Germany is proceeding with its decision to abandon nuclear power despite the crisis in this field, as it shut down the last three reactors on Saturday, counting on the success of its environmental transition without relying on atomic energy .

On the banks of the Neckar River, near Stuttgart in southern Germany, the white steam from the Baden-Württemberg nuclear power plant will soon be a memory.

The same applies to the "Essar 2" complex in Bavaria, in the east of the country, and Emsland in the north, on the other side of Germany, near the Dutch border.

While many Western countries rely on nuclear energy, Germany, the economic leader in Europe, is turning this page once and for all, despite the ongoing controversy on the subject.

Germany is implementing the decision to phase out nuclear power taken in 2002, which was accelerated by Angela Merkel in 2011, after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

The German chancellor said at the time that the Fukushima disaster showed that "even in a high-tech country like Japan, the risks associated with nuclear energy cannot be controlled 100 percent."

The declaration convinced public opinion in a country where a strong anti-nuclear movement had been fueled first by fears of conflict linked to the Cold War and then by accidents such as Chernobyl.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 could have prompted a comprehensive reconsideration of the issue: With Germany deprived of Russian gas after Moscow cut off the bulk of it, Berlin found itself exposed to the darkest scenarios, from the risk of closing its factories to the risk of deprivation of heating in the height of winter.

A few months before the tentative shutdown of the last three reactors, on December 31, the winds of public opinion began to turn. "With the rise in energy prices and the burning climate issue, naturally there have been calls to extend the operation of the stations," says Jochen Winkler, mayor of Neckarfestheim, where the power station of the same name is living its last hours.

And the government of Olaf Scholz, in which the Green Party, the most hostile to nuclear power, finally decided to extend the operation of the reactors to secure supplies until April 15.

Winkler explains, "Perhaps the discussion would have been renewed if we had witnessed a more difficult winter, or if there had been a power outage and a shortage of gas. But the winter that passed us did not have many problems," thanks to the massive import of liquefied natural gas.

For the mayor of the town of 4,000, more than 150 of whom work at the power plant, “the wheel has begun to turn” and there is no time to “turn back”.

Germany has shut down sixteen reactors since 2003. The last three plants provided 6% of the energy produced in the country last year, after nuclear energy provided 30.8% of the total energy in the country in 1997.

Meanwhile, the share of renewables in the generation mix will reach 46% in 2022, compared to less than 25% ten years ago.

However, the current pace of progress in renewables satisfies neither the government nor environmental activists, and Germany will not achieve its climate goals without strong additional efforts.

These goals are "already ambitious without phasing out nuclear energy, and every time we deny ourselves a technical option, we make things more difficult," says Jörg Sackmann, a specialist in energy issues at the Bruegel Research Center in Brussels.

The equation is even more complicated with the goal of closing all coal-fired power plants in the country by 2038, with a large proportion of them shutting down by 2030.

Coal still accounts for a third of Germany's electricity production, up 8% last year to make up for the absence of Russian gas.

Olaf Scholz emphasized the need for Germany to install "4 to 5 wind turbines every day" over the next few years to cover its needs. These numbers are considered high compared to the installation of 551 turbines in 2022.

A series of regulatory easings adopted in recent months should allow the pace to accelerate. “The planning and approval process for a wind power project takes an average of 4 to 5 years,” according to the industry association BWE, which considers accelerating the pace by a year or two as “significant progress”.