Angela Merkel’s freshly released autobiography admits to few wrong turns in her 16 years as German chancellor. Among the momentous decisions she doesn’t regret is Germany’s frantic withdrawal from nuclear energy in favor of Russian gas.
But the country should rethink this. Everyone else is — and for good reason.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s outgoing coalition may not admit it, but their completion of Merkel’s accelerated nuclear exit was a mistake.
When Scholz took office in 2021, Germany imported half of its gas and coal and a third of its oil from Russia. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and Germany had to find expensive replacements. The country’s last nuclear plants were closed in April 2023 even though they still provided 12.6% of electricity in 2021.
There has been deafening political obstinacy about this. “We can achieve climate targets without nuclear power,” Merkel insists in her memoir. Scholz told critics to stop flogging the “dead horse” that was nuclear energy.
This singular German stubbornness doesn’t prove the decision was right. It’s true that the switch from Russian fossil fuels to other suppliers, mainly Norway and the US, has been remarkably successful. It’s also true that Germany now produces more than half of its electricity through renewables. But the country is paying a heavy price for this.
At its peak in 2000, the nuclear sector provided 30% of electricity nearly emission free. Renewables supplied only 6.3% at the time. As nuclear fell away, Germany’s coal plants filled the void — the majority being fired by brown coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel of them all. This autumn, Germany produced nearly 30% of its electricity that way.
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For the foreseeable future, renewables need to be supplemented. Domestic coal is one way of doing that, but Germany also needs gas and oil. In 2022, it imported nearly 70% of all the energy it consumed — a staggering level of dependency — the dangers of which were revealed when Russia invaded Ukraine, triggering an energy crisis.
The political, economic and social fallout has been huge. Germany has the highest electricity prices in Europe. Predictions for 2025 also indicate that households may have to pay hundreds of euros more for gas next year. Industry is already lobbying hard for lower energy prices.
Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, earlier this year rightly called Germany’s nuclear exit a “historic mistake”.
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But it enjoyed broad consensus. The phasing-out was first decreed under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2000, accelerated by Merkel after the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011 and finally completed by Scholz in 2023 — largely with public support.
Had the Cold War turned hot, Germany might have become a wasteland since nuclear weapons were stationed on its soil by the US and the Soviet Union. The resulting fear of nuclear power in all its forms sits deep.
Even the German energy sector continues to say, “for us there is no going back”, as Guido Knott, the CEO of PreussenElektra, which ran one of the last power plants, put it.
Yet industry captains also lobbied for cheap energy from Russia and were heavily invested in the Nordstream pipelines irrespective of what this meant for German security.
And so the German energy conundrum remains. The government expects an increase in electricity demand of over a third by 2030 alone. At the same time, it wants to phase out coal. It’s unlikely that this will be covered through renewables alone, which is why most other industrialised nations back nuclear projects.
Currently a tenth of the world’s electricity is produced through nuclear energy. A further 65 reactors are being built and about 90 more are at the planning stage. While much of this is happening in Asia, Germany’s immediate neighbours see the future in nuclear energy too.
France produces a staggering 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy. Its eastern neighbour Poland is starting from scratch and wants its first plant up and running in 2033.
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Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, challenged Germany at COP29 to consider: “Why does the rest of the world see things differently?” Grossi argues a return to nuclear would be “logical” in spite of the “can’t be done” doctrine that prevails in Berlin.
With German elections likely to bring in a new government from February 2025, now is the time for a break with the country’s energy conventions.
The Conservative CDU/CSU, also known as Union, which is expected to win, has issued a paper that calls the shut down of the last power plants an “ideologically motivated mistake” and promises to check if they can be reactivated.
But Markus Reichel, chairman of the CDU in Dresden and a senior Union Member of Parliament, told me he thought “building new reactors on the current technology is out of the question”. Only “if new types of reactors are secure and affordable and if there is a solution to nuclear waste, would they be an option”, he said.
This alludes to the Small Nuclear Reactors that the Union’s chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz is eyeing. These are compact and can be assembled from pre-manufactured parts.
Alphabet's Google has just signed a deal to use them to power its data centres. Microsoft and Amazon.com have also made public commitments to nuclear energy.
Yet in Germany, this is still treated like a pipe dream, including by the Union, whose paper focuses on making nuclear energy from other European countries, specifically nuclear-focused France, available to its market but accepting the “different strategies” of EU countries as set in stone.
The idea is that Germany makes use of its neighbours’ nuclear energy but does not produce its own. However, such an arrangement is already in place. Around a quarter of the electricity Germany imported last year had been produced in nuclear power plants.
The Union should dare more boldness to break with Germany’s longstanding misgivings about nuclear energy. There is nothing standing in the way of the country rebuilding its nuclear sector other than a stubborn insistence that it can’t be done.
Poland is bold enough to build a brand new nuclear sector from scratch, understanding that the clean, domestic energy it produces also provides high-paid jobs and affordable electricity.
The chance for a genuine reset for Germany is now. It won’t be easy to overcome resistance, but nothing worthwhile ever is.
