30.8% of the total basket in 1997. Meanwhile, renewables’ share of the generation mix has risen to 46% by 2022, from less than 25% a decade earlier.
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