It began as a movement of pacifists chaining themselves to fences outside nuclear power plants. Five decades later, efforts to shut down German nuclear power plants will end with echoes of the Cold War era in which they began, as Russia’s war in Ukraine is a reminder of both the risks and the prospects of nuclear power.
Germany’s three remaining reactors will be shut down by Saturday – the end of nuclear power generation in Europe’s largest economy. But it comes as the continent grapples with securing enough energy to power its economies and keep homes warm while meeting ambitious climate goals.
Germany’s move makes it an outlier in much of the industrialized world. Great BritainFinland and France increasingly rely on nuclear energy as a reliable source of electricity and extremely low CO2 emissions. Last year, Poland signed a construction contract with Westinghouse Electric its first nuclear power plantabout 200 miles east of the German border.
In the United States, the Biden administration Support Technology to build a new generation of smaller nuclear reactors as a tool for “mass decarbonization”.
Some polls suggest that even Germans, who were once largely behind the shutdown in their country, have doubts: In a poll commissioned by Germany’s largest daily newspaper, Bild, 52 percent said they were against ending nuclear power because it would Country off its dependency on fossil fuels adopted from Russia.
Economics Minister Robert Habeck from the Greens insists that Germany manages to phase out nuclear power. The country’s natural gas storage facilities are more than half full – a significant cushion since the heating season is almost over. And Germany has been quick to build liquefied natural gas terminals, allowing gas to be imported by cargo ships rather than through the Russian pipelines that once provided about 55 percent of Germany’s supply.
“The security of energy supply in Germany is guaranteed in this difficult winter and will continue to be guaranteed,” said Habeck in an interview with the Funke media group. By contrast, new European nuclear power plants are a “fiasco,” he argued, plagued by rising costs, construction delays and maintenance problems. “Our energy system will be structured differently: by 2030 we will have 80 percent renewable energy.”
Nuclear power has long been a fault line in German politics. Horrified by the Cold War, peace activists had campaigned against nuclear energy since the 1970s, some becoming founding members of the Green Party, now represented in Germany’s three-party coalition. The anti-nuclear movement grew after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster created a cloud of nuclear fallout that reached and left West Germany scarring memories among this generation.
By 2000 had a left-leaning government agreed to a plan shutting down German nuclear power, only to be reversed by a conservative government led by Angela Merkel.
However, the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 caused the mood in Germany to once again turn strongly against nuclear energy and against Ms. Merkel Course reversed abruptly. Your government has passed a law to phase out Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors by the end of 2022.
The nuclear Debate took a different turn last year, when Germany experienced its first winter without fuel from Russia. As officials urged businesses and consumers to reduce energy use or face rationing, Chancellor Olaf Scholz extended the operation of the last three plants until April 15 to ensure sufficient energy at a reasonable price until spring.
However, with no end in sight to the war in Ukraine, business leaders are warning that this is not the time to cut off a relatively cheap source of electricity.
“We must continue to do everything we can to expand energy supplies and not cut them any further,” Chamber of Commerce and Industry Chairman Peter Adrian said in a statement, warning that power instability could jeopardize the country’s position as an industrial powerhouse.
On Thursday, Two dozen scientists and Nobel Prize winners from all over the world sent in Letter to Mr. Scholz He urged him to reverse course, citing nuclear power as a valuable alternative to power plants that emit greenhouse gases.
“Germany’s power grids remain among the most carbon-intensive in Europe,” the letter’s organizers, an alliance called RePlanet, said in a statement.
The International Energy Agency said last year that nuclear power could play a key role in reducing CO2 emissions in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement. It stressed that nuclear energy could also play a role Development of carbon-free synthetic fuels known as green hydrogen.
But climate and energy experts predict that Germany’s nuclear shutdown will cause only a slight, temporary increase in its carbon emissions – offset by increases in solar and wind power over the next few years.
Andrzej Ancygier, an expert at the Climate Analytics think tank in Berlin, rejects the argument that nuclear power is more reliable than wind or sun. He pointed to last summer’s droughts and high temperatures, which forced several European countries to shut down reactors when they did Rivers were used to cool the plants fallen too deep or their water got too warm.
“We are coming to a place where the planet is becoming warmer, more dangerous and more unstable. We could end up in a bad place,” he said. “Security is an issue here. It’s something we forgot, but we shouldn’t have done.”
Germany’s Environment Minister Steffi Lemke argued that the war in Ukraine had increased the risk of nuclear power.
“We are facing a situation where nuclear power plants in Ukraine are shot at because of the Russian war of aggression and have become the target of armed conflicts, ”she told the German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. “Nuclear power plants were never designed for such a situation.”
The three German reactors slated for shutdown are safe and could provide power at relatively low cost for many years to come, making the decision to shut them down an expensive decision, said Georg Zachmann, climate and energy expert at Bruegel think tank in Brussels. At the same time, he said, the plants under construction in the UK, Finland and France were going over budget, making the energy they could supply up to three times more expensive.
“I would not say that only the Germans are crazy,” said Zachmann. “Shutting down existing nuclear power plants is expensive, building new ones is expensive.”
