Europe’s mad dash to decommission its nuclear power plants was a “strategic mistake” which now has to be rectified, European Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen has admitted.
Energy prices are too high in Europe, which harms both consumers and industrial competitiveness, and this is partly because several European nations destroyed their own nuclear energy industries, leaving the continent dependent on imported gas and oil, a nuclear energy conference in Paris heard on Tuesday.
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen, who was a member of the Angela Merkel-led government that decided to destroy Germany’s nuclear energy, and who personally voted in the German parliament to end the nuclear programme, appears to have now seen the error of her ways.
Acknowledging absolutely none of her own culpability in the decision-making process, or that Germany led the charge against nuclear, Von der Leyen said at the Paris conference: “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”.
The share of nuclear in Europe’s energy mix has fallen from one-third in 1990 to one-sixth today, she said, and with few new nuclear plants being built, this may dwindle further.
Von der Leyen said:
Europe’s energy prices are structurally too high… affordable energy are not only important for our citizens’ cost of living but is also decisive for industrial competitiveness… Europe is neither an oil nor a gas producer.
For fossil fuels we are completely dependent on expensive and volatile imports. They are putting us at a structural disadvantage to other regions, and the Middle East crisis is giving us a stark reminder of the vulnerability it creates… but we have homegrown energy sources.
Nuclear energy, she said, “is reliable, producing electricity all year, around the clock”, and alongside renewables would be the “joint guarantors” of the future. While European Union spending on nuclear power is fraught with difficulty because several member states remain strongly opposed to nuclear energy, Von der Leyen unveiled a new commission-backed investment package in small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to get the sector moving.
The proposed investment is a comparative drop in the bucket, however, with just $230 million pledged to private investment in SMRs.
Deutsche Welle states French President Emmanuel Macron also addressed the meeting and, given that his country is the European Union’s final remaining civil nuclear power, enthusiastically backed plans to enhance European nuclear. As widely reported, this would almost certainly massively benefit the French state-owned nuclear energy giant EDF, not least as Europe tries to wean itself off its longstanding dependence on Russian-made nuclear fuel.
Cloaking this national self-interest in diplomatic language, President Macron told the conference: “Nuclear power is key to reconciling both independence — and thus energy sovereignty — with decarbonization, and thus carbon neutrality… We can see it in our current geopolitical context: when we are too dependent on hydrocarbons, they can become a tool of pressure, or even of destabilization.”
Significantly, Marine Le Pen’s deputy and potentially the next President of France, Jordan Bardella, also responded to the conference, decrying Germany’s approach to nuclear and the anti-nuclear obsession of European Green parties, who utterly abhor the most effective zero-carbon energy source presently available. Bardella said:
For years, we have fought to ensure that nuclear energy holds a place of honor… against the obscurantism of so-called environmentalists and the dogmatism of the European Commission, which has driven the reduction of nuclear’s share in Europe.
Ursula von der Leyen now acknowledges that this was a “strategic error.” In reality, it was more than that: it was a historic blunder that has cost our continent precious time, harmed the competitiveness of its businesses, and eroded the purchasing power of its citizens.
This belated admission must be accompanied by a profound rethinking of the European energy market rules, which prevent France from benefiting from the advantage of its nuclear fleet.
While Germany has long been the forefront of Western anti-nuclear sentiment, an outgrowth of anti-nuclear weapons campaigns of the mid-20th century, things came to a head in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan. Reckoning that if the Japanese couldn’t run nuclear flawlessly, then nobody can, Germany entered into a massive crisis of confidence and rushed at breakneck speed towards denuclearisation.
Natural gas — sourced cheaply from Russia, it was reckoned at the time — was supposed to cover the shortfall during the transition to renewables, but that change has taken longer, has been more expensive, and has been less reliable than originally hoped. Nevertheless, with the exception of one brief life extension of Germany’s three final nuclear plants as Russia invaded Ukraine, denuclearisation proceeded at pace, and the final plants were disconnected from the grid in 2023.
It is not as if this mistake, or its inherent risks, were not abundantly obvious at the time. The then German opposition leader Friedrich Merz, who is now himself Chancellor, called the end of nuclear energy in Germany a “black day” for the country and observed how it went against Germany’s own self-interest at a time of Europe-wide energy crises over the Ukraine war.
A top European Union commissioner begged Germany to give its remaining power stations life extensions, and Polish lawmakers even offered to lease the nuclear plants to prevent them from closing. In 2024, a year after the last plant closed, it was reported that the German government actually knew that closing the plants was a bad idea but did it anyway for political reasons.
While Germany is the most high-profile of the anti-nuclear nations in Europe, it is not the only country to have wrecked its nuclear fleet, nor even the most reckless. Spain, which has one of Europe’s largest deposits of uranium ore and once had a major domestic nuclear energy industry, is also pushing to close its final plants under the nation’s left-wing, green-obsessed government.
The massive Iberian Peninsula-wide blackout across Spain and Portugal last year saw Madrid lean back on its remaining nuclear plants to keep the lights on; however, even this abject demonstration of their utility was not enough to force a change of direction for the socialist-led government.
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