Near the French village of Fessenheim, facing Germany across the Rhine, a nuclear power station stands dormant. The German protesters that once demanded the site’s closure have decamped, and the last watts were produced three years ago.
But disagreements over how the plant from 1977 should be repurposed persist, speaking to a much deeper divide over nuclear power between the two countries on either side of the river’s banks.
German officials have disputed a proposal to turn it into a centre to treat metals exposed to low levels of radioactivity, Fessenheim’s mayor Claude Brender says. “They are not on board with anything that might in some way make the nuclear industry more acceptable,” he adds.
France and Germany’s split over nuclear power is a tale of diverging mindsets fashioned over decades, including since the Chernobyl disaster in USSR-era Ukraine. But it has now become a major faultline in a touchy relationship between Europe’s two biggest economies.
Their stand-off over how to treat nuclear in a series of EU reforms has consequences for how Europe plans to advance towards cleaner energy. It will also affect how the bloc secures power supplies as the region weans itself off Russian gas, and how it provides its industry with affordable energy to compete with the US and China.
“There can be squabbles between partners. But we’re not in a retirement home today squabbling over trivial matters. Europe is in a serious situation,” says Eric-André Martin, a specialist in Franco-German relations at French think-tank IFRI.
France, which produces two-thirds of its power from nuclear plants and has plans for more reactors, is fighting for the low-carbon technology to be factored into its targets for reducing emissions and for leeway to use state subsidies to fund the sector.
For Germany, which closed its last nuclear plants this year and has been particularly shaken by its former reliance on Russian gas, there’s concern that a nuclear drive will detract from renewable energy advances.
But there is also an economic subtext in a region still reeling from an energy crisis last year, when prices spiked and laid bare how vulnerable households and manufacturers could become.
Berlin is wary that Paris would benefit more than its neighbours if it ends up being able to guarantee low power prices from its large nuclear output as a result of new EU rules on electricity markets, people close to talks between the two countries say.
Ministers on both sides have acknowledged there is a problem. “The conflict is painful. It’s painful for the two governments as well as for our [EU] partners,” Sven Giegold, state secretary at the German economy and climate ministry, tells the Financial Times.
Agnès Pannier-Runacher, France’s energy minister, says she wants to “get out of the realm of the emotional and move past the considerable misunderstandings that have accumulated in this discussion”.
In a joint appearance in Hamburg last week, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president Emmanuel Macron made encouraging noises over their ability to break the latest deadlock: a disagreement over the design of the EU’s electricity market. Ministers had been due to agree a plan in June but will now meet on October 17 to discuss the reform, aimed at stabilising long-term prices.
But the French and German impasse on nuclear has already slowed down debates on key EU policies such as rules on renewable energy and how hydrogen should be produced. Smaller member states are becoming impatient. The delay on the market design is “a big Franco-German show of incompetence again”, says an energy ministry official from another EU country who requested anonymity.
“We have the problem with the competitiveness of the whole continent and we are focusing on how to get a competitive advantage [against] each other,” says Jozef Sikela, the Czech energy minister who chaired EU energy ministers’ meetings during last year’s gas crisis. “This way will not help us, it will not move us forward.”
Divisions run deep
Today’s deep disagreement over nuclear power was not always so stark.
France first laid out its intention to build up civil and military nuclear programmes in 1945. In the 1960s and ’70s there were even ideas about communal European nuclear plants.
The big accelerator for France was the 1973 oil crisis, which prompted a wave of reactor construction that gave it its current fleet of 56.
“Germany had some coal reserves, France had nothing,” says Bernard Accoyer, a former conservative politician in France and the head of a pro-nuclear lobby group.
The feat of engineering that followed is still a source of French national pride, although a series of outages at several reactors operated by state-owned EDF last year caused severe embarrassment and lost France its crown as the region’s top power exporter.
“Nuclear energy is part of France’s vital interests. The French would rather leave Europe than turn their backs on nuclear,” quips one senior French official.
Germany had its own reactors, including Soviet ones in the Communist east. But an anti-nuclear movement began to emerge in the 1970s when farmers and winegrowers in the south-west led opposition to a plant in Wyhl, also on the Rhine.
That movement, nourished by fears of the atomic bomb, spawned what would later become Germany’s influential Green party that today is a part of Scholz’s three-way coalition.
“Germany was at the frontier of the cold war and everybody knew the country would become ground zero in the event of a nuclear war,” says Arne Jungjohann, a political scientist.
After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, that sentiment took root more deeply. Children in then West Germany were told not to play in sand and people ran inside when it rained out of fear of radiation levels. In some parts of Germany, certain types of mushrooms — and the wild boar that eat them — are still contaminated from the accident.
The 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan proved a point of no return. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel, who had initially pushed back plans by a previous Social Democrat and Green government to phase out nuclear power, announced closures that finally took place this year.
“Before Fukushima . . . I was convinced that it was highly unlikely that [an accident] would occur in a high-tech country with high safety standards,” Merkel, a trained physicist, said in a speech three months after the accident. “Now it has happened.”
The government in Paris looked on aghast, former conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy recalled.
“I tell her — but Angela, what’s going on? How can this be?” he told a recent parliamentary hearing, in an account of their phone call. “She says, but Nicolas, have you not seen Fukushima? And I said — but where is the tsunami going to come from in Bavaria?”
Present-day public opinion in Germany is complicated. One survey in April found that less than a third of respondents backed shutting down the country’s nuclear plants.
But across the river from Fessenheim, Stefan Portele, a father of four and resident of Breisach in the state of Baden-Württemberg, is relieved that the French plant is now offline.
“It’s not safe. As long as nothing happens it’s fine, but if it does it’s a problem for millions of people,” he says. “This is still a region with the possibility of earthquakes. You never know. There hasn’t been one, but one is enough.”
On the French side, there is incomprehension, especially in the face of recent German decisions to re-fire coal power plants following the energy squeeze caused by the Russia-Ukraine war.
“Germany used to buy this nuclear power and now it is polluting us all the way here with coal,” says Dominique Schelcher, chief executive of the Système U supermarket chain and owner of Fessenheim’s store.
The Fukushima disaster provoked some wobbles on nuclear power in France too. After a parliamentary pact with the Green party, socialist president François Hollande sought to trim reliance on the sector, which eventually led Fessenheim to be closed in 2020. The decision was endorsed by Macron after he came to power in 2017.
But by 2022, Macron had performed a volte-face and doubled down on the technology, announcing a €52bn plan for at least six new reactors and the extension of the lifespan of other sites.
Not seeing eye-to-eye
German objections to France’s pro-nuclear strategy partly reflect an ideological stance felt especially strongly by the Greens — including the vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, whose ministry for economy and climate change leads negotiations on energy matters.
Giegold, who works in the ministry, says it is “totally wrong” to claim that Germany is “leading a European crusade against nuclear power”. He says he does not dispute France’s right to generate atomic energy, only the right to use EU funds to do so. “We can finance together what we agree [on] with each other,” he says.
But other Green party figures in Berlin privately voice concern about the safety of France’s ageing fleet.
One person familiar with the government’s thinking pointed to the EDF shutdowns last year to fix so-called stress corrosion issues and said that the country’s nuclear safety agency was “doing its job”.
He added, however, that he feared one day…
Read More:The nuclear row driving a wedge between France and Germany
2023-10-15 04:00:07
