If you keep your eyes peeled while cycling through the streets of Berlin, you’re almost certain to spot a weather-battered yellow flag or bumper sticker emblazoned with the red image of a smiling sun and the message: “Atomkraft? Nein Danke” (“Nuclear power? No, thanks”). The anti-nuclear movement’s cheerful icon is so familiar almost everywhere in Germany that it’s become part of national identity: a symbol of people power, the supremacy of scientific reason, and the payoff of perseverance.
Shortly before midnight on April 15, Germany’s last three nuclear reactors—the remnants of a nuclear energy program that began in the 1950s and peaked at nearly thirty reactors in 1989—were switched off. Multiple generations of activists motivated by concerns about the safety of nuclear power could finally claim victory after almost fifty years of demonstrations and blockades, collective strategy sessions, and battles with police.
Shortly before midnight on April 15, Germany’s last three nuclear reactors ere switched off.
But in the first few months of 2023, as the shutdown date grew nearer, the German government’s resolve appeared to waver. Russia’s embargo of natural gas exports to Germany—in response to Germany’s sanctioning of Russian oil exports after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022—had caused energy prices to skyrocket, prompting the German government to impose emergency conservation measures on consumers, and companies to throttle back energy use.
But Germany remained resolute and followed through on its promise to shut the plants down, bringing its postwar chapter on nuclear power to a close—for now.
Over the decades, from the occupation of power plant construction sites by protesters in the early 1970s, through the disasters at Three Mile Island in Middletown, Pennsylvania, in 1979, at Chernobyl in Pripyat, in the then Soviet Union (now northern Ukraine) in 1986, and at Fukushima in Ōkuma, Japan, in 2011, an increasing number of Germans grasped that the atomic generation of electricity was neither safe nor necessary.
“The dogged demonstrations, the obstruction of railway routes for nuclear waste, the sabotage of nuclear facilities, and the occupation of construction sites simply proved too costly for the utilities and the government,” German journalist Manfred Kriener, a chronicler of the movement, tells The Progressive. “They needed tens of thousands of police officers to secure the sites. This hard-nosed stripe of civil disobedience proved successful, together with peaceful protests and other actions.”
This campaign from the ground up will go down in history books for more than just ending the nuclear energy era in Germany.
This campaign from the ground up will go down in history books for more than just ending the nuclear energy era in Germany. Starting in parts of southwestern Germany, and continuing across the country, it educated ordinary people about energy—a topic previously left to engineers and politicos. The public listened closely to scientists who were critical of nuclear energy, as well as whistleblowers who had quit their lucrative jobs in the nuclear industry to speak the truth about the risks.
In contrast to the late 1960s student movement before it, the anti-nuclear cause encompassed men and women, young and old, urban and rural, Christians and labor unionists, farmers and high schoolers. Their decentralized initiatives constituted an exercise in community-level participatory democracy, and as such, provided a democratic push to postwar West Germany’s liberalization.
“It showed us that broad, citizen-led movements can make a difference,” Kriener says. “It might take a while, but if done right and with determination, they can bring down whole industries and upend political majorities.”
Many, but not all, of the German anti-nuclear movement’s most relevant experiences have been absorbed by today’s climate activists. In terms of breadth, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s brainchild, Fridays for Future, born in 2018 as high schoolers skipped classes to protest the climate crisis, has diversified far beyond the brash kids with their witty posters and chants. It has strategically reached out to labor unions, scientists, and LGBTQ+ people, and adults in general, including the veterans of the campaigns against nuclear power.
The global climate movement is much broader than Fridays for Future, and includes a new wave of activists in groups like Last Generation, Just Stop Oil, and Klimaliste. Last Generation and other climate activists have commanded headlines since 2021 by supergluing themselves to busy intersections and tossing soup at revered works of art. They have occupied airport runways, glued themselves to SUVs, smashed up gas stations, launched hunger strikes, and disrupted the Shell oil company’s stockholders meeting, among other actions.
“There is a whole planetary layer of stations, pipelines, platforms, derricks, terminals, mines, and shafts that must be shut down to save humanity and other life-forms."—Andreas Malm
The stepped-up tactics of Last Generation are an in-your-face brand of civil disobedience, as were the disruptions that Germany’s most devoted anti-nuclear activists employed. Andreas Malm, the Swedish author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, sees the tack as necessary and overdue, but directed more specifically at the fossil fuel industry: “There is a whole planetary layer of stations, pipelines, platforms, derricks, terminals, mines, and shafts that must be shut down to save humanity and other life-forms. When governments refuse to undertake this work, it is up to the rest of us to initiate it,” he recently wrote in an essay for The New York Times. “That is the rationale for sabotage: to aim straight for the bags of coal.”
Germany, which is now one of fifteen European Union countries without nuclear power plants (Spain is in the process of exiting the industry, too), belies the fact that there’s an upsurge of interest in nuclear power in Europe and worldwide—including among climate-conscious nations. This means that Germany’s opponents to nuclear energy, along with their international allies, still have work ahead of them: The Chernobyl plant’s radioactive plume drifted over much of the continent all the way to Italy and France, illustrating that nuclear fallout is not contained by state borders. Germany will have to remain vigilant about its nuclear waste storage during the decades-long decommissioning process.
The United States is the largest producer of nuclear power, while France has the greatest percentage of its electricity produced by nuclear energy—about 70 percent. China, now the second largest nuclear energy producer in the world, has twenty-one new reactors under construction, while India follows with eight.
In another category are Thunberg and U.S. environmentalist Bill McKibben, who advocate for existing nuclear power plants to remain operational until the end of their designated lifespans. They argue that in Germany, and everywhere else, low-carbon nuclear energy, despite its hazards, beats burning fossil fuels. Groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council are wary of nuclear power but say that shutting down all of the world’s operational reactors could mean relying on fossil fuels for even longer, and thus cause emissions to climb.
The rationale of those genuinely concerned about the climate crisis is that nuclear energy’s carbon footprint is minimal, and its generation capacity prodigious and consistent. This is how billionaire Bill Gates articulates his thinking, as posted on the pro-nuclear Nuclear Energy Institute website: “Nuclear power is the only carbon-free energy source we have that can deliver large amounts of power day and night through every season almost anywhere on Earth. And it has been proven to work on a large scale.” U.S. President Joe Biden agrees: “We acted to bolster our reliance on our nuclear energy facilities—which generate more than half of our carbon-free power. And we’re just getting started.”
The United States is not the only country that says it intends to expand nuclear power production—or start programs anew. In the European Union, the current nuclear energy powers want to maintain or add to their fleets, while Poland and Estonia believe they can start up programs from scratch, with U.S. support. France, the informal leader of this group, is negotiating to make nuclear power qualify for E.U. green industrial subsidies. President Emmanuel Macron says France will start construction of six new reactors in 2027.
The nuclear industry’s latest strategy—posing as part of the answer to climate breakdown—is a red herring.
The nuclear industry’s latest strategy—posing as part of the answer to climate breakdown—is a red herring. It might sound appealing, but nuclear power is not only too dangerous and too toxic, it is also too costly, too slow to roll out, and not available around the clock due to frequent scheduled and unanticipated outages. Every dollar investment in a real clean energy transition wields many times the clout as that in nuclear. In fact, most of those plants envisioned today by Gates and others—be they large or small, in the United States or Poland—simply won’t ever happen.
The chimera of nuclear power is a detour that saps time and energy from the urgent task at hand. And, in contrast to the anti-nuclear energy campaign, the climate movement doesn’t have fifty years to decarbonize our societies.