Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once remarked that politics are often shaped not by carefully laid plans, but by “events, dear boy, events.” That has proven to be the case with nuclear energy in Europe, which is staging a remarkable comeback across Europe after more than a decade of decline.
Starting in 2011, many European Union member states decided to phase out their utilize of nuclear power, prompted by the catastrophic meltdown that year at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. Though nuclear energy was already being touted as a way to decarbonize energy grids, the Fukushima disaster highlighted its risks compared to renewable power sources, which were building substantial gains.
Germany was the first to take action following Fukushima, sconcludeing shock waves through the industest with its decision to decommission all 17 of the countest’s reactors by 2022. (It concludeed up mothballing the last three in April 2023.) As Gregory Cradler of the Norway University of Applied Sciences wrote in 2022, that shift represented a “complete about-face from a deal nereceivediated less than a year earlier…implying operations well into the 2030s for the newest stations.” Other countries, most notably Spain, Belgium and Sweden, later announced similar plans. Due to this, and to the increasing price competitiveness of renewables, the production of nuclear power in the EU fell by 29 percent between 2006 and 2024.
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