BERLIN — Germany is ending its nuclear energy era with the shutdown of its last three nuclear reactors by midnight on Saturday night — a moment pushed by the country’s steadfast anti-nuclear movement for decades and promised by successive governments, though it comes at a time when many other countries are moving in the opposite direction.
Originally scheduled to be turned off by December, the three plants won a brief extension as Germany dealt with the fallout of the war in Ukraine and scrambled to find substitutes for cheap pipeline gas from Russia. German government leaders worried that the country might not be able to power itself through the winter. Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced he would keep the nuclear plants going for an extra 3½ months.
In the end, a mild winter, a natural gas buying spree and the firing up of old coal power plants helped Germany avoid energy shortages. Government officials insisted it was time to make good on pledges to end nuclear power.
“The security of energy supply in Germany was guaranteed during this difficult winter and will continue to be guaranteed,” Economy and Energy Minister Robert Habeck said, seeking to reassure the public, in an interview with Germany’s Funke media group this past week.
But many Germans aren’t so sure. The latest polls show a majority wanted to keep these reactors going, for now, even if they don’t support nuclear energy indefinitely. Objections to the shutdown came even from within the ranks of Germany’s three-party governing coalition.
The country’s impassioned debate about nuclear energy dates back more than five decades. The yellow logo bearing the slogan, “Nuclear energy? No, thank you!” — originally from Denmark — became synonymous with the 1970s anti-nuclear energy movement in Germany and further afield in Europe.
The anti-nuclear cause was spurred on in the mid-1980s with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, when radioactive clouds spread over Germany. It was followed by decades of wrangling and flip-flops over whether to phase out nuclear power.
The first pledge to do so came under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who said all plants were to be closed by the early 2020s. That decision was reversed a decade later during Chancellor Angela Merkel’s second term in office.
However, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster reignited public fears over the potential for nuclear catastrophe and, three days after the leak, Merkel announced plans to shut down all 17 of Germany’s remaining nuclear reactors by the end of 2022.
But Russia’s war in Ukraine cast fresh doubts on that decision.
Bijan Djir-Sarai, a leader of the neoliberal Free Democratic Party, part of the German government coalition, says the move to turn off nuclear energy is wrong. The operation of the nuclear power plants is necessary for energy security and to avoid coal-fueled power, he told the German Press Agency.
“Emergency situations like those recently caused by the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine cannot be reliably predicted,” he said.
Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democrats, the largest opposition party in the German parliament, described Saturday’s shut-off as a “dark day for Germany.”
“No other country is reacting to the Ukraine war and the worsening energy supply situation like Germany,” Merz told regional radio station NDR Info on Friday, pointing to the more than 400 nuclear power plants in operation across 41 countries. Another 53 are currently under construction.
It’s true that the decision by Europe’s largest economy to shut down nuclear energy plants is somewhat of an anomaly. The war in Ukraine, while destabilizing global energy markets, revived global interest in nuclear power, and even countries some that had stopped investing in it are now considering building new plants.
The Biden administration is among those who have taken the position that boosting nuclear energy is an important part of combating climate change.
Germany’s neighbor France has long relied on nuclear energy — in 2021, almost 70 percent of its electricity was nuclear-generated. Although maintenance and safety issues hobbled the French power grid for periods this past year and proved something of an embarrassment, President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to push on with a $57 billion plan to build six new reactors.
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In Poland, construction of the country’s first nuclear power plant is due to get underway in 2026, and could take between 10 and 15 years.
“In that time, we could increase the share of renewables in Germany by up to 80 to 95 percent,” said Claudia Kemfert, an economist at the German Institute for Economic Research.
Kemfert said the decision to end nuclear energy in Germany would have limited impact on the country’s energy stability.
The last three plants made up a tiny part of the country’s power production. Between 2000 and 2021, the contribution of nuclear power to the Germany energy mix shrunk from 29.5 percent to 11.5 percent. By October 2022, nuclear power provided just 6 percent of the country’s electricity.
“We could, in fact, have already shut down the nuclear power plants by January 1 of this year without the lights going out,” Kemfert told The Washington Post. “The extension was more like a psychological comfort blanket, as we had an oversupply of electricity.”
Kemfert said: “We talk about an energy crisis, but what we had was a heating crisis, because of the shortage of gas. And nuclear power can only generate electricity — not heating.”
