Germany’s Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen announced that Germany is going nuclear-free by 2022. The country’s seven oldest reactors were taken off-line shortly after the Fukushima meltdown, and an eighth (the glitch-prone Kruemmel facility in northern Germany) has been off-line for technical reasons and won’t be returned to active service. Six more will go into shut down in 2021, and the three newest will be retired in 2022. Mr. Rottgen said, “It’s definite. The latest end for the last three nuclear power plants is 2022. There will be no clause for revision.”
Before the older plants went off-line, Germany was getting 23% of its power from nuclear power. To make that up, the government of Angela Merkel is promising reduction in usage of electricity by 10% over the next decade – more efficient buildings and machinery may achieve that.
The German government is focusing on wind energy to make up a large part of the shortfall. The problem there is that the best place for the wind turbines is up by the North Sea, and the nuclear plants are in the south. This means the distribution system will need revamping. Natural gas is going to figure heavily in the future energy mix as well.
Of course, that doesn’t really mean that all the electricity Germans use will be non-nuclear. The Wall Street Journal notes, “The BDEW–the country’s main energy lobby group–said Germany has gone from being a net exporter of electricity to an importer, with nuclear-generated power from France and the Czech Republic plugging the gap caused by the shut down of Germany’s seven oldest reactors after March’s nuclear accidents in Japan.”
France is not about to get rid of its nuclear industry, nor are the Czechs. Moreover, Poland remains committed to building at least two new nuclear plants in the short term. Germany may not generate any nuclear power after 2022, but nothing says it won’t import it long after that date.
