Germany shut down its last three nuclear reactors on April 15, 2023, and for most of the decade after Fukushima, the power nuclear used to supply went mostly to coal, not to wind and solar. That’s the uncomfortable part of the story. The more recent part is better: renewables have since pulled ahead of coal, and Germany’s power-sector emissions are now at their lowest recorded level.
How the phase-out happened
Germany’s exit from nuclear didn’t start with Fukushima. It started nine years earlier. In 2000, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s SPD-Green government struck what’s known in Germany as the nuclear consensus, a deal with the country’s utilities to cap reactor lifespans at roughly 32 years and wind the fleet down entirely. That agreement became law in 2002 as an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act, with a theoretical end date around 2022, according to Clean Energy Wire.
The center-right government elected in 2009 tried to undo it. Angela Merkel’s coalition with the FDP extended reactor operating licenses by eight to fourteen years in 2010, which drew large protests, including roughly 40,000 people who marched in Berlin that autumn (Clean Energy Wire).
Then came Fukushima. Within days of the March 11, 2011 disaster, Merkel imposed a three-month moratorium on the extension and took Germany’s eight oldest reactors offline for review. By June, her government had reversed course again, this time for good: those eight would stay shut permanently, and the remaining nine would close on a fixed schedule ending in 2022. The Bundestag passed the plan with support from more than 80 percent of members (Clean Energy Wire).
The last three plants, Emsland, Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim, were due to close at the end of 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting gas squeeze pushed Berlin to delay that by three and a half months. Parliament approved a one-time extension to April 15, 2023, with no further extensions on offer (U.S. Energy Information Administration and CNN). That’s the date nuclear power in Germany ended.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2000-2002 | Schröder government and utilities agree the “nuclear consensus,” written into law as an Atomic Energy Act amendment |
| 2010 | Merkel government extends reactor lifespans by 8-14 years |
| March 2011 | Fukushima triggers a moratorium, and Germany’s eight oldest reactors go offline |
| June 2011 | Bundestag votes to close the remaining nine reactors by 2022 |
| Late 2022 | Gas crisis prompts a short extension for the last three plants |
| April 15, 2023 | Emsland, Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim close, taking German nuclear output to zero |
What filled the hole nuclear left behind
Nuclear supplied more than a quarter of German electricity as recently as 2010, when the country’s 17 reactors generated 133 terawatt-hours (World Nuclear Association). After the 2011 shutdowns cut that fleet roughly in half overnight, the lost output didn’t shift to wind turbines. Reporting on the years since Fukushima shows reductions in nuclear generation were offset primarily by increases in coal, not by the renewable buildout that was supposed to be the long-term answer (CNN).
Renewables kept growing through the 2010s, but not fast enough to close the gap outright. By the time the last three reactors closed in April 2023, nuclear was still supplying about 6 percent of German electricity, and coal had climbed to more than 30 percent (U.S. Energy Information Administration and CNN).
From the operations side, that pattern isn’t surprising. When a reactor comes offline, the grid needs something dispatchable to answer the gap that same hour, and in Germany that was almost always a coal unit already built, permitted and sitting on standby. Wind and solar add capacity over years, not overnight, and without enough storage or transmission to carry their output where it’s needed, they can’t step in for a retired baseload plant on short notice. The substitution shows up as more hours on coal, long before it shows up as a clean replacement.
The 2022 energy crisis pushed the same lever harder. Russia supplied 55 percent of Germany’s natural gas imports in 2021, and Germany heats almost half its homes with gas (U.S. Energy Information Administration). When Russian gas deliveries collapsed after the invasion of Ukraine, Berlin passed the Substitute Power Plants Maintenance Act to bring mothballed coal capacity back into the grid, moving roughly 2.7 gigawatts of lignite units and several gigawatts of hard coal plants out of cold reserve between mid-2022 and early 2023 to save gas for winter heating (Clean Energy Wire). Delaying the nuclear exit and reviving coal plants were two sides of the same emergency response.
Climate scientists don’t agree on whether losing that last 6 percent of nuclear was worth it. Hans von Storch, a German climate researcher, called the shutdown decision “incomprehensible” from a climate standpoint. Niklas Höhne, who studies climate policy, took the opposite view, arguing that locking in the phase-out gave renewable investment the certainty to scale “much faster, cheaper and safer” over the following decade (CNBC).
What economists found it cost
An economics team, Stephen Jarvis, Olivier Deschenes and Akshaya Jha, tried to put a number on that substitution. Their study looked at ten of Germany’s seventeen reactors, the ones shut down between 2011 and 2017, and traced where the lost generation went. It circulated first as an NBER working paper and was published in 2022 in the Journal of the European Economic Association (NBER and LSE Grantham Research Institute). Their finding matches the pattern above: the lost nuclear output was replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports.
The published version puts the added social cost of that substitution at 3 billion to 8 billion euros a year. Most of that cost has nothing to do with carbon. It comes from the added mortality risk tied to the local air pollution that burning coal puts into the air people breathe (LSE Grantham Research Institute). An earlier version of the same research had put the annual toll closer to 12 billion dollars, with more than 70 percent of it coming from that same air-pollution mortality channel (EurekAlert). The estimates moved between drafts, but the conclusion didn’t: the accident and waste-disposal risks that motivated the phase-out were real, and by the authors’ own accounting, still smaller than the health and climate costs of running coal harder in nuclear’s place.
Where German power emissions stand now
The renewable buildout that was meant to replace nuclear has largely caught up, years after the fact. Renewables supplied more than half of Germany’s gross electricity consumption for the first time in 2023, and power-sector CO2 emissions fell 21 percent that year to a record low of 177 million tons, according to Agora Energiewende. In 2024, renewables reached 55 percent of consumption, utilities retired 6.1 gigawatts of coal capacity (about 16 percent of the country’s coal fleet), and coal-fired generation dropped another 16 percent year on year (Agora Energiewende). Germany’s federal environment agency put the energy sector’s 2024 emissions decline at just over 15 million tons, a 7.4 percent year-on-year drop, driven mainly by lower coal and lignite burning (Umweltbundesamt). The carbon intensity of German grid power fell alongside it, from 433 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour in 2022 to 386 grams in 2023 and 363 grams in 2024 (Umweltbundesamt).
The most recent full-year numbers, for 2025, show the same trend continuing with no nuclear anywhere in the mix. Wind became Germany’s single largest electricity source for the year at 132 terawatt-hours, and solar generation rose 21 percent to overtake lignite for the first time on record. Renewables held at 55.9 percent of net public electricity generation, per Fraunhofer ISE. Coal hasn’t gone away. It still covers the gaps on windless, sunless days, and it came back briefly during the 2022 gas crisis. But every year since 2023, it’s lost ground to renewables and imports, not back to nuclear.
For someone who’s spent years around reactor operations and safety systems, the German case reads less like a referendum on nuclear risk and more like a lesson in sequencing. Retire generating capacity before its replacement is built, and the gap gets filled by whatever’s cheapest and already licensed to run. For most of the 2010s in Germany, that was coal. The more recent numbers show what happens once the renewable buildout catches up: emissions fall, and they fall faster than they did while nuclear was still winding down. Whether the trade was worth it depends on how heavily you weigh a decade of extra coal smoke against a nuclear risk Germany decided it no longer wanted to carry, and the scientists who study this professionally still land on different sides of that scale.
