A year ago, Germany shut down its last three nuclear power plants. Few events related to energy have more perplexed outsiders.
Faced with climate change, calls to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and an energy crisis triggered by Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Berlin's move to phase out nuclear power ahead of carbon-intensive energy sources such as coal has drawn considerable criticism. (Greta Thunberg prominently labeled this a “mistake”).
This decision can only be understood in the context of post-war social and political developments in Germany, where anti-nuclearism preceded public climate discourse.
A 1971 West German bestseller was titled: Peacefully Into Disaster: A History of Nuclear Power Plants, the anti-nuclear movement has garnered national attention and widespread sympathy, with large-scale demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people, including the largest protest ever held in Bonn, the capital of West Germany. It became a major political force long before the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
The motivations include: distrust of technocracy; ecological, environmental and safety fears; suspicions that nuclear power could lead to nuclear proliferation; and general opposition to concentrated power (especially after the extreme consolidation under the Nazi dictatorship).
Instead, activists have advocated for safer, greener, and more accessible renewable alternatives like solar and wind, and embraced promises of greater self-sufficiency, community engagement, and citizen empowerment (“energy democracy”).
This support for renewable energy is less about CO2 and more about resetting power relations (through decentralized, bottom-up generation rather than top-down production and distribution), protecting local ecosystems, and promoting peace in the context of the Cold War. Focused.
Germany's energy transition
The contrast here with Thunberg's later Fridays for Future movement and its slogan “listen to the experts” is striking. The older generation of activists deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time. At the time, they viewed centralized nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewable energy as a pipe dream.
This early movement was instrumental in creating Germany's Green Party, which is today one of the most influential in the world. The Green Party emerged in 1980 and first entered national government as a junior partner of the Social Democrats from 1998 to 2005. This “red-green” coalition has banned new nuclear reactors, announced plans to close existing reactors by 2022, and passed several bills supporting renewable energy.
This, in turn, has accelerated the national deployment of renewable energy, which will surge from 6.3% of total domestic electricity consumption in 2000 to 51.8% in 2023.
This figure is even more surprising when we consider the contributions of ordinary citizens. In 2019, they owned 40.4% of Germany's total renewable generation capacity (up from more than 50% in the early 2010s) through community wind energy cooperatives, farm-based biogas installations or household rooftop solar power.
In most other countries, recent energy transitions have been attempts to achieve net-zero targets using all available low-carbon technologies. But Germany's now-famous “Energiewende” (translated as “energy transition” or “energy revolution”) has been trying since its early days to transition from carbon-intensive and nuclear energy to mainly renewable alternatives.
In fact, the very book credited with coining the term Energiewende in 1980 was titled Energie-Wende: Growth and Prosperity Without Oil and Uranium and was published by a think tank founded by anti-nuclear activists.
Successive German governments have more or less adhered to this line over the past 25 years. Angela Merkel's pro-nuclear second cabinet (2009-2013) was the first exception.
This continued until the Fukushima disaster in 2011, after which mass protests by 250,000 people and the Green Party's shocking state election defeat forced the administration to revert to a 2022 phase-out plan. It is no wonder that many politicians today are reluctant to reopen that particular Pandora's box.
Another ongoing political headache is where to store the country's nuclear waste, a problem Germany has never solved. No community has agreed to host such a facility and those designated for this purpose have witnessed mass protests.
Instead, radioactive waste is stored in temporary facilities close to existing reactors, which is not a long-term solution.