Sven Giegold made no secret of his joy.

"Today a youth's dream is coming true," tweeted the Green politician and State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection on New Year's Eve.

During his school days in Hanover, they had campaigned against nuclear power plants.

“With the shutdown of Grohnde and Brokdorf, our protests achieved their goal: Decentralized renewable energies are replacing nuclear power, coal and natural gas.

Finally!"

Since the beginning of the new year, there are no longer six but only three nuclear power plants in operation in Germany.

The kilns in Brokdorf (Schleswig-Holstein), Grohnde (Lower Saxony) and Gundremmingen (Bavaria) were shut down as planned.

Isar 2 near the Bavarian Landshut as well as the reactors in Emsland in Lower Saxony and Neckarwestheim 2 in Baden-Württemberg are still connected to the grid.

But they also only have a short remaining term.

The nuclear phase-out decided in 2011 after the reactor accident in Fukushima, Japan, should be completed by the end of this year at the latest.

Return to nuclear power is not an option

Germany is thus taking a separate path internationally. A number of European countries want to stick to nuclear power in order to achieve the climate targets, in some cases even building new reactors. The background to this is that by 2030, CO2 emissions in the EU should decrease by 55 percent compared to 1990. Since the generation of one kilowatt hour of electricity from nuclear power causes significantly fewer CO2 emissions than those from lignite or gas, proponents like to praise the technology as "green".

Within the EU, France in particular takes this position.

And it has now achieved an interim success: the EU Commission has proposed, within the framework of the so-called taxonomy, to classify nuclear power as well as gas as green energy sources under certain conditions.

The Commission's regulation is seen as a guideline for where investors put their money if they want to invest it sustainably.

Environmentalists fear that the expansion of renewable energies will no longer make sufficient progress if investments in nuclear and gas power plants are also considered sustainable.

The federal government rejects the initiative of the EU commission.

Economics and Climate Protection Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) spoke of “greenwashing”.

It is questionable whether this will "even find acceptance in the financial market".

Habeck had previously ruled out a return from Germany to nuclear power.

He has not yet met a politician who wants a repository for nuclear waste in his constituency - therefore, in his view, the debate is superfluous.

With every kiln that is switched off, however, the question of how Germany intends to meet its future electricity needs becomes more pressing, which is forecast to rise sharply if, for example, steelworks work with hydrogen and, above all, electric cars are to be used on the roads.

Habeck wants to build three times as many wind turbines

Germany “ideally” also wants to get out of lignite by 2030, according to the coalition agreement.

And also that Germany should get 80 percent of its electricity from renewable energies that year.

In 2021, however, their share of electricity generation did not increase, but actually fell, to just under 41 percent.

According to preliminary figures from the BDEW energy association, brown and hard coal together covered more than a quarter of Germany's electricity needs, and nuclear power almost 12 percent.