In Germany, the quest for carbon neutrality without nuclear power

It was one of the highlights of the summer 2021 election campaign. During a debate on television between the candidates for the chancellery, the leader of the conservative bloc, Armin Laschet, said: “It was a mistake to get out of nuclear power before getting out of coal. “ With this sentence, Armin Laschet settled accounts with an emblematic decision of Chancellor Angela Merkel: that, taken in 2011 after the accident in Fukushima (Japan), to abandon nuclear energy early.

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Politically, he also gathered his camp: economic circles were very angry with Angela Merkel for having “sacrificed” the atom. while the plants did not present any particular risk to their security, they believe, to neutralize the green vote. Ten years later, when the last reactor must be shut down at the end of 2022, a beginning of discussion has resumed in certain economic and scientific circles. Should we really stop the last power plants, when the urgency would be to do without coal? Shouldn’t we, like the French, bet on nuclear minijets?

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The carbon neutrality objective, put forward this summer to 2045 by the government, seems all the more difficult to meet as Germany has only reached its greenhouse gas reduction target for 2020 because of the decrease in activity linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. In reality, it is unlikely that the country will one day return to nuclear power, as it is rejected by a large part of the population. This is the essential difference with France: the nuclear feud divided German society for decades, and the images of Fukushima did the rest.

Production too low

“I do not know anyone, neither in political circles nor in industrial circles, who is seriously considering relaunching the debate”, Carsten Rolle, energy expert of the German industrial federation (BDI). Especially when the Greens, who grew up politically on the rejection of the atom, enter the government. As for the electricity companies (Vattenfall, E.ON, RWE and EnBW), which closed in March 2021 the long dispute with the State related to the early shutdown of their reactors by obtaining compensation of 2.4 billion euros, none wants to reopen this chapter.

The planned abandonment of nuclear power has allowed a considerable acceleration of renewable energies: they represent 45% of electricity production in 2020, according to the national statistics institute Destatis, against 6% in 2000. But this increase has come at a high cost: due to the financing system for renewables, via a fee, households and small businesses currently pay around 32 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), one of the most expensive in the world. While gross energy prices have risen sharply in recent months, the government decided in mid-October to lower this tax by 43%.

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