Despite recent months marked by an energy crisis, Germany is implementing the decision taken in 2002 to phase out nuclear power. The last three nuclear reactors in operation in the country – Emsland in the north, Isar 2 in the south, and Neckarwestheim 2 in the west – will be definitively extinguished this Saturday, April 15.
“The high availability of the energy supply in Germany remains assured”, however, assured the German Ministers of the Environment and the Economy in a press release on Thursday. “The exit from nuclear power makes our country safer, because the risks of nuclear energy are not controllable”, added Prime Minister Steffi Lemke.
The closure of these last reactors will however have been postponed for a few weeks, since it was initially scheduled for December 31st. The war in Ukraine, which caused gas prices to soar last winter and raised fears of supply shortages, had in fact convinced the government of Olaf Scholz to extend the operation of the reactors to secure the supply until mid-April.
Fears for the country’s supply…
To ensure energy security, Berlin is emphasizing “the high filling level of the country’s gas reservoirs” (64.5%), thanks to the massive import of liquefied natural gas (LNG) aimed at replacing Russian gas on which the leading European economy was very dependent.
But the fears, many in recent months, were still present in recent days. Even within the ruling coalition in Germany, members of the liberal FDP party, including President Christian Lindner, who occupies the Ministry of Finance, have asked for a new extension of the power stations. “It’s a strategic error, in a still tense geopolitical environment”, thus struck the secretary general of the FDP, Bijan Djir-Sarai, Monday. What Robert Habeck, the Minister of Economy and Climate retorted this Thursday: “We remain faithful to the exit from the atom that the FDP and the CDU decided in 2011”.
At that time, in fact, the government of Angela Merkel – led by the CDU allied with the FDP – had decided to accelerate the exit from nuclear power following the Fukushima disaster. This event showed that “Even in a high-tech country like Japan, the risks associated with nuclear energy cannot be 100% controlled”, had then justified the ex-chancellor at the time.
In total since 2003, 16 reactors have been shut down in Germany. The last three plants provided 6% of the energy produced in the country last year, while nuclear represented 30.8% in 1997.
… but also for the climate
These closures also prompted reactions from several political figures who said they feared for Germany’s climate objectives and the energy independence of the country deprived of atomic energy. “It’s a black day for climate protection”, said Jens Spahn, leader of the CDU Conservatives in parliament, on Tuesday.
If the share of renewables in the country’s production mix has increased over the past twenty years, reaching 46% in 2022 against less than 25% ten years earlier, the pace is too slow in the eyes of the government and environmental activists. . Thus, Germany will not achieve its climate goals without a serious push. These goals “are already ambitious without phasing out nuclear power – and each time we deprive ourselves of a technological option, we make things more difficult”, notes Georg Zachmann, specialist in energy issues for the Brussels think tank Bruegel.
Germany must install “4 to 5 wind turbines every day” over the next few years to cover its needs, warned Olaf Scholz. The step is high compared to the 551 units laid in 2022. A series of regulatory relaxations adopted in recent months should make it possible to accelerate the tempo.
The equation is even more complex given the objective of stopping all coal-fired power plants in the country by 2038, many of them by 2030. This fossil fuel still represents a third of electricity production. German, with an increase of 8% last year to compensate for the absence of Russian gas.
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(With AFP)