Germany’s leaders insist the atomic exit is final. Inside a dismantled reactor, that certainty looks less than convincing.
By MARC FELIX SERRAO
in Lingen, Germany
Illustration by Natália Delgado/ POLITICO
AI generated Text-to-speech
Marc Felix Serrao is a Global Reporter with The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network.
The entrance to Germany’s former Emsland nuclear power plant leads straight back in time. Visitors step into an elevator that displays not floors but altitude. The corridors are lined with telephone booths and phone books, as if the internet was never invented.
Everything that belongs to ordinary life has to stay outside, tucked in a locker: clothes, watches, phones, wedding rings… In return, visitors are issued clean but used underwear, socks, rubber slippers, a yellow hard hat and a pair of orange coveralls with yellow zippers.
Once this garish uniform is donned, the journey continues through a passageway with meter-thick doorframes into the heart of the complex, the controlled area. Above the entrance flutters a small plastic strip. Even the air, for safety reasons, is drawn inward.
Beneath the domed roof, the vast hall feels like a cathedral of high technology. From 1988 to 2023, atoms were split here to generate electricity — more than 400 billion kilowatt-hours of it, nearly as much power as Germany consumes in a year. Today, amid an infernal din, workers are taking the plant apart.
In the 15 years since Germany declared it would phase out nuclear power, scenes like this have been taking place all around the country, as workers toil to decommission its 33 remaining reactor units. Recently, however, the wars in Ukraine and Iran have pushed up energy prices in Germany, raising the question of whether turning away from nuclear energy was a good idea.
In 2011, after a tsunami caused the meltdown of a Japanese nuclear power plant in Fukushima, nearly nine out of 10 Germans said they favored a rapid nuclear exit. By 2023, 59 percent already believed the phase-out had been the wrong decision. In 2025, a representative survey showed a majority, 55 percent, supporting a return to nuclear power.
Perhaps sensing the political winds, two senior German politicians recently criticized the country’s retreat from nuclear power. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — a minister in the German government when the decision was taken — called the move a “strategic mistake.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz went further, describing it as a “grave strategic mistake.”
And yet, he added, the decision is now “irreversible.”
It was that last statement that brought me to the Emsland plant in the town of Lingen, near the Dutch border. It struck me as the perfect place to ask the question: To what extent does Merz’s perfunctory dismissal reflect the technical and political reality? Is it too late for Germany’s nuclear phase-out to be, well, phased out? Is the decision truly “irreversible?”
My goal in coming here wasn’t to weigh the pros and cons of nuclear energy. Nor was I seeking to answer the still unresolved question of where Germany should permanently store its highly radioactive waste. What I wanted to know was if the country could reverse its nuclear exit. As a question, it is complicated enough — now it’s becoming increasingly urgent.
German industry is hungry for energy. The country already needs vast amounts of electricity. And in the years ahead, as it builds data centers powering technologies like artificial intelligence, it will need even more.
At the same time, the country has embarked on an energy transition — known as the Energiewende — that relies primarily on wind and solar. Last year, renewables accounted for 56 percent of the country’s electricity generation. In the past, nuclear energy, a low-carbon mode of production, helped make up the rest of the mix. Today, coal and gas have to fill the gap. Germany still mines lignite domestically. Hard coal and natural gas, by contrast, come overwhelmingly from abroad.
This creates two problems: The first is emissions from fossil fuels. The second is dependence on natural gas suppliers that are, in some cases, authoritarian, unstable or both. Wars — whether in Ukraine or in the Middle East — can send prices flying.
German electricity is already expensive. In recent years, it’s been among the priciest in the European Union. In the first half of 2025, the price was above 38.35 cents per kilowatt-hour; the EU average was almost 10 cents lower.
This doesn’t have to be the case. In Europe, Germany is largely alone in its quest to phase out nuclear power. Many countries continue to back the technology. From France and the United Kingdom to Finland, Sweden and the Czech Republic, governments are building new reactors or laying the groundwork to do so. Others, such as Poland, are either entering the field for the first time, or they are exploring a return, like Italy.
Of the 33 reactor units Germany is decommissioning, three were shut down just three years ago. If those sites alone — Emsland, Neckarwestheim 2 and Isar 2 — were still operating, they would generate around 32 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. That would be enough to cover the annual consumption of roughly 9 million households, a significant part of the German population.
So, it was worth asking: What would it take to get those plants back online?
To the untrained eye, the decommissioned Emsland plant still looks largely intact, both the outside and within. At the center of the controlled area, the deep blue water of the spent-fuel pool still shimmers. At the bottom sit 718 fuel assemblies, which must continue cooling even after the end of power generation.
“Emsland was a state-of-the-art flagship plant, one of the best in the world,” says Andreas Friehe. A tall engineer with gray stubble, Friehe knows the site’s every detail. He started here as a student in 1996, wrote his thesis at the neighboring fuel-assembly factory, and now oversees the decommissioning. After talking in his office, we head together into the innermost part of the plant.
