Nikolaus Valerius is celebrating New Year's Eve in the nuclear power plant this year.

In any case, Valerius, member of the board of the Essen-based electricity producer RWE Power, will travel from the Ruhr area to Gundremmingen in Bavaria on the last day of the year in order to be there in the evening when the nuclear power plant near the small community goes off the grid once and for all.

The RWE manager's business trip is intended as a gesture of thanks to the local staff, who have controlled and maintained the reactor for 37 years.

In Gundremmingen, which lies on the Danube between Ulm and Augsburg and has almost 1400 inhabitants, even the municipal coat of arms shows a representation of Bohr's model of the atom.

Marcus Theurer

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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On New Year's Day there is an end to nuclear power. Along with Grohnde in Lower Saxony and Brokdorf in Schleswig-Holstein, Gundremmingen C is one of three German nuclear power plants that will be shut down at the turn of the year. After that, only the Isar 2, Neckarwestheim 2 and Emsland power plants will be in operation, and will cease operations twelve months later. More than a hundred nuclear facilities have been built in Germany for research purposes and for commercial operation since the 1950s. 2022 will be the last year in which Germany will still generate its own nuclear power.

The nuclear power plants, which last year still provided around 18 percent of electricity generation, won new advocates shortly before they were shut down. Criticism of the nuclear phase-out has come from the business world in particular. “We should talk about a return to nuclear power,” says Stefan Wolf, head of the Gesamtmetall employers' association. After all, the electricity for the many new electric cars on the streets has to come from somewhere. "For the competitiveness of the German economy, it would make sense to continue operating these nuclear power plants," warns former BASF boss Jürgen Hambrecht. The new CEO of the Linde Group, Sanjiv Lamba, also considers the German phase-out of nuclear power to be a mistake. And in politics, Saxony's Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU) demands: After the coal phase-out was decided,the nation must “keep nuclear power open as an option”.

Opinion polls show that the majority in the population is shrinking in favor of the nuclear phase-out: ten years ago three out of four Germans were in favor of the switch-off, now it is only 56 percent of citizens.

Proponents of nuclear power argue that nuclear power is climate-friendly, that it will continue to be needed in view of the intended earlier shutdown of German coal-fired power plants and extremely high natural gas prices.

RWE has "zero interest in nuclear power"

The operators of the German nuclear power plants consider this debate to be a pipe dream. The discussion is “strange”, wonders Eon boss Leonhard Birnbaum, whose energy company is one of the three nuclear power plant operators in the country alongside EnBW and RWE. The RWE manager Valerius does not want to leave any doubts. “Our interest in continuing to operate is zero,” he says. For his company, the nuclear phase-out is irreversible: “The future of RWE lies in renewable energies.” In mid-November, the company presented its new “Growing Green” strategy: RWE plans to invest 50 billion euros in wind power, solar parks and the hydrogen economy by 2030. New natural gas power plants should ensure the power supply even in times when renewables do not provide enough.RWE intends to continue operating these systems later with climate-friendly green hydrogen.