German Greens lied to push nuclear power phase-out – media

Environmentalist diehards reportedly manipulated experts’ conclusions to fit their own agenda.

Top-ranking German government officials from the Ministry of Economic Affairs intentionally falsified experts’ reports to make it look like nuclear power was no longer viable in the country, Cicero magazine reported on Thursday.

Citing internal documents and e-mails it obtained via a court order, the media outlet claims that long-time Green Party proponents of a nuclear phase-out in high positions swept reports under the rug, or altered them, if they ran counter to their ideological convictions.

Following the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011, Germany’s parliament voted in favor of shutting down all similar facilities in the country. In April 2023, Germany’s last three operational nuclear power plants were taken offline.

In the article, Cicero claims that Patrick Graichen and Stefan Tidow, then-undersecretaries at the Economy and Environment ministries respectively, played a key role in the effort to portray the prolongation of German nuclear power plants’ operational life as dangerous.

The two allegedly conspired to prevent their respective bosses from getting acquainted with any technical reports that refuted this assumption. According to the article, these documents dated March 2022 clearly pointed out that with starkly diminishing Russian gas imports, an “extension of the nuclear power plants’ operational life” could have alleviated the dire situation in Germany’s energy sector and prevented prices from skyrocketing in the coming winter.

However, the Green higher-ups, unhappy with this conclusion, allegedly rewrote the document, ramming home the message that any prolongation of the remaining nuclear power plants’ operation “is not tenable on technical-security grounds.”

Cicero claims that Economy Minister Robert Habeck most likely only saw the reworked version of the report, and not the original.

Faced with the threat of looming energy deficits, on October 17, Chancellor Olaf Scholz ordered the remaining three nuclear power plants to remain operational throughout the winter, despite warnings coming out of the Economy and Environment ministries. However, as Cicero notes, the overall trend toward the total phasing out of nuclear power-generation has remained unchanged.

With energy prices on the rise, Germany’s prized industrial sector has found itself increasingly at a disadvantage, with one in three manufacturers considering moving production overseas as a result, Bild reported in February.

Image credit: Timo Volz