Reactors and Reactions
The case of German nuclear energy
When driving down the A2 Autobahn, from the commuter towns of the Detmold region to the production powerhouse of Dortmund, the average driver will encounter the sight of two enormous cooling towers belonging to the discontinued Hamm-Uentrop nuclear reactor. Turning greyer and more worn-out every year, the power plant has remained inoperative since September 1989, mere weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall and after barely more than a year of activity.
This grim landmark in the heart of the Rhineland (one of the most populated metro areas in the world) may remind the inadvertent tourist of a seeming decline in the Ruhr industry, and a potential self-inflicting wound on its energy sector. For hundreds of thousands of German commuters the power-plant is a billion-euro-a-year monument to squandering. An enormous pimple on the green landscape, soon to be torn down to the delight of most taxpayers. Hamm-Uentrop is the unfortunate legacy of an unstable, overburdened nuclear energy policy.
Atoms for peace of mind
After the Trümmerfrauen had finished clearing up the rubble from World War II and the European Coal and Steel Community gave way to the Euratom in the late 1950s, the German economy saw nuclear energy as a miraculous energy source for its rapidly growing “miracle economy”. European leaders sought to establish deeper ties not only in a free-market exchange of raw materials, but also in the R&D of nuclear energy.
France led the way during the development of both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, seeking to become as self-reliant as possible (as seen on a previous post).
The end result: France remains the world’s leading nation on nuclear energy production to this day, as well as being the only country in the EU with its own nuclear deterrence program.
Germany, still a subject in terms of geopolitics and a country split into two states, had to take a different route. In 1960, the West-German federal government subjected the nuclear energy sector to a segmentalization with the Atomgesetz (the Atomic Energy Act, revised various times during the following decades). Although the law gave a way for many players in the private sector to participate in nuclear energy production as well as a wide variety of nuclear reactors, it also meant that the private enterprises, which run the operations of the nuclear power plants, would also carry the weight of dismantling and decommissioning the reactors, as well as the disposal of radioactive waste. This would eventually lead to ever-growing issues as the years passed.
The first nuclear reactors started operating in the 60s and 70s and nuclear energy production rose steadily, reaching more than 30% of the national energy mix in the 1990s. Most plants ended up achieving their planned lifespan when they were built: between thirty to forty years (like the Neckarwestheim plant). Some of them were cut short due to safety concerns (like the Greifswald plant, the biggest in former East Germany), whilst a select few, with special reactor designs, hardly saw any operation.
Such was the case with the Hamm-Uentrop plant, which in May 4th, 1986, reportedly emitted small quantities of radioactive gas into the atmosphere. Various investigations have taken place since then and no definitive conclusion on harmful effects has been drawn. Yet this possible leak came at the same time as the radiation cloud from the Chernobyl disaster — merely ten days prior — reached the Central European airspace.
In both instances, though the severity of any health effects in the German population remains very debatable, the public perception of nuclear energy was radically altered. The anti-nuclear movement, initially a spawn of various citizen action groups opposed to the construction of new nuclear energy power-plants around the country (with the ironic song by Kraftwerk, Radioaktivität, as its unofficial anthem), turned an otherwise localized movement into a major national policy driver within a single decade.
Decline and decommissions
In the 2000s, as the focus on green energy had come to dominate much of the domestic agenda, Germany decided to put into law a new package plan for the Energiewende (‘energy transition’) by which non-renewable sources of energy would be gradually discontinued in favor of renewables. Coal was to be discontinued by the 2030s and nuclear by the 2020s, whilst relying on ‘greener’ fossil fuel during the phase-out: natural gas.
A tenuous, country-wide debate took place over a possible extension of some power-plants around the early 2010s. Most old nuclear plants, as can be seen in the US and France, could surpass their expected life expectancy by almost two-fold, without any major security risk. Still, this was subject to a higher degree of maintenance, and a number of guarantees or subsidies by regional and federal governments for when plants remain inactive during the production cycle. In 2010, such an extension was about to be granted to a number of nuclear plants around the country. After the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, all moratoriums were suspended and eight nuclear reactors were left off the grid.
