The Nuclear Mirage: Why Germany’s Atomic U-Turn Doesn’t Add Up
There is a particular kind of political argument that survives entirely on vagueness. It doesn’t need to be right. It just needs to sound reasonable long enough to avoid being checked against the numbers. Germany’s nuclear comeback debate is that argument. The premise, advanced recently by prominent voices in German conservative politics — among them Kristina Schröder, former Federal Minister for Family Affairs and a rising figure in the CDU’s economic wing — is seductively simple: the Atomausstieg, Germany’s legislated nuclear phase-out, is not irreversible. Technically, they are correct. The question was never whether a return to nuclear is physically possible. The question is whether anyone with access to a spreadsheet would recommend it. Let’s open the spreadsheet. The €30 Billion Question A modern Generation III+ reactor — the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), to be specific — costs between €20 and €30 billion per unit. In return, you get approximately 1.6 GW of installed capaci...
