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These emissions harm the planet, but they’re also poisonous for people. “By pursuing their complete nuclear phase-out policy over the past decade while continuing to heavily use fossil fuels, Germany has lost the opportunity to prevent thousands of premature air pollution-induced deaths,” says Columbia University’s Kharecha.
His comments are grounded in some of his own peer-reviewed research. Similar analyses, including a more-recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a US-based nonprofit, have likewise found that Germany’s withdrawal from nuclear resulted in thousands of preventable deaths, mostly due to air pollution caused by the burning of coal. That NBER paper also concluded that the phase-out cost the country $12 billion.
Kharecha acknowledges that Germany has done “a very impressive job” of rapidly scaling up solar and wind sources of energy production. But he says the unreliability of renewables requires supplementation with other sources, and that’s where nuclear is needed. “Nuclear provides continuous ‘baseload’ power,” he says. “Renewables and nuclear really should be viewed as complementary choices, not binary ones.”
But other energy experts say renewables and nuclear make poor bedfellows. “One of the issues with nuclear is its inflexibility — it either operates at 100 percent or zero, and you can’t just flip a switch and turn it on or off,” says Andrzej Ancygier, a lecturer at New York University’s Berlin satellite campus and a senior energy and climate policy analyst at Climate Analytics. For renewables to work at scale, he says, flexible complementary energy sources are needed, and nuclear isn’t that.
Also, nuclear power plants have a finite lifespan. To extend that lifespan requires significant investments of both cash and time, and may come with mounting risks. “Operating a plant longer than is planned ... in my opinion, it’s dangerous, but I can understand the discussion there,” Ancygier says. On the other hand, he argues that building new nuclear facilities now, in 2022, makes little sense: “Economically and from a climate change perspective, it is complete nonsense. They’re much, much more expensive than renewables, they come with more risks, and they always take much longer to build than planned.”
Schreurs, the Technical University of Munich professor, makes a similar point. She says that very few Western nations, even pro-nuclear countries, have managed to build new nuclear plants in recent years. Those that have tried — for example, the UK’s still-in-progress Hinkley Point power plant — have run into major delays and massive budget overruns. “The upfront costs of nuclear are immense, and the time to build new plants is on average something like 10 years,” she says. “If you’re talking about building new facilities to reduce emissions quickly, it’s hard to argue for nuclear over renewables.”
Columbia’s Kharecha agrees that high costs and long lead times are arguably the biggest challenges for new nuclear. But he says these are solvable problems, and history has shown that they can be overcome. “France and Sweden built lots of reactors very rapidly, decades ago, and neither country has experienced major problems with them,” he says.
But here again, there are valid counterarguments. In 2022, more than half of France’s nuclear reactors were shut down unexpectedly for maintenance reasons, and the country had to rely on German energy imports to meet its shortfalls. Schreurs highlights these problems as evidence that nuclear too can be unreliable.
What’s next for Germany?
Germany’s move away from nuclear and toward renewables has forced it to rely on fossil fuels. Proponents of this strategy say this reliance is temporary — a short-lived trade-off that, in the long run, will allow Germany to power itself cheaply, safely, and sustainably.
Some will no doubt scoff at this argument. In the US, many still view solar, wind, and other renewables as unreliable energy sources that cannot anchor a country’s electricity industry. But even some American observers say the German view of renewables’ potential may be closer to reality.
“When Germany first pivoted away from nuclear and prioritized renewables in 2000, a lot of people said this is insane, but they’ve had a lot more success than many anticipated,” says Wesleyan’s Wiliarty. “I think getting to a point where they’re not using nuclear or fossil fuels is realistic. The question is, how long will it take?”
Ancygier echoes these sentiments. He says German policymakers have at times vacillated in their support for renewables — something that has slowed progress. But while some political dissent persists, the current government has affirmed its commitment to renewables, and its stated policy aims are for these sources to make up 80 percent of the country’s electricity production by 2030.
The great debate over nuclear energy is sure to rage on, both here and in the United States. In the end, the lesson other countries may take from Germany is that abandoning nuclear in favor of safer and greener renewables is possible but that it comes with uncomfortable trade-offs. It also requires political will and broad public support. For much of the past 20 years, Germany has had both. Whether it can sustain them will likely determine how much success it has, and how quickly that success comes.
Markham Heid is a freelance journalist who chiefly covers health and science. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, and other outlets.
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