TELEGRAPH
Germany became only the third European country to shut off its nuclear power supply on Saturday when its final three reactors were severed from the grid for good.
The end of German nuclear energy, a process begun by former chancellor Angela Merkel after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, came at the same time as the country seeks to wean itself off fossil fuels and manage an energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine.
A small crowd of pro-nuclear demonstrators turned out in front of the Brandenburg Gate on Saturday to protest the end of Germany’s nuclear era.
On the rain-drenched Pariser Platz, they watched a pantomime in which the sun and wind struggled to defeat men dressed as coal and gas until nuclear power came to the rescue.
“Our reactors set records for energy production year after year,” said Lucan Eichhorn, one of a small number of protesters on the pro-nuclear side.
“Switching them off when they could run for years longer really is the height of stupidity.”
On the other side of the gate, Greenpeace activists set up a float that depicted nuclear energy as a dinosaur being slain by the sun.
Johana Caro, dressed in a Greenpeace cagoule, said she had come out to celebrate the end of a “dangerous technology”.
“Our reliance on nuclear stopped us investing in renewables,” she asserted.
Against a backdrop of rising energy prices and an increased reliance on coal-fired powerplants, many Germans are having second thoughts about the wisdom of shunning reliable, carbon-free power sources. Italy and Lithuania are the only other European countries to have shut down nuclear power generation.
The Fukushima nuclear disaster was a pivotal moment for Rainer Klute, whose son was studying at a Japanese university just a hundred miles from the site of the reactor when the earthquake hit.
With the health of his child potentially at stake, Mr Klute, an IT specialist, said he wanted to understand the risks of nuclear energy “as quickly and as deeply” as he could.
“By coincidence I had just been on a visit to a German reactor where we learned about the security mechanisms at the site,” he told the Telegraph.
The lesson he took from the meltdown at Fukushima was that, as bad as it was, it wasn’t likely to happen in Germany.
The rest of the German public reacted in a rather different manner, however.
In the days after the disaster in Japan, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to demand an immediate shutdown of Germany’s nuclear energy facilities.
Under pressure, Mrs Merkel, who had previously insisted it was “nonsense” to shut down the plants, announced that Germany would leave the nuclear era behind by 2022.
In response, Mr Klute founded Germany’s only pro-nuclear organisation, Nuklearia.
He is the first to admit that it has been “a lonely battle”. Eleven founding members have grown to a little over 500 today.
“We are no Greenpeace,” he conceded. The environmental group has led Germany’s anti-nuclear campaign and has hundreds of thousands of members.
At the same time, opinion polling from the buildup to the nuclear shut down suggests that the German public is having major doubts about closing down power stations that provided up to 10 million homes with electricity.
Over two thirds said they thought the nuclear reactors should be kept running, while a quarter said they favoured dusting off decommissioned nuclear power stations.
Shifting attitudes in favour of nuclear power were already evident last autumn, when Russia’s decision to cut off gas supplies stoked fears that the country might suffer blackouts in the winter.
That led the government to delay shutting down the reactors by three months.
Now though, the Greens, a junior partner in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition, insist that the decision is final.
“We secured energy supply during this difficult winter and we will continue to secure it,” promised vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, a senior figure in the ecology-focused party.
Celebration time for Greens
For the Greens, born out of the protest movement against nuclear energy in the 1970s, the end of the nuclear era is the fulfilment of their founding mission.
“Without the anti-nuclear movement, the Greens would be unimaginable. Today, we can say that we have achieved one of our very first political goals,” Jürgen Tritten, a Green party grandee, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
But critics have accused the Greens of hypocrisy, arguing that the nuclear exit means that Germany will have to burn more fossil fuels instead.
Experts have pointed out that nuclear energy provided a predictable supply of electricity that the Greens’ favoured wind turbines cannot replicate.
The result, they point out, is that Germany has recommissioned close to 20 coal-fired power stations over the past 12 months to make up for the fluctuations in wind and solar production.
It is an uncomfortable fact for Mr Scholz’s “coalition for progress” that the opposition CDU have seized upon.
The government would “prefer to run carbon-guzzling coal plants – the climate killer par excellence – rather than run climate-neutral nuclear plants,” claimed Jens Spahn, a senior CDU figure.
Fears for energy prices
Saturday marked “a dark day” for climate protection, Mr Spahn told a local broadcaster.
The German media, once solidly anti-nuclear, have also started to fret at the fact that Germany is ending its nuclear era just as France and the UK are building new plants.
Industry representatives, meanwhile, have warned that electricity prices, already some of the highest in Europe, might push firms into bankruptcy.
These are concerns that the government has brushed aside.Mr Habeck has said that Germany will soon be replacing gas and coal with “green” hydrogen produced with renewables.
Describing British and French nuclear projects as “a fiasco”, Mr Habeck stated that “we will have a different energy system, one based on 80 per cent renewables”.
For Mr Klute, the bet on renewable energy is German self-delusion.
“Our mentality means that when we start something, we see it through to the bitter end,” the nuclear advocate said.
“With nuclear energy, that means that we will only change course when we have hit rock bottom.”