One might expect a man like Friehe to be melancholy. He chose a profession in a sector he believed had a future. Some years later, he learned the end was coming. Now, in the final third of his career, he is in charge of laying this plant to rest.
But the 56-year-old is either a pragmatist or an excellent actor. The decommissioning, he says, is an “enormous challenge that I enjoy.” As for reversing the phase-out, “if you ask me, the point of no return was passed long ago,” he says.
To make his case, he leads me to a tarpaulin in the controlled area. Behind it lies a gigantic metal hemisphere: the lid of the reactor pressure vessel, the steel container that houses the reactor core.
Emsland relied on a pressurized water reactor in which nuclear fission is used to heat water under high pressure. That water transfers its heat to a second circuit, which drives the turbine and generator. When I visited in early March, workers were in the process of sawing apart the lid. Deep cuts had already been sliced into the metal.
The lid, weighing 109 tons, was custom built, made specifically for this plant. “You cannot just order something like that off the shelf,” says Friehe. “Nobody in Germany today could build one for you.”
At this point, I might have been tempted to stop my reporting. If the manager in charge of dismantling one of Germany’s most recently shuttered reactors says the process is irreversible, why should I doubt him? Anti-nuclear politicians often make exactly that argument: Look, they say, even experts from the industry consider a return impossible.
But it is not that simple. Friehe’s employer, the Germany-headquartered energy multinational RWE, is hardly a neutral observer in this matter. It once operated Emsland and is now managing its decommissioning. For a decade and a half, politics have forced the company to prepare economically, technically and organizationally for the dismantling of its nuclear plants.
RWE CEO Markus Krebber has rejected a return to nuclear power in Germany; the era of the most recently shut-down plants, he has said, is “over.” One of his spokespersons put it this way: “German politicians decided to phase out nuclear energy, and as a company we are implementing that decision. We are not participating in any debate about a return to nuclear power.”
My visit to Emsland showed just how sensitive the issue remains for RWE. The company dispatched two press officers to accompany me and the plant manager at every step. Friehe’s line about the “point of no return” matches the company’s official position.
This wasn’t always the company’s view, of course. After German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared the risk of a Fukushima-style event “unmanageable” in 2011, RWE’s then-CEO Jürgen Grossmann warned that a phase-out “could have massive consequences for Germany as a business location.”
Indeed, many in the industry are still making a case for the restoration of plants like Emsland. “Individual existing German nuclear power plants that are in an early stage of decommissioning can be returned to operation,” said KernD, an industry association that represents the interests of the sector.
Components that have already been dismantled could be reproduced and reinstalled. “Up to a certain point in the decommissioning process, this is even economically advantageous compared with building new,” said the association.
KernD recommends a two-track approach: First, Germany should prepare for a future with new mini-reactors (small modular reactors, or SMRs), which manufacturers say could reach the market in the 2030s. Second, older nuclear plants should be refurbished where that remains feasible.
Many supposed obstacles, the association said, are in fact surmountable. Fuel assemblies could be procured anew. Key positions, such as shift supervisors and reactor operators, could be refilled before operations resumed.
Tarik Choho, chief commercial officer of the American nuclear company Westinghouse, is optimistic that Germany’s nuclear exit could be reversed. His firm is supplying the reactor technology for Poland’s nuclear energy effort. In Germany, meanwhile, it is involved in decommissioning.
A component like the freshly sawn-open reactor pressure vessel lid at Emsland, he says, could be replaced by Westinghouse “without difficulty.”
So, if the problem isn’t technical, what is it?
I sent detailed questions to key players in Berlin: What legal steps would be required to halt the decommissioning of plants like Emsland? What timelines would be realistic? What safety and licensing requirements would operators have to meet? What would be the biggest hurdles — and the decisive stop signs?
The federal government and the relevant regulatory authority both responded evasively. The Ministry for Economic Affairs, led by Katherina Reiche from the chancellor’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), referred inquiries to the Ministry for the Environment, which is headed by Carsten Schneider of Merz’s coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
BASE, the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management, did the same. And a spokesperson for the environment ministry sent no real answers at all — only a description of the current status quo.
All nuclear power plants in Germany, the ministry said, have decommissioning licenses, and dismantling is well advanced. The federal government is neither considering nor reviewing any option to restart decommissioned plants. Former operators, it added, have repeatedly publicly stated that they are not available for further operation. And finally: “We do not comment on hypothetical scenarios.”
The obstacle is clearly political.
Ahead of the 2025 parliamentary election that made Merz chancellor, the CDU pledged to keep the “nuclear option” alive. “We will examine the resumption of operations at the most recently shut-down nuclear power plants,” announced his party’s platform.
But after an unexpectedly disappointing result, Merz was forced to form a coalition with the SPD, which opposes the return of nuclear power.
Nina Scheer, the SPD parliamentary group’s spokesperson on energy policy, told me a return is “not realistic.” Restarting a decommissioned plant, she argued, is something entirely different than merely extending operations. Old licenses could not simply be prolonged. Instead, highly complex new procedures would be required, ones that could drag on for years.
