Europe 1 with AFP 11:25 p.m., October 17, 2022

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced Monday to extend the operation of the last three German nuclear power plants, a "snub" for the Greens within his coalition government, in a context of unprecedented energy crisis.

It's official.

Germany's last three nuclear power plants are to be extended as Europe faces an unprecedented energy crisis.

“The legal bases will be created to allow the operation of the Isar 2, Neckarwestheim 2 and Emsland nuclear power plants beyond December 31, 2022, until April 15, 2023”, specifies a letter from the Chancellor to the government that AFP was able to consult. .

His coalition government had so far only agreed on maintaining two of the three power plants beyond the end of 2022, the date initially planned for a nuclear phase-out.

The Emsland power station in the north of the country was at the heart of a showdown within the ruling coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals, torn over the solutions to be found in the face of the crisis. energy born of the war in Ukraine.

The chancellor therefore finally decided on Monday, in an emergency context, where the first European economy is trying to reduce its dependence on Russian energy imports, in particular its gas.

FDP Justice Minister Marco Buschmann praised Chancellor Scholz's decision on Twitter.

"Common sense prevails... This strengthens our country because it guarantees greater grid stability and lower electricity prices", he rejoices, while nuclear currently produces 6% of the net production of electricity. electricity in Germany.

But this decision is a new blow for the German Minister of the Economy, the ecologist Robert Habeck, whose frictions with his colleague of Finances, the liberal Christian Lindner, are more and more obvious.

Snub for the Greens

The chancellor's decision is "a snub for Habeck", commented the Bild on Monday.

The Minister of the Environment, Steffi Lemke, of the Greens, for her part welcomed the "clarification" made by Mr. Scholz, which according to her does not in any way mean an abandonment of the eventual exit from nuclear power.

“Germany will finally phase out nuclear power on April 15, 2023,” there will be no “life extension” of power plants,” Lemke said confidently on Twitter.

The NGO Greenpeace called Scholz's decision "irresponsible".

“Extending the lifespan of nuclear power plants puts us all at unjustifiable risk,” said Greenpeace Germany executive director Martin Kaiser.

Initially, Germany, a large part of the population of which is hostile to the atom, intended to close its last three nuclear reactors in operation at the end of 2022.

But the government of Olaf Scholz reversed this decision after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and decided in September to extend two of the three plants still in operation until spring 2023, blaming France for its poor network, in a context of energy shortage orchestrated by Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

About twenty reactors out of the 56 in the French fleet are in fact unavailable due to maintenance operations or corrosion problems.

EDF has promised their gradual restart by February 2023.

Go further

The German Liberals would like to go further than the spring of 2023 and keep the three plants in operation longer, while the Greens are historically deeply anti-nuclear.

Faced with the threat of an energy shortage this winter, the German government has already decided to increase the use of coal, a particularly polluting energy, with the extension of the activity of several coal-fired power stations until spring 2024. , even though he has set a goal to abandon this energy in 2030.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg had considered it preferable to continue to use the nuclear power plants currently in operation in Germany rather than turn to coal, in a recent interview on German television.

The nuclear phase-out schedule was decided by Angela Merkel after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.