Status: 04/15/2023 08:28 a.m
Germany started late into the nuclear age. There was a lot of enthusiasm for the new technology at first. Critical voices tended to come from the right-wing political spectrum. That only changed in the 1970s.
At the beginning of the 1950s, there was an atmosphere of nuclear optimism. In the Germany of the reconstruction, the hunger for energy is growing, at the same time the coal reserves are threatening to become scarce. The promise of peaceful nuclear energy comes at just the right time.
Physics Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg is also promoting them. In a 1951 interview – to hear in SWR2 archive radio – he is asked if “the nuclear cooker for the housewife and the nuclear car” will come. Although Heisenberg describes such fantasies as “pure fantasies”, such visions were quite common at the time. “Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably become a reality within the next ten years,” predicted US inventor Alex Lewyt back in 1955.
First nuclear reactor should go to Karlsruhe
First of all, the Germans ban applied nuclear research. But then the Federal Republic of Germany is also allowed to build its first research reactor. Heisenberg would have liked to have him in Munich, but Chancellor Konrad Adenauer chose Karlsruhe. For safety reasons: “Munich was Adenauer too close to Czechoslovakia” and thus to the Eastern Bloc, nuclear energy historian Joachim Radkau explains in the podcast SWR2 To know. Karlsruhe seemed safer for Adenauer. However, there were delays in construction, and in the end the first reactor was in Garching near Munich.
For peaceful use only?
In 1955, a separate “Federal Ministry for Atomic Affairs” was created and the up-and-coming CSU politician Franz Josef Strauss became the first Federal Atomic Minister. Even then there was a heated nuclear debate. It did not revolve around the question: “Nuclear power, yes or no?” but “Should the Federal Republic limit itself to peaceful use? Adenauer and Strauss – he becomes Minister of Defense in 1956 – push for the nuclear armament of the Bundeswehr. The SPD is against it and follows it in its line “Göttingen Manifesto” – a statement by the leading German nuclear physicists, which boils down to the formula: yes to nuclear energy, no to nuclear weapons. The Bundestag debated this for four days, accompanied by public demonstrations.
First nuclear power plants – and early criticism
In the end, Adenauer did not prevail, the Federal Republic would not become a nuclear power. But in 1961 it got its first nuclear power plant in Kahl am Main and many more after it. Incidentally, in 1962 the Federal Ministry of Research, which still exists today, takes precedence over the Federal Atomic Energy Ministry.
In the 1960s, the first critical voices were raised. Unlike later, they came more from the right. One of the early warners was the physician and science journalist Bodo Manstein – who later belonged to the co-founders of the Bund for the Environment and Nature Conservation Germany BUND.
Manstein had a Nazi past. In 1930 he joined the NSDAP and was a member of the “National Socialist German Medical Association”. In the 1950s he tried to organize protests against the atomic bomb tests in the Pacific. As a result, he focused more and more on nuclear energy and its risks.
For 1968 nuclear power was hardly an issue
The political left, on the other hand, has little to do with nuclear energy. Rudi Dutschke, for example, one of the leading figures of the 1968 movement, tends to sympathize with her. A real anti-nuclear movement only emerged when power plant construction was promoted in the early 1970s, particularly under the impact of the oil crisis in 1973. The first major protests were directed against the nuclear power plant Wyhl am Kaiserstuhl. The citizens’ initiatives there do not yet have a political agenda; it is farmers, winegrowers and church representatives who are joining forces. They worry about simple things – not so much about a nuclear accident. Rather, they feared that the Rhine could heat up excessively, that the water vapor escaping from the cooling towers would lead to less sun and more fog. They don’t want “a second Ruhr area on the Upper Rhine”.
1970s: Politicization of the nuclear issue
The dispute escalated. After the opponents were not taken seriously by the Baden-Württemberg state government or considered themselves to be on the “extreme left” corner, they occupied the building site in February 1975.
Protests, occupations, evictions. What began with civil protests in Wyhl is later repeated – much more politicized – at other locations: in Brokdorf, Kalkar, at the planned Gorleben repository. The anti-nuclear movement becomes one of the roots of the Green Party.
Chernobyl 1986: Impetus for the opponents
The protest received further impetus in the spring of 1986 through the reactor accident in the Soviet nuclear power plant Chernobyl. Tens of thousands gather at Pentecost on the site of the planned Wackersdorf reprocessing plant, a prestige project by Franz Josef Strauss, now Prime Minister of Bavaria.
Masked demonstrators fired steel balls at the police and set vehicles on fire. The state authorities, for their part, provoke with low-flying helicopter flights and tear gas grenades, which they throw into the crowds. The result: hundreds of injuries on both sides, property damage in the millions. After Chernobyl, the opposition SPD changed its position and switched to the side of the opponents.
Birth of the Federal Environment Ministry
Chