The nuclear dispute driving a wedge between France and Germany

Near the French village of Fessenheim, facing Germany across the Rhine, a nuclear power station stands dormant. The German protesters that once demanded the site’s closure have decamped, and the last watts were produced three years ago. 

But disagreements over how the plant from 1977 should be repurposed persist, speaking to a much deeper divide over nuclear power between the two countries on either side of the river’s banks.

German officials have disputed a proposal to turn it into a centre to treat metals exposed to low levels of radioactivity, Fessenheim’s mayor Claude Brender says. “They are not on board with anything that might in some way make the nuclear industry more acceptable,” he adds.

France and Germany’s split over nuclear power is a tale of diverging mindsets fashioned over decades, including since the Chernobyl disaster in USSR-era Ukraine. But it has now become a major faultline in a touchy relationship between Europe’s two biggest economies.

Their stand-off over how to treat nuclear in a series of EU reforms has consequences for how Europe plans to advance towards cleaner energy. It will also affect how the bloc secures power supplies as the region weans itself off Russian gas, and how it provides its industry with affordable energy to compete with the US and China. 

“There can be squabbles between partners. But we’re not in a retirement home today squabbling over trivial matters. Europe is in a serious situation,” says Eric-André Martin, a specialist in Franco-German relations at French think-tank IFRI. 

France, which produces two-thirds of its power from nuclear plants and has plans for more reactors, is fighting for the low-carbon technology to be factored into its targets for reducing emissions and for leeway to use state subsidies to fund the sector.

For Germany, which closed its last nuclear plants this year and has been particularly shaken by its former reliance on Russian gas, there’s concern that a nuclear drive will detract from renewable energy advances.

But there is also an economic subtext in a region still reeling from an energy crisis last year, when prices spiked and laid bare how vulnerable households and manufacturers could become.

Berlin is wary that Paris would benefit more than its neighbours if it ends up being able to guarantee low power prices from its large nuclear output as a result of new EU rules on electricity markets, people close to talks between the two countries say.

Ministers on both sides have acknowledged there is a problem. “The conflict is painful. It’s painful for the two governments as well as for our [EU] partners,” Sven Giegold, state secretary at the German economy and climate action ministry, tells the Financial Times. 

Agnès Pannier-Runacher, France’s energy minister, says she wants to “get out of the realm of the emotional and move past the considerable misunderstandings that have accumulated in this discussion”.

In a joint appearance in Hamburg last week, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president Emmanuel Macron made encouraging noises over their ability to break the latest deadlock: a disagreement over the design of the EU’s electricity market. Ministers had been due to agree a plan in June but will now meet on October 17 to discuss the reform, aimed at stabilising long-term prices.

But the French and German impasse on nuclear has already slowed down debates on key EU policies such as rules on renewable energy and how hydrogen should be produced. Smaller member states are becoming impatient. The delay on the market design is “a big Franco-German show of incompetence again”, says an energy ministry official from another EU country who requested anonymity. 

“We have the problem with the competitiveness of the whole continent and we are focusing on how to get a competitive advantage [against] each other,” says Jozef Sikela, the Czech energy minister who chaired EU energy ministers’ meetings during last year’s gas crisis. “This way will not help us, it will not move us forward.”

Divisions run deep

Today’s deep disagreement over nuclear power was not always so stark.

France first laid out its intention to build up civil and military nuclear programmes in 1945. In the 1960s and ’70s there were even ideas about communal European nuclear plants.

The big accelerator for France was the 1973 oil crisis, which prompted a wave of reactor construction that gave it its current fleet of 56.

“Germany had some coal reserves, France had nothing,” says Bernard Accoyer, a former conservative politician in France and the head of a pro-nuclear lobby group.

The feat of engineering that followed is still a source of French national pride, although a series of outages at several reactors operated by state-owned EDF last year caused severe embarrassment and lost France its crown as the region’s top power exporter.

“Nuclear energy is part of France’s vital interests. The French would rather leave Europe than turn their backs on nuclear,” quips one senior French official.

Germany had its own reactors, including Soviet ones in the Communist east. But an anti-nuclear movement began to emerge in the 1970s when farmers and winegrowers in the south-west led opposition to a plant in Wyhl, also on the Rhine. 

That movement, nourished by fears of the atomic bomb, spawned what would later become Germany’s influential Green party, which today is a part of Scholz’s three-way coalition.

“Germany was at the frontier of the cold war and everybody knew the country would become ground zero in the event of a nuclear war,” says Arne Jungjohann, a political scientist.

After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, that sentiment took root more deeply. Children in then West Germany were told not to play in sand and people ran inside when it rained out of fear of radiation levels. In some parts of Germany, certain types of mushrooms — and the wild boar that eat them — are still contaminated from the accident. 

The 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan proved a point of no return. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel, who had initially pushed back plans by a previous Social Democrat and Green government to phase out nuclear power, announced closures that finally took place this year. 

“Before Fukushima . . . I was convinced that it was highly unlikely that [an accident] would occur in a high-tech country with high safety standards,” Merkel, a trained physicist, said in a speech three months after the accident. “Now it has happened.”

The government in Paris looked on aghast, former conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy recalled.

“I tell her — but Angela, what’s going on? How can this be?” he told a recent parliamentary hearing, in an account of their phone call. “She says, but Nicolas, have you not seen Fukushima? And I said — but where is the tsunami going to come from in Bavaria?”

Present-day public opinion in Germany is complicated. One survey in April found that less than a third of respondents backed shutting down the country’s nuclear plants. 

But across the river from Fessenheim, Stefan Portele, a father of four and resident of Breisach in the state of Baden-Württemberg, is relieved that the French plant is now offline. 

“It’s not safe. As long as nothing happens it’s fine, but if it does it’s a problem for millions of people,” he says. “This is still a region with the possibility of earthquakes. You never know. There hasn’t been one, but one is enough.”

On the French side, there is incomprehension, especially in the face of recent German decisions to re-fire coal power plants following the energy squeeze caused by the Russia-Ukraine war.

“Germany used to buy this nuclear power and now it is polluting us all the way here with coal,” says Dominique Schelcher, chief executive of the Système U supermarket chain and owner of Fessenheim’s store. 

The Fukushima disaster provoked some wobbles on nuclear power in France too. After a parliamentary pact with the Green party, socialist president François Hollande sought to trim reliance on the sector, which eventually led Fessenheim to be closed in 2020. The decision was endorsed by Macron after he came to power in 2017.

But by 2022, Macron had performed a volte-face and doubled down on the technology, announcing a €52bn plan for at least six new reactors and the extension of the lifespan of other sites.

Not seeing eye-to-eye

German objections to France’s pro-nuclear strategy partly reflect an ideological stance felt especially strongly by the Greens — including the vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, whose ministry for economy and climate action leads negotiations on energy matters.

Giegold, who works in the ministry, says it is “totally wrong” to claim that Germany is “leading a European crusade against nuclear power”. He says he does not dispute France’s right to generate atomic energy, only the right to use EU funds to do so. “We can finance together what we agree [on] with each other,” he says.  

But other Green party figures in Berlin privately voice concern about the safety of France’s ageing fleet. 

One person familiar with the government’s thinking pointed to the EDF shutdowns last year to fix so-called stress corrosion issues and said that the country’s nuclear safety agency was “doing its job”. 

The entire debate is not so much a debate on nuclear technology, but more about industry policy and gaining advantages from cheap energy for its own industry

He added, however, that he feared one day “politicians [could] over-rule the nuclear safety agency”, arguing that the world has experienced a serious nuclear accident roughly every 25 years and that “the 2030s will be a dangerous decade”.

Germans also fear the French are playing a dirty game on subsidies. Prices in the EU’s electricity market are dictated by supply and demand, with power flowing to where demand is greatest. But national subsidies, which need to get the green light from Brussels, play a role in incentivising new investments, including in renewable energy. France has been pushing to be able to use some of these instruments more broadly on its existing nuclear assets as well as any new plants.

It wants, for example, to have greater access to “contracts for difference”, which set a minimum price guarantee for power providers but also a ceiling above which the state can recover any revenue. That could then potentially be reverted back to consumers and businesses on their power bills, helping to keep prices low.

“The entire debate is not so much a debate on nuclear technology, but more about industry policy and gaining advantages from cheap energy for its own industry,” says Markus Krebber, chief executive of RWE, Germany’s biggest power generator in terms of output.

A German idea mooted by Habeck for a state-subsidised electricity tariff for energy-intensive industries has similarly raised eyebrows in France and beyond, as it would also give Germany a competitive advantage.

People in Strasbourg carry a coffin to celebrate the closure of the Fessenheim nuclear plant. The closure was endorsed by Emmanuel Macron after he came to power in 2017, but by 2022 he had performed a volte-face © Patrick Hertzog/AFP/Getty Images

Pannier-Runacher, the energy minister, says France is now trying to debunk “fantasies” that have arisen over what it is trying to achieve. French officials say this includes concerns they have heard from German counterparts that France could try to lure German manufacturers to the country with its more favourable energy regime, a stance they reject.

The misunderstandings took a turn for the worse this year despite previous attempts by Macron and Scholz to put on a show of unity, including at a meeting at the Élysée Palace in January. That resulted in a joint declaration with a specific embrace of hydrogen produced from “low-carbon” sources — a byword for nuclear — which was welcomed in Paris.

But weeks later negotiations over EU legislation on “green” hydrogen production, and whether nuclear power could play a role, met with objections from Berlin. It opened a period of stand-offs that included the French pulling support for new rules governing renewables in the EU at the last minute, citing a lack of recognition for the role of nuclear fuel.

The episode at the start of the year was a wake-up call over how complicated it would be to strike deals when Germany was governed by a fractious coalition, officials in Paris say.

In recent months, France has created a nuclear alliance backed by 14 countries, including Czechia, Poland and Hungary, and Pannier-Runacher says the issue is not “just a Franco-German problem”.

But France is disproportionately reliant on nuclear production compared to most EU countries, and the state-owned operator of its fleet, EDF, has a dominant market position.

A way forward?

France began to lobby for nuclear to be added to various texts under negotiation in multiple EU meetings this year in a way several countries found excessively pushy, according to EU diplomats and officials.

French diplomats raised their concerns on the omission of nuclear or “low-carbon” power in texts concerning everything from agreements for energy supplies with third countries to deals on what industries should be prioritised in the bloc’s “net zero industry act”.

Agnès Pannier-Runacher at a nuclear plant in eastern France. The energy minister says she wants to ‘get out of the realm of the emotional’ in the discussion over whether to use nuclear power © Emmanuel Dunnand/AFP/Getty Images

“It was really a 360-degree strategy,” says one senior EU official.

The European Commission says that it maintains a stance of “technology neutrality” and will not intervene, as power policies are national prerogatives. But France and other countries with nuclear fleets, such as Finland and Czechia, say that by prioritising renewable power the commission is disregarding other low-carbon options.

“There is a lot of legacy regulation, which from the start has been biased against nuclear power,” says Atte Harjanne, parliamentary leader of the Finnish Greens, a rare pro-nuclear Green party in Europe. “There is a lot of work to make any new regulation technology neutral, but you are already lagging behind.”

The commission had not foreseen a growth in nuclear power returning to Europe and had assumed that it would be stable and decline as countries pushed towards the EU’s goal of net zero emissions by 2050.

But the realisation of how massive the expansion of available decarbonised electricity will need to be to feed everything from cars to households had “foster[ed] its renaissance”, the senior EU official says.

Vehemently anti-nuclear states such as Austria and Luxembourg still argue that investment in expensive nuclear power plants takes away from greener and cheaper renewables, noting that France was the only EU country not to hit its renewables targets in 2020. 

West German officials check for signs of radiation after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Anti-nuclear sentiment took root more deeply in Germany after the accident, but the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan proved the point of no return © Patrick Piel/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Last Tuesday, Macron and Scholz raised some hopes that the blockage on the electricity market reform at least could be resolved, with the French president flagging “very encouraging discussions” and a potential deal by the end of the month.

It is still not clear what that could entail, however.

Henning Gloystein, director for climate, energy and resources at Eurasia Group, says that if both Germany and France entered into a tit-for-tat on energy subsidies, each allowing the other to support their industries with low prices, “it’s possibly the death of the EU wholesale power market as most consumption would be locked into fixed prices”.

In the longer term, nuclear advocates are hoping that a more serene debate can emerge over the technology. 

Pascal Canfin, a liberal French MEP who is close to Macron, says policymakers will have to acknowledge that while nuclear is “not green”, “it is clearly part of the solution, so we should not exclude it from financing and so on”.

“When I interview for media and describe my view in Finland, I get private messages [from German Greens] saying you have a point,” Harjanne, the head of the pro-nuclear Finnish Greens, says.

But in Fessenheim, a cartoon in the mayor’s office gives a flavour of the lingering divisions. It shows on one bank of the Rhine the nuclear plant and on the other a coal power station and wind turbines with groups of French and German workers each saying: “They don’t understand anything!”

Additional reporting by Leila Abboud and Guy Chazan