Germany, which has been opposing for years EU attempts to treat nuclear power as a green electricity source on par with renewable energy, has dropped this opposition under new chancellor Friedrich Merz, which could make EU energy policy much easier to adopt.
Germany under former chancellor Olaf Scholz was opposing treating nuclear on an equal footing as solar and wind in the EU’s goals and policy to achieve net-zero by 2050. The anti-nuclear camp was led by Germany and Austria and was dismissing nuclear as a “green” power source.
Now Merz’s Germany appears to be shifting its anti-nuclear stance on EU energy policies, French and German officials have told the Financial Times.
In April 2023, Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, ended the nuclear power era despite continued concerns about energy security and energy supply after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the end of pipeline natural gas deliveries from Russia, which was the largest gas supplier to Germany before the war.
Germany took its last three nuclear power plants offline in the middle of April 2023, ending more than six decades of commercial nuclear energy use. The pledge to phase out nuclear was made by Angela Merkel in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.
Since the 2022 energy crisis Germany and France have clashed on how nuclear energy should be treated in the green transition in the EU.
But now the major Germany-France rapprochement on nuclear as part of the EU’s net-zero path promises to unlock stalled negotiations on EU energy policies and legislation, officials and analysts tell FT.
“This will be a sea-change policy shift,” a German official told the financial newspaper.
Austria remains a major holdout to including nuclear on a par with renewables. But other EU countries have started considering a return to nuclear power after four decades—the latest examples include Denmark and Italy, which are looking at small modular reactors (SMRs) to complement their renewable energy generation.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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