03/11/2026March 11, 2026
At a nuclear summit near Paris earlier this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the transition from nuclear energy undertaken by some EU countries as a “strategic mistake.” Nuclear power, she said, is a “reliable, affordable source of low-emission electricity.” She announced new EU financial assistance for nuclear power plants.
Von der Leyen’s words reverberated in Germany, which switched off its last nuclear reactor in 2023.
Von der Leyen’s father, Ernst Albrecht, like his daughter a member of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), was the head of government of the state of Lower Saxony in the 1970s and a staunch supporter of nuclear energy.
He failed in his attempt to establish a final repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste in the east of his state, however. The village of Gorleben, which had been pinpointed as the place where that repository was to be built, became a symbol of the struggle of hundreds of thousands of people against nuclear energy. The repository was never built.
No German nuclear plants since 2023
Von der Leyen’s appeal for a return to nuclear energy is meeting with mixed reactions at best in Berlin.
From 1961 onward, a total of 37 reactors within Germany supplied up to 30% of the nationy’s electricity. The country began phasing out nuclear power 15 years ago, following the disaster in Fukushima, Japan, on March 11, 2011. The last German nuclear power plant was taken offline in 2023. Spain and Austria have also announced that they have permanently shut down nuclear power.
Since then, there has been a recurring debate in Germany about whether a return to nuclear power would be sensible, given the fluctuation in the production of renewables like solar and wind energy and especially given the scarcity of oil and gas imports during international crises such as the war in Ukraine or the US-Israeli war on Iran and subsequent escalations across the Middle East.
On Tuesday Chancellor Friedrich Merz, himself a member of the CDU, said previous federal governments had decided to phase out nuclear energy and rolling back that decision was not possible. “I regret this,” he said, “but it is the way it is, and we are now concentrating on the energy policy we have.”
Though the CDU and allied Bavarian Christian Social Union support nuclear energy, Merz also knows that a rollback would need to find a majority in the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s parliament. And and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s votes would be needed to make up the numbers. Merz has said he would not work with the AfD.
SPD rejects new nuclear power plants
The conservatives’ junior coalition partner, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), have rejected von der Leyen’s proposal to return to nuclear energy: Environment Minister Carsten Schneider, of the SPD, saidt nuclear energy had already cost taxpayers billions. “If a risky technology is still dependent on state support after three-quarters of a century, and better alternatives have long existed, then consequences should be drawn,” Schneider said.
Schneider also rejected the suggestion to focus primarily on mobile reactors, so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs): “These small nuclear power plants have been in the works for decades, but there still has not been a breakthrough, and there is still a struggle to secure subsidies,” he said.
Markus Krebber, the CEO of Germany’s largest electricity provider, RWE, recently rejected the idea of small reactors. “As things stand, an investment in SMRs is not feasible for a private company,” Krebber told the newsportal Político. He said no supplier worldwide could commit to construction times at fixed and negotiated costs. Companies will not provide funding for small reactors, Krebber said. […]
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