The genie is out of the bottle and it won't go back in.

Against the background of the Russian attack on Ukraine, a discussion has flared up in Germany about whether it wouldn't make sense to continue generating nuclear power.

The party that fought like no other for the nuclear phase-out, the Greens, really got the debate going.

After the war began, Robert Habeck, the Federal Economics and Climate Protection Minister responsible for energy issues, said with reference to a possible extension of the service life: "I would not ideologically resist that."

Christian Geinitz

Business correspondent in Berlin

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This could be understood as a further "turning point" in this time, which was not exactly lacking in political voltes.

In fact, the nuclear phase-out is deeply anchored in the green ideology, it is part of the DNA of the party that emerged from the anti-nuclear movement.

A few weeks earlier, Habeck and Environment Minister Steffi Lemke, also from the Greens, had vehemently railed against the EU's "taxonomy" that classifies nuclear energy as a sustainable technology.

Now, after the Russian invasion, Habeck could only dare to question the anti-nuclear axiom because the second pillar of his party is the peace movement.

To repel the aggressor, Russian President and Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin, the unthinkable became conceivable: giving nuclear fission a reprieve.

In this way, so the calculation goes, energy dependency could at least be alleviated and thus also the susceptibility to blackmail by the aggressive and erratic regime in Moscow.

Nuclear phase-out by the end of the year

Habeck must have been reminded of his party friend Joschka Fischer, who as foreign minister was forced to make a similar choice between plague and cholera: During the Kosovo war in 1999 he supported the participation of the Bundeswehr in combat missions against Serbia, on the grounds that the Greens propagated “Never again War”, but also “Never again Auschwitz”.

The latter was aimed at human rights violations and attempts at genocide in Kosovo.

At the beginning of March of this year, it looked as if the German energy story was once again producing bizarre blossoms: in 2010, a coalition of Union and FDP initially extended the operating times of the nuclear power plants, but then surprisingly announced the nuclear phase-out after the tsunami in Fukushima in March 2011 .

The law is still in effect today: in 2021, half of the six remaining reactors were shut down, and the last three are to be taken off the grid by the end of the current year.

With the decision in the "super election year" of 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and Vice-Chancellor Guido Westerwelle (FDP) wanted to keep their parties afloat in a mood that clearly tilted against nuclear power after the accident in Japan.