Germany's energy supply: "The nuclear phase-out is a success"

Mr. Uekötter, you are a historian and have written a book about the history of nuclear power in Germany.

After the Fukushima nuclear accident, we wanted to get out of nuclear power, but now, because of the energy crisis, there are heated discussions about longer operating times.

Why are we such a mess?

Sebastian Balzter

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Marcus Theurer

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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In an international comparison, the German nuclear phase-out is actually quite orderly, with a clear timetable and legal framework.

I prefer that to the improvisational theater that we see in Belgium, for example, where the service lives of nuclear power plants were extended by ten years because of the war in Ukraine – without a safety check.

The decision to phase out nuclear power in 2011 was a hasty reversal after the Fukushima disaster.

What should be arranged about it?

I think Chancellor Angela Merkel was a bit of a believer in nuclear power.

At first she really believed that a new nuclear reactor could be built in Germany, even though the electricity producers had given up on it for a long time.

Consider: The last new West German kiln was commissioned in 1982.

I see Merkel's about-face after Fukushima as the end of her unsuccessful attempt to somehow conjure up a nuclear future again.

In view of the acutely endangered energy supply, shouldn't we urgently reconsider the exit?

Three nuclear power plants are still in operation in Germany today.

If they are not switched off at the end of the year as planned, it will not make too much of a difference for our energy supply.

And if the demand for longer lifetimes is now justified by the fact that we want to end our dependence on Russian energy, then one has to say: The German nuclear industry was at this point as early as 1982. Even then, half of the uranium came from the Soviet Union, and to date, Russia is one of the largest uranium suppliers in the world.

In your book you describe the decades-long debate about nuclear power as a success story of negotiation democracy.

In view of the battles over the nuclear power plants with water cannons and tear gas, isn't that pretty euphemistic?

The worrying thing about the protests wasn't that there were a handful of left-wing extremists who wanted to fight, but that many ordinary people were also angry.

This is what I mean by the success of democracy: in the nuclear debate, we have managed to step back from a precipitous level of violence and, in a 20-year democratic learning process, we have agreed on where the red lines for legitimate protest lie.

Incidentally, there was a similar process in the nuclear industry: an oversized construction program was shelved without prices exploding or a large corporation going bankrupt.

However, Germany has been discussing a location for a nuclear waste repository for decades without any result.

Isn't that more an expression of collective irresponsibility than democratic success?

The repository discussion is a great tragedy.

The reason for this lay right at the beginning of the nuclear age: In Germany, people got into this technology in the 1950s without having a solution for nuclear waste.

This is a failure of the nuclear industry, which for decades has promised a solution to the nuclear waste problem without ever delivering that solution.

In Germany, too, nuclear power was once considered the future.

Yes, in the 1950s and 1960s there was a broad social consensus that this is a future technology that we need to be part of.

Conservatives like Franz Josef Strauss and Marxists like Ernst Bloch agreed on this.

The brightest minds of an entire generation set out to build this nuclear future.

Huge sums of money have been invested.

But I'm not sure they would have done so knowing that nuclear power would become just another form of fossil fuel generation.

What do you mean?

Initially, the hope was that a fast breeder could be built that would also produce new fissile material with the current.

So that an endless cycle of energy production can be created.

Around 1970 the expectation was: In three decades most reactors will be fast breeders.

In the following years, however, it became apparent how difficult, expensive and prone to failure these were.

So it stayed with light water reactors, which depend on uranium mining to ensure the supply of fuel.

Quite similar to the other fossil energy sources.