FREIBURG, Germany — Earlier this spring, the German government closed down the country’s three remaining nuclear power plants — the last vestiges of what was once a large domestic fleet.
While not everyone in Germany supported the closures, many here — particularly supporters of the Greens (Die Grünen), one of the world’s strongest and most powerful environmentally focused political parties — viewed the event as the happy culmination of a decades-long battle to rid the country of nuclear energy.
“We are embarking on a new era of energy production,” said Steffi Lemke, a Greens member and Germany’s federal minister for the environment and nuclear safety, in a CNN interview following the plant closures.
Nuclear energy is a controversial topic in most places, but Germany is notable for its historic antipathy toward the technology. “Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is widespread and longstanding, and it’s highly correlated with concern for climate change,” says Pushker Kharecha, deputy director of the Climate Science, Awareness, and Solutions Program at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
In the United States, Gallop polls going back 20 years have found that Americans are generally split on the subject of nuclear energy, though support for nuclear has swelled in recent years.
For its part, the White House has invested heavily in sustaining the country’s nuclear infrastructure, and President Joe Biden has also touted nuclear as an important component in the country’s quest for carbon neutrality. Many countries are following the same path based on similar climate calculations, and some experts support this position. “Nuclear is actually one of the cleanest and safest energy sources,” Kharecha says. For countries that want to mitigate climate change and reduce air pollution, he says that nuclear energy should be embraced — at least until better options come along.
But environmental advocacy groups and left-leaning…
Read the full article here