A majority of Germans think the government pressing ahead with shutting down the country’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors during Europe’s years-long, crippling energy crisis was a mistake, with around a third feeling it was “completely wrong”.
The decision by the former Angela Merkel German government, which was later taken up and executed by the left-wing Olaf Scholz government, to kill Germany’s nuclear energy sector — officially because of safety concerns — was a mistake, 53 per cent of Germanys think. While only fractionally over half of Germans think so, national broadsheet Die Welt reports, that group is meaningfully larger than the 40 per cent who said they supported the nuclear phase-out, which saw the final reactors taken out of service in April 2023.
While a surprisingly large minority really strongly feel Merkel made a mistake in ordering the end of nuclear, with 32 per cent saying it was “completely wrong”, the survey also shows Germans as a whole seem to view the decision with a certain amount of fatalism and the decision as irreversible, with just 39 per cent saying nuclear should make a comeback. Solar, wind, and hydro are the most popular.
The official reasoning for taking nuclear out of the national energy picture was safety, and even as the Ukraine War triggered a continent-wide energy crisis, the left-wing government of the time argued that extending the life of nuclear plants would have no impact on German energy capacity and it wouldn’t be safe to do so. The public do not appear to share this view, however, with the survey finding only a small minority say their feeling is swayed about concerns for a nuclear accident.
Just 15 per cent said they were very worried, while 52 per cent said they were “slightly” concerned about an accident at any European power plant, and remarkably 53 per cent said that even the Chernobyl nuclear disaster hadn’t worsened their feeling about nuclear power.
If Germans feel their government forging ahead with denuclearisation was a mistake, it is a view that is gaining increasing acceptance, even in unexpected quarters. European Union boss Ursula von der Leyen, who is German, and who served in and voted for the Merkel government which killed nuclear, is now on record as saying the decision was a “strategic mistake”. As reported last month, Von der Leyen said at a Paris energy conference that “This reduction in the share of nuclear was a choice. I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power. This should change”.
Similar remarks emerged from the International Energy Agency just days later, with their director saying of Europe’s energy crisis in light of the aggravation of the Strait of Hormuz closure: “I don’t get the impression that political decision-makers have yet grasped the magnitude of the problem we are facing… Germany made a huge strategic error—I’ve been saying this for almost 20 years like a broken record—by shutting down its nuclear power plants… The situation wouldn’t be so bad today if Germany still had the power plants.”
Germany’s rush away from nuclear and apparent disinclination to reverse course now the folly has become apparent to all is at odds with its allies. Many Western nations are now looking to a new generation of nuclear plants, even if they are intended just as a stop-gap to cover the period between the phase-out of coal and gas and until a so far elusive, hoped-for future where ‘green’ energy is capable of carrying a modern economy reliably. Slovakia in Central Europe is looking to the United States for assistance to build new nuclear. In America itself, the tech sector is looking to nuclear to satisfy its growing need for cheap energy to keep the wheels on the Artificial Intelligence bubble.
Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, in a rare expression of sanity for the otherwise dogmatically green-obsessed left-wing government, a contract has just been signed for the first of the country’s planned fleet of Small Modular Reactors (SMR), a new form of nuclear plant reckoned to get energy generation online faster and cheaper than traditional large plants. Because political decision-making tends to deal with extremely short horizons, this speed of deployment appears to be essential to get new nuclear over the line in most Western democracies.
Rolls Royce is to deliver three units producing 1.4 gigawatts, which the government says is enough to “three million of today’s homes for more than 60 years”.
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