Nuclear power, she added, is the most expensive form of electricity generation anyway. It is ill-suited to a system based on renewables, she continued. Waste disposal and safety issues remain unresolved. And Germany would not improve its resilience by creating new dependencies for fuel imports.
These points are, at best, debatable. It’s true that new builds are costly. That’s less obvious for existing plants, where construction costs have already been paid off. And countries like Spain show that nuclear power can, in principle, coexist with wind and solar.
Germany would, indeed, depend on foreign uranium imports, but not in a way that’s fundamentally different from other energy sources; uranium ore was even mined domestically until 1990. At the same time, the solar industry Scheer champions illustrates just how deep such dependencies can run: In 2024, 86 percent of the photovoltaic systems imported into Germany came from China.
I asked Scheer whether there was any scenario that might prompt the SPD to reassess nuclear power. An extreme supply crisis, for example? She said no.
In the face of this opposition, Merz’s conservatives have declined to push.
A return to operating the most recently shut-down plants would be “extremely difficult,” Andreas Lenz, the CDU/CSU parliamentary group’s energy-policy spokesperson, wrote to me. Like Scheer, he pointed to the advanced state of decommissioning, the loss of personnel and the lack of licenses.
Above all, however, he pointed to the SPD.
“It has to be said plainly — the coalition partner lacks the political will,” he said.
Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency in Paris, is among the sharpest critics of Germany’s energy policy. Speaking on the sidelines of a conference in Berlin, the 68-year-old also rejected the doctrine of finality. Restarting the most recently shut-down reactors would be “very challenging,” he acknowledged. Still, he argues for “a sober second look.” If even a single nuclear plant could return to the grid, he says, that would be “an important gain for Germany.”
One country that has taken the right path, in Birol’s view, is Poland. While Germany tears down its nuclear plants, Poland’s state-owned company Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe, or PEJ, is building its first one. For now, the site is little more than a cleared strip through a coastal forest, a few hundred meters from the Baltic Sea. The first concrete is to be poured at the end of 2028, and the first of three reactor units are scheduled to begin operating in 2036.
In conversation, PEJ chief Marek Woszczyk explains Poland’s turn to nuclear power with a single word: sovereignty. For decades, coal carried the country’s power system, but Poland also learned how risky dependence on Russian gas could be. Therefore, as coal declines, nuclear energy has become the obvious answer. It offers electricity that is reliably available, affordable over the long term and largely emissions-free. Poland, he says, is betting on proven and modern Generation III+ reactors that can run for 60 to 80 years, perhaps longer, and that become highly competitive once the steep upfront investment has been made.
What does Woszczyk make of Germany’s course? “I do not want to lecture Germany,” he says. “But I can explain Poland’s momentum.” In his country, he explains, the debate is not driven by ideology but by a simple question: “What else can guarantee clean, safe and predictable electricity on a large scale for decades?” Most Poles share his optimism. In surveys, support for nuclear energy has remained exceptionally high for years.
Back in Lingen, however, the decommissioning continues. Every dismantled component and every screw from the former power plant is logged and packed into compact metal containers. A red lid means the contents still need to be cleaned in the site’s own decommissioning facility. A green lid means clean and decontaminated — that is, cleared of any potentially radioactive particles on the surface.
Once officially cleared for release, most of these materials enter the normal recycling stream. A small portion is burned or melted down. That leaves the radioactive waste. According to RWE, it accounts for only about 1 percent of the total material from a nuclear plant.
Since decommissioning began in 2024, Friehe says, his team has removed nearly 1,000 tons of material. In the end, the total will come to around 800,000 tons, not including the cooling tower. The job is supposed to be finished by the mid-2030s. Once the facility then “falls out of the Atomic Energy Act,” as Friehe puts it, conventional demolition will follow.
But if I’ve learned anything from researching this article, it’s that it’s worth contemplating the alternative.
If Germany wanted to produce nuclear electricity again, the Bundestag would first have to amend the Atomic Energy Act. As things stand, the law effectively says that the license for commercial operation has expired. That sentence would have to be deleted or changed. A simple parliamentary majority would suffice.
If the law were amended this year, KernD estimates that a rough timeline might look like this: In 2027 and 2028, a political decision would need to be taken on which sites should be brought back online. In parallel, the relevant authorities would adapt their regulatory frameworks. A new operating organization could begin work — hiring and training staff, for example.
By the end of 2029, operators would then have time to recruit private investors and industrial offtakers. And if the final licenses were granted, the first reactors could be back online between 2031 and 2033, before the Emsland plant would even be fully decommissioned.
But to get there, German politicians would have to move now — and it’s not looking likely. As the CDU’s Lenz put it: “Every additional day of dismantling makes it harder and more expensive.”
The phase-out of nuclear power in Germany might, indeed, turn out to be “irreversible,” as Merz said. That, however, is not a hard reality but a political choice.
In the meantime, a nuclear power plant in decommissioning is a strange in-between thing. No longer a source of energy but not yet a pile of scrap — like Schrödinger’s cat, it still contains the possibility of both.
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