At that time, the problem of unwanted nuclear waste turned out to be hardly manageable. In most small rural areas, nuclear waste was thought as dangerous as the nuclear plants themselves. An extension on the operations of the remaining nuclear power plants became increasingly difficult as waste management bills piled up around the country much to the detriment of plant operators and regional governments. Going back to Hamm-Uentrop, the North Rhine-Westphalen government itself faced significant financial struggle just to maintain its old, decaying power plant structures. Meanwhile, France has provided temporary storage for much of this nuclear waste.
During the Great Recession company sell-offs, Nukem GmbH (specialized in fuel assembly manufacturing and nuclear waste storage) was acquired by Atomstroyexport, a subsidiary of Rosatom. Russia, on an ever-increasing antagonist position in the eyes of the federal government in the 2020s, was not to be trusted for the dismantling of nuclear plants nor to provide maintenance services for the old East German reactors. The ‘Atomlobby’ showed deep links with Russian companies in various parts of the nuclear energy production cycle throughout the 2010s, posing a major security threat.
At the peak of the energy-crisis in 2022-23, the federal government did grant a hail-Mary extension of a few months to 3 nuclear plants to curb the enormous demand for energy after the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipeline. On April 15th, 2023, Germany’s 62-year bout with nuclear energy finally came to an end.
Future of the energy grid
Whereas prices did end up rising considerably during the 2022-2023 crisis, Germany still managed to lower them shortly afterwards. Both the BDEW (German organization for energy producers and grid operators) and NGO for energy research Fraunhofer show a decade-peak in prices in 2022 — steeper for households — with an almost definite return to the pre-crisis average: lower prices for industrial businesses in 2024.
Now, if your own neighbor is the best in the world on a particular area of expertise, and you are having some trouble managing said area, it is not a bad idea to trade with your neighbor on the service he is good at (Adam Smith talks about this). At the height of the energy crisis, France and Germany did exactly that; French nuclear energy was used on the German energy market whilst a few years prior, the energy surplus from the North Sea wind farms was exported outside Germany.
Prices are expected to fall even further with Germany’s effective integration into a unified energy grid, splitting itself into two different energy grids with different prices, significantly cutting the energy costs for the more industrialized populated north of the country. The growing integration with other EU countries’ energy grids should allow for bigger trade of energy between the member states’ markets.
Barring the 2022-23 energy crisis, the transition to renewable energy sources has been much more justifiable considering the expensive and burdensome venture into nuclear energy. In parallel to Japan’s view of nuclear, Germany’s highly industrialized and densely populated territory faced the consequences of a nuclear accident or spillover which — whether justified or hardly so — was seen as a threat to the health of tens of millions. Geopolitics and growing costs of maintenance, compliance and safety pushed on a fractured market, paved the way for making nuclear a redundant energy source in Germany’s green energy plans.
And whilst nuclear production remains out of the energy mix for the foreseeable future, there is no reason to believe that a return to nuclear is off the table. It is very much the case, considering the latest advancements on nuclear technology with smaller, more compact nuclear reactors (SMRs). There are also some companies still in operation such as PreußenElektra namely one of the oldest energy conglomerates in Germany and previous owner of various plants around the country, and Urenco (Uranium enrichment company). They are still operating in Germany and offering services abroad.
One question remains. If Germany has managed, relatively effectively and despite its own faltering, to drop its nuclear power plants: why does the German Federal government fail to address this relative success of their energy sector? Germany today remains one of the leading countries on the use of renewable energy, whilst making the utmost effort on the transition towards a full green energy grid. Yet most of the news coming out of the country produces nothing but concern.
Perhaps a justification is out of the question coming from a foreign government. Yet there is this shared feeling from the North to the South of the country, that the Federal government remains decidedly undecided on its policy-making, with the aging Hamm-Uentrop cooling towers standing as a daily reminder. Lack of resolve on such issues from the Scholz cabinet, and from previous governments, weighs on the Germans themselves but also on the German nation as a whole.