Pretty shortly after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, Germany decided to accelerate its exit from nuclear energy. To be precise, the fundamental decision hadn’t been born in a moment of panic—it had been taken much earlier and was supposed to unfold gradually, like a carefully managed retreat. Fukushima changed that. Overnight, the whole thing was put on steroids. What had been a phased exit turned into a moral crusade with a countdown timer.
The debate that followed was loud, emotional, and proudly allergic to arithmetic. In 2014, not long after I started blogging, I made a prediction that was received with the kind of warmth usually reserved for heretics. I said that Germany would not only come to regret the nuclear exit, but that it would eventually be forced to make the fundamental decision to build new nuclear power plants—before 2030.
You can imagine the comments. I was dreaming. I was crazy. I had no idea what I was talking about. Nuclear was over. History had moved on. The future was green, decentralized, and powered by good intentions.
Looks like I did, in fact, have an idea.
Because there is a little rule that governs all political theater, no matter how virtuous the slogans or how loud the applause: when people start hurting, virtue signalling goes down the drain very fast. And now, in a moment that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, the German chancellor himself has admitted in front of a German public that the nuclear exit was a mistake.
That is not a footnote. That is not a rhetorical flourish. That is a crack in a wall that was supposed to be eternal.
So the obvious question follows: is this the opening salvo for a renuclearisation of Germany?
The country doesn’t have many good options left. It needs energy—reliable, scalable energy—and its natural resources are limited. It cannot drill its way out, mine its way out, or import its way out indefinitely. Wind and solar, meanwhile, have not delivered the promised energy utopia. Instead, they have managed to seriously stress, destabilize, and in parts outright wreck the existing energy infrastructure, while quietly relying on the very systems they were supposed to replace.
This will not be a quick fix. It will be expensive. It will generate enormous political resistance and no shortage of bad blood. Entire careers have been built on the certainty that nuclear was finished, dead, and buried. Those people will not go quietly.
But frozen, angry citizens are not particularly receptive to moral lectures or abstract future visions. Cold apartments have a way of clarifying thought. And once the lights start flickering, ideology tends to lose its grip remarkably fast.
