I didn't protest against Merkel's nuclear phase-out - let's be wiser today

"I did not agree, neither in the cabinet nor in the Bundestag," I could say. In fact, in 2011 the second phase-out of nuclear energy was decided without my vote.

After the first (and actual!) nuclear phase-out in 2002 was the work of the red-green federal government under Gerhard Schröder and the black-yellow federal government, to which I belonged, decided in 2010 to significantly extend the lifespan, things suddenly went completely after the reactor accident in Fukushima in 2011 fast: Germany should now phase out of nuclear energy quickly, and the last three reactors should go offline at the end of 2022.

At the time, of course, I too found the images from Japan, this highly civilized, high-tech country, oppressive. Tens of thousands dead, what a tragedy.

Only gradually did it become clear that almost all of them were victims of the tsunami, while it is still disputed today whether the meltdown in the nuclear power plant claimed any fatalities at all. In 2021, at least the UN radiation protection committee UNSCEAR came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of increased radiation exposure in the Japanese population as a result of the accident.

At the time, the extent of the direct consequences of the reactor accident seemed much greater, and yet I was not convinced that Germany would finally phase out nuclear energy, as I saw it, which also applied to large parts of the Union.

Because the events in Japan hadn't changed the scientific facts either: the 17 nuclear power plants that were still online in Germany in 2011 were among the safest in the world, and they were also much better prepared than Fukushima for potential natural disasters. And with regard to the parameters of costs, space and resource requirements, but above all reliability and CO₂ emissions, they seemed to me to be objectively superior to other forms of energy persuasion overall.

I didn't articulate my doubts out loud like most though. The decision seemed too irrevocable, and as Federal Minister for Family Affairs I could not feel responsible. The fact that I did not take part in the vote was a heroic act, but not in relation to our country's energy supply - our first daughter was born on the day of the Bundestag resolution.

"To the good of the German government! This is a good day for Russian energy policy, this is a good day for Russia,” said the Russian ambassador in the evening after Angela Merkel announced her exit at a press conference. He had invited some editors-in-chief to his embassy on Unter Den Linden, including Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, who recently reported on it in WELT.

Whether cementing dependence on Russian gas was really a good day for Russia, I doubt it. But definitely for Putin, because the path that Germany finally took on that day gave him an instrument of power that he now openly uses as a weapon against the western world.

Everyone who was politically responsible in Germany at the time had to live with this guilt, which consisted at least of a lack of political stamina.

Today, however, we have the chance to reflect and make wiser decisions, at least for the coming decades. We could keep the three nuclear power plants that are still running, reactivate the three that were recently shut down, and plan to build new nuclear power plants. We could correct this historical error and go back to nuclear energy - what else?

Because, of course, our current problem in Germany is not only that we “have not expanded renewables enough” in recent years, as it is said everywhere, especially in the direction of the Union.

Let's assume that we had tried to replace all 17 nuclear power plants that were still running in Germany in 2011 with renewable energies: On the one hand, this would have meant gigantic land use, in addition to the problems of grid expansion and acceptance by the population, which I believe could be solved. You have to realize that just to get the annual electricity production of the Isar-2 nuclear power plant, which is now threatened with shutdown, in wind power, you have to build a wind farm the size of Munich, as the technology historian and energy blogger Anna Veronika Wendland calculates.

Above all, however, we would have taken a step backwards in terms of security of supply. Because the big, still unsolved problem of renewables, which stands like an elephant in the room that likes to be studiously ignored, is that of storage technology.

It is a banal realization: the wind does not always blow, the sun shines at best during the day. Renewable energies therefore need either storage capacity to keep green electricity surpluses, which sometimes help to get through a ten-day lull or unequal feed-ins and requirements in summer and winter.

Despite extensive worldwide research, such storage capacities are still a long way off. In an essay from 2018, the physicist and philosopher Simon Friederich, who teaches at a Dutch university, calculates that Germany would need energy storage systems that are around a thousand times larger than we currently have.

One of the largest batteries in the world, Hornsdale Power Reserve, which Tesla boss Elon Musk had built in Australia for almost 100 million euros, could support the German power grid for just 14 seconds at night, according to Rainer Klute, chairman of the nuclear energy-friendly association "Nuklearia".

The other option for backing up renewables is a familiar one: gas, coal and nuclear, which step in whenever wind and solar aren't able to deliver. "The German renewable energies are celebrating their current triumphs on their broad backs," Wendland states laconically.

The decision to phase out coal and nuclear power at the same time therefore had an important side agreement: the cheap natural gas should take over the back-up of the renewables for the time being, this was of course completely clear to the Russian ambassador. For well-known reasons, this natural gas is no longer available today. And for very reasonable reasons, we shouldn't be restarting coal-fired power plants permanently either.

The duo of renewable and nuclear energy remains. This would give Germany an energy supply that would be CO₂-free except for emissions during production and thus probably offers the only chance of meeting the goals of the Paris climate protection agreement. And which, above all due to the high capacities of nuclear power, is also realistically able to actually supply electricity to all the future e-cars, electric heat pumps and industrial furnaces that we are currently planning so carelessly.

It can also be put more simply: the return to nuclear energy, together with the further expansion of renewable energies, offers the opportunity to maintain our prosperity, which is also closely linked to our freedom.

In the last few months we have been beginning to suspect what it means for the life of each of us if we fail to do this. Perhaps just in time so that we can collectively muster the strength to leave ideologies, errors and vanity behind us and really dare to change the tide, at least in energy policy.

WELT columnist Kristina Schröder was a member of the German Bundestag from 2002 to 2017 and Federal Minister for Families, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth from 2009 to 2013. Today she works, among other things, as a management consultant and as deputy chairwoman of REPUBLIK21, a think tank for new middle-class politics. She belongs to the CDU and is the mother of three daughters.