The countdown is on for Germany’s last three nuclear reactors to close on Saturday, ending the decades-old controversial atomic energy era in Europe’s biggest economy.
By midnight (2200 GMT), the Isar 2 (southeast), Neckarwestheim (southwest) and Emsland (northwest) power plants will be disconnected from the power grid.
“It will be a very moving act for the colleagues to turn off the plant for the last time”, assures a few hours before the deadline Guido Knott, the CEO of the company PreussenElektra which operates Isar 2, saying he is “personally affected” .
For MP Jürgen Trittin, on the contrary, it is an exit “which comes too late and not too early”, a “historic date” for the German anti-nuclear movement, one of the most powerful in Europe, of which this elected environmentalist is one of the figures since the 1980s.
“We are ending dangerous, unsustainable and expensive technology,” he said at a rally outside the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on Saturday.
A farewell to the atom, symbolized by the remains of a dinosaur defeated by anti-nuclear forces, brought together a few hundred people there, as in Munich and other cities in Germany.
Germany is now challenged to wean itself off fossil fuels, while managing the gas crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine, in a context of climate emergency.
Olaf Scholz’s government had extended the operation of the reactors by a few months, compared to the shutdown initially set for December 31, but without calling into question the decision to turn the page.
The exit from nuclear power comes a long way. After an initial decision by Berlin in the early 2000s to abandon the atom, former Chancellor Angela Merkel accelerated the process in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Since 2003, the country has already closed 16 reactors.
The invasion of Ukraine marked a caesura. Deprived of Russian gas, the bulk of which Moscow has interrupted, Germany has found itself exposed to the darkest economic scenarios.
The winter finally passed without shortages, Russia was replaced by other gas suppliers but the consensus around phasing out nuclear power has crumbled: in a recent poll for the public television channel ARD, 59 % of respondents see it as a bad idea in the current context.
Germany must “expand the supply of energy and not restrict it further”, lamented the president of the German chambers of commerce, Peter Adrian, in the daily Rheinische Post.
For the leader of the conservative opposition (CDU) Friedrich Merz, the abandonment of nuclear power is the result of an “almost fanatical bias”. “(…) The founding myth of the Greens triumphs over all reason,” he tweeted.
The last three plants supplied only 6% of the electricity produced in Germany last year, while nuclear accounted for 30.8% in 1997.
Meanwhile, the share of renewable energy reached 46% in 2022, compared to less than 25% ten years earlier.
“After 20 years of energy transition, renewables now produce about one and a half times more electricity than nuclear produced at its peak,” Simon Müller, Germany director of the center, told AFP. Agora Energiewende studies.
But in Germany, the biggest CO2 emitter in the European Union, coal still represents a third of electricity production, with an increase of 8% last year to cope with the absence of Russian gas.
“The revival of fossil energy to compensate for the exit from nuclear power does not go in the direction of climate action”, reprimanded this week the French Ministry of Energy Transition.
France, with 56 reactors, remains the most nuclear country per capita. At the European level, there are sharp differences between Paris and Berlin on the role of the atom.
Germany prefers to focus on its goal of covering 80% of its electricity needs with renewable energy by 2030, while closing its coal-fired power plants by 2038 at the latest.
But there, uncertainty reigns. “Where and how should renewable energy be produced? Everyone in this country agrees at least on one thing: not in my house,” the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung pointed out on Saturday.
15/04/2023 21:20:03 – Berlin (AFP) © 2023 AFP