Quico Toro and Guido Núñez-Mujica at Persuasion:
It’s been an enormous week for nuclear. On Monday, in a landmark policy U-turn, the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz finally dropped his country’s longstanding opposition to nuclear energy at the European level. In a joint op-ed with French President Emmanuel Macron, Merz aligned his position with France’s, ending years of fierce and constant opposition that had refused funding to nuclear investments across the EU and treated nuclear power, in some ways, as worse than coal.
The move came in the context of a broader effort to revitalize the Paris-Berlin strategic partnership, where German sniping against nuclear projects had been a constant irritant. The shift has barely gotten noticed in the German press, because it isn’t likely to change policy within the country. Nuclear restarts remain a hot-button issue there, with not only the Greens but the Social Democrats adamantly opposed to restarting the country’s nuclear fleet. As Merz depends on Social Democratic votes for his coalition’s Bundestag majority, big roadblocks remain.
But in the EU more broadly, dropping the German government’s constant obstructionism to approving nuclear projects under the Green New Deal—Europe’s landmark climate policy—could nudge dozens of plants toward viability.
More here.
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