Split by the atom
Political divisions threaten nuclear powers role in Europe's energy transition
On Saturday, Germany’s three remaining nuclear facilities were shutdown. The plants - Emsland, Neckarwestheim II and Isar II - provided 4 GW of power to the country’s electricity grid.
The closures marks the end of long planned decision to stop nuclear generation in Germany, a technology that some critics argue is unsafe and unsustainable. Years of anti-nuclear protests had put pressure on successive German governments to phase out the technology. And then, in the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster in which an earthquake and tsunami caused three nuclear meltdowns, Chancellor Angela Merkel set 2022 as the deadline for Germany’s nuclear generation.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the spike in energy prices, the current German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz agreed to a one-off extension to 15th April 2023. Of those other EU countries (among them Spain, Switzerland, Belgium) that also agreed in 2011 to phase out nuclear power, the Belgian government overturned its energy strategy in light of the energy crisis and reached an agreement to extend the life of two of its newest nuclear reactors by 10 years, abandoning the previous plan to exit nuclear power by 2025. For Germany though, 15th April was the final cut off.
The day after Germany’s final reactors closed, Finland's 1.6 GW Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) nuclear reactor, Europe's largest and the first to be built for 16 years, began generating electricity. The facility is 14 years late. Construction at the plant began in 2005, however technical issues including a string of breakdowns and outages prevented the operators from sticking to OL3 original four year construction timeline.
Nuclear power divides Europe. Until this past weekend, 13 EU member states generated electricity with nuclear power, while 14 did not. Germany has now completely pivoted away from nuclear energy, but other countries are far more sympathetic to the benefits that the zero carbon, baseload power technology provides. Rather than being a uniform nuclear family of countries all pulling in the same direction, the dysfunctional nature of the European family of member states increases the risk of political uncertainty.
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