The Radioactive Energy Plan.(World Affairs)

Byline: Stefan Theil

Germans were once dead set against nuclear energy. But high energy costs are forcing them to rethink.

The latest casualty of the rising cost of energy is one of Europe's most persistent political taboos: Germany's striking aversion to nuclear power. Nowhere else did the opposition to atomic energy become as deeply embedded in the cultural and political DNA of a nation. Many citizens now in their 40s and 50s came of age protesting nuclear power in the 1970s and '80s. A generation of Green and Social Democrat (SPD) politicians built careers out of their total opposition to nukes--the Green party was antinuclear even before it became environmentalist. The movement reached its climax in 2001, when Parliament passed an "atomic-exit law" to shut down the country's then 19 reactors by approximately 2021. Two have already been decommissioned. As countries around the world began reinvesting in nuclear energy, thanks to growing worries over energy security and climate change, Germans held fast to the atomic-exit law and their quasi-religious belief in the evils of nukes.

But the energy business has changed dramatically since the Germans passed their law, and German attitudes are finally catching up. The world is now more worried about climate change than a repeat of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. Growing fuel imports from an assertive Russia and an unstable Middle East have turned energy into a security issue. But what really got Germans to rethink was their pocketbooks. When the Bundestag passed the exit law, oil cost less than $20 a barrel--one sixth its cost in early August. Now that Germans are pinching euros to pay their surging electricity bills, more of them have decided it makes no sense to shut off the source of 25 percent of their power--the relic of a nuclear building boom launched after the first oil shock in 1973, amid energy worries strikingly similar to today's. In a recent poll, an unprecedented 54 percent of Germans say they want to keep the reactors up and running, up from 40 percent as recently as December. As a result, what had long seemed unlikely has started to happen: a fresh public debate over nukes.

In June, parliamentarians in Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic party published a proposal to drop the exit law and build more plants, promising to make cheap nuclear energy an issue for next year's national election. Even in the SPD, dissident voices are getting louder. Prominent figures like ex-chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former Economics minister Wolfgang Clement have called on their party to rethink their energy policy. "It's enormous," says Dieter Marx, director of Atomforum, Germany's nuclear operators association. "We've been completely surprised by the shift in opinion." At this year's annual meeting in Hamburg, he says, only 15 protesters showed up.

In addition to high energy prices, part of the reassessment can be traced to pressure from Germany's neighbors. Germany's virtually unilateral veto of carbon-free nukes was getting ever tougher to square with the country's self-styled role as a global environmental leader. At the G8 talks on energy security in Tokyo earlier this summer, Merkel was the odd person out, opposing a call on countries to use nuclear energy as one way of cutting emissions. France, which generates 80 percent of its electricity from nukes and has one of the lowest per capita emission rates of any developed country, has just announced construction of its 61st reactor--and doesn't see why it should be obliged to shift to expensive wind and solar ...