The government decided to speed up its phasing
out of nuclear power following Japan’s Fukushima reactor meltdown in 2011 when
an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the coastal plant in the world’s worst
nuclear disaster since Chernobyl 25 years earlier.
The reactors of Brokdorf, Grohnde and
Gundremmingen C, run by utilities E.ON
and RWE, will be shut down on Friday after three and half decades in
operation.
The last three nuclear power plants – Isar 2,
Emsland and Neckarwestheim II – will be turned off by the end of 2024.
The phase-out of an energy deemed clean and
cheap by some is an irreversible step for Europe’s biggest economy, facing
ambitious climate targets and rising power prices.
“For the energy industry in Germany, the
nuclear phase-out is final,” said Kerstin Andreae, the head of energy
industry association BDEW.
The six nuclear power plants contributed to
around 12% of electricity production in Germany in 2024, BDEW preliminary
figures showed. The share of renewable energy was almost 41%, with coal
generating just under 28% and gas around 15%.
Germany aims to make renewables meet 80% of
power demand by 2030 through expanding wind and solar power infrastructure.
The new government, which plans to step up
climate protection efforts, stood by the nuclear power phase-out in its
coalition agreement.
Economy and Climate Protection Minister Robert
Habeck on Wednesday said he did not see the anti-nuclear consensus weakening in
Germany.
Environmental groups welcomed the move but
warned that 2024 was not the real end of the nuclear era in Germany.
“We have to say that there will still be
uranium enrichment plants in Germany, like the one in Gronau,” Arne
Fellermann, a manager at the BUND environmental group, told Reuters.
“There is also a research reactor in
Garching that still works with weapons-grade uranium,” Fellermann added.
Asked about possible job losses, Gundremmingen
mayor Tobias Buehler said the plant’s employees would be busy with dismantling
the reactor after the shutdown.
“And this period of dismantling will
certainly take another one or two decades,” Buehler said.
Total costs for the dismantling are estimated
by EON at 1.1 billion euros ($1.25 billion) per plant. In 2020, E.ON made
provisions of 9.4 billion euros for the nuclear post-operational phase,
including dismantling the facility, packaging and cleaning up the radioactive
waste.
The dismantling is expected to be completed by
2040.
Japan’s government on Tuesday mapped out a
plan for releasing contaminated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant
into the sea, angering neighbouring China and South Korea.
