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Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder and CDU chairman Friedrich Merz in the Isar 2 nuclear power plant
Photo: Bavarian State Chancellery / picture alliance / dpa
To start with a personal question: How are you prepared at home if the power goes out? Well, the probability that this will actually happen is extremely low, because the German power grid is one of the most stable in Europe and also in the world. The security of supply continues to increase. Although Friedrich Merz personally warned in autumn 2022 that Germany was threatened with a “blackout”. It is one of the narratives that Merz has adopted from the far right.
But back to the question: If, contrary to expectations, it does get dark for a short time, how prepared are you? Candles at hand, flashlight in the kitchen drawer?
Whatever your answer was, it probably wasn't: "To be on the safe side, a diesel generator runs in my basement all year round." That would be absurd, annoying and expensive.
More like the flashlight
And yet this clearly absurd method corresponds structurally to the plan to support the rapidly growing renewable energies worldwide with nuclear power plants. You can't just switch a nuclear power plant off and then switch it back on again. There are always phases, most of them quite short, in which wind and solar power would not be enough to cover German needs, even if renewable energies were expanded to a much greater extent than today.
In such cases, the network can be temporarily stabilized with battery storage. One such facility is to be built in the former Brokdorf nuclear power plant, for example, and construction of such a facility will begin in Lower Saxony this year. This is a successful model in Australia. According to the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, battery storage also accounted for 3.15 percent of the available power in this country in 2023.
Battery storage, gas and later hydrogen power plants can be started up and shut down very quickly. They're more like the flashlight in the kitchen drawer than the constantly running diesel generator in the basement.
Costs more than doubled
Building nuclear power plants that run all year round so that we have an alternative in the few weeks of the year when renewable electricity is not quite sufficient in the future has a number of major disadvantages.
Above all, nuclear power plants are incredibly expensive. They are almost never completed at the originally planned cost and almost never on the planned date. In Great Britain, for example, the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant has been under construction since 2016. It was actually supposed to be finished in 2025, then 2027, but the commissioning date has now been pushed back to possibly 2031. The expected costs have more than doubled since construction began and are now probably 46 billion euros, including inflation - if that's enough.
The most expensive default insurance in the world
A Chinese investor has now withdrawn from the project because of the enormous costs, and France wants Great Britain to inject even more money. The French state-owned nuclear company EDF, which is building Hinkley Point, is constantly making high losses and is already heavily in debt. Nuclear power plants are the most expensive default insurance in the world.
The head of the German energy supplier and former nuclear power operator EnBW recently told the “Handelsblatt” that it was “a mystery” to him how Hinkley Point “will ever generate electricity at a cost-covering level.” New nuclear power plants are “not the solution for energy supply.” The Federal Association of the Energy Industry sees it the same way.
“Massively subsidized”
Because of the high risks and financing problems, the nuclear power sector is “massively subsidized by governments” not only in France but also everywhere else. That's what we just read in the Financial Times. Against this background, it is particularly strange that parties like the Union and FDP, which otherwise call for a “planned economy” when it comes to every subsidy for non-fossil energy supply, prefer this form of energy supply that can only survive with a lot of tax money.
Nuclear power fans are currently fond of saying that all of this will soon change with so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), i.e. smaller, possibly transportable nuclear reactors. A first such pilot project by the operator NuScale in the USA was discontinued precisely because it was uneconomical. SMRs have so far been castles in the air.
Despite all this, many Germans seem to want to stick to nuclear power - which is probably mainly because they are poorly informed.
The operators waved away in annoyance
The FDP considers state investments in electricity generation from gas (short-term) and hydrogen (medium-term) power plants to the extent of the equivalent of around a Hinkley Point nuclear power plant to be “beyond realistic”. But their representatives like to talk about nuclear power (permanently expensive) and fusion power plants (non-existent).
There are also other unpleasant aspects of nuclear energy production. For example, that around half of all uranium enrichment capacity is located in Russia, the country that we no longer want to be blackmailed by in the future. The largest uranium mining volume in 2022 was in Kazakhstan, which is governed autocratically and is politically unstable, posing a “major risk to the energy markets.”
Yes, also in China
All over the world - including China, where people often claim the opposite - renewable energies are growing ever faster. Much faster than nuclear power. Around 80 percent of all generation capacity added worldwide was renewable in 2023. In addition, according to Nathanial Bullard of Bloomberg NEF, investments in storage technology overtook those in nuclear power for the first time last year. The former are growing rapidly, the latter hardly or not at all.
From 2022 to 2023, the expansion of battery storage tripled worldwide. And battery storage prices continue to fall exponentially, as do prices for renewable electricity. The global share of electricity generated from renewable sources is continuously increasing, the nuclear share is continuously falling. The much-vaunted “renaissance of nuclear power” has so far been primarily a fiction.
So where does some politicians' dogged adherence to nuclear power as an "option" come from? Even though the Union and the FDP themselves decided to phase out nuclear power in 2011, and under the black-red government three of the last six nuclear power plants were shut down shortly before the end of the last legislative period?
“One-sided”?
The explanation probably has to do with a concept that Friedrich Merz and Christian Lindner apparently only incorporate very selectively into their tactical considerations. It has been a topic in this column several times: “Issue Ownership”. The term from political science means: There are certain topics that, in the perception of those eligible to vote, “belong” to certain parties. If there is a lot of talk about these issues, then these parties benefit. When it comes to migration, it's the AfD, but Friedrich Merz, Markus Söder and FDP General Secretary Christian Dürr apparently still don't want to accept that.
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The issue of renewable energies (RE), on the other hand, belongs most closely to the Greens, because the Union and the FDP have deliberately torpedoed the expansion of renewable energy for years. For Friedrich Merz, their great success is therefore unpleasant. So this week he complained that the energy supply was “focused too one-sidedly on wind and sun.” In view of falling electricity prices and emissions thanks to renewable energy, this is a bizarre statement. By 2023, Germany was already covering almost 60 percent of its total electricity needs with renewable sources.
Because the Union and FDP can no longer get away with openly promoting more fossil fuels, the only supposed alternative that remains is the dead horse nuclear power. Of course, Friedrich Merz also knows that the horse is dead, which is why he uses phrases like “option” or “whether you actually need it and do it is another question.”
It's just a matter of pretending until the next election that you have an alternative to offer. Once you have taken part in the government, you will try to quietly accept this alternative, which in reality is not one.