The plants must be disconnected from the electricity grid by midnight on Saturday. The culmination of an exit from the atom initiated by Berlin in 2003.
Germany is definitely turning its back on atomic energy, Saturday April 15: the last three nuclear reactors in operation in the country must be disconnected from the electricity grid before midnight. Long planned for December 31, 2022, this closure had been delayed by a few months due to the war in Ukraine and the end of Russian gas deliveries to Germany. Since 2003, 16 other reactors had already stopped producing electricity across the Rhine.
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The Isar 2 (South-East), Neckarwestheim (South-West) and Emsland (North-West) reactors provided 6% of the energy produced in Germany in 2022, while nuclear represented 30.8% of the produced in 1997.
To replace nuclear, Germany has invested in renewable energies, whose share in the production “mix” reached 46% in 2022, against less than 25% ten years earlier. But coal-fired power plants still represent a third of the country’s production, a proportion up from 8% in 2022 in the face of gas supply difficulties. Berlin aims to close these plants in 2038 and to cover 80% of its electricity needs with renewables by 2030.
Debates in the ruling coalition and doubts in public opinion
The gradual exit from nuclear power was decided by Germany in the early 2000s, then accelerated by Chancellor Angela Merkel after the Fukushima disaster (Japan) in 2011.
While this policy has long been a consensus in Germany, public opinion has changed as a result of the war in Ukraine: in a recent poll for the public television channel ARD, 59% of those questioned believe that abandoning nuclear power in this context is not a good idea.
“It’s a strategic error, in a still tense geopolitical environment”said Bijan Djir-Sarai, secretary general of the liberal FDP party, yet a member of the government coalition alongside the social democrats and environmentalists.
“The risks associated with nuclear energy are definitely out of control”, insisted this week the Minister of the Environment, Steffi Lemke, an environmentalist. A few hundred people celebrated this exit from nuclear power in Munich and Berlin, at the invitation of the NGO Greenpeace.