Germany began winding down its three remaining nuclear power plants yesterday, ending a six-decade programme that spawned one of Europe’s strongest protest movements but saw a brief reprieve due to the Ukraine war.
The smoking towers of Isar II, Emsland and Neckarwestheim II reactors shut forever by midnight as Berlin enacts its plan for fully-renewable electricity generation by 2035.
Following years of prevaricating, Germany pledged to quit nuclear power definitively after Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster sent radiation spewing into the air and terrifying the world.
But the final wind-down was delayed last summer to this year after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine prompted Germany to halt Russian fossil fuel imports. Prices soared and there were fears of energy shortages around the world – but now Germany is confident again about gas supplies and expansion of renewables.
Germany’s commercial nuclear sector began with the commissioning of the Kahl reactor in 1961: eagerly promoted by politicians but met with scepticism by companies. Seven commercial plants joined the grid in the early years, with the 1970s oil crisis helping public acceptance. Expansion, however, was throttled to avoid harming the coal sector, said Nicolas Wendler, a spokesperson for Germany’s nuclear technology industry group KernD.
But by the 1990s more than a third of electricity in the newly-reunited Germany came from 17 reactors.
The next decade, a coalition government including the Greens – who grew out of the 1970s anti-nuclear movement – introduced a law that would have led to a phase out of all reactors by about 2021.
Former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative-led governments went back-and-forth on that – until Fukushima.
As Germany switches off its last remaining reactors, Finland’s much-delayed Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) nuclear reactor, Europe’s largest, will begin regular output today, boosting energy security in a region to which Russia has cut gas and power supplies.
OL3’s operator Teollisuuden Voima has said the unit is expected to meet around 14 per cent of Finland’s electricity demand, reducing the need for imports from Sweden and Norway.
Construction of the 1.6 gigawatt reactor, Finland’s first new nuclear plant in more than four decades and Europe’s first in 16 years, began in 2005. The plant was originally due to open four years later, but was plagued by technical issues.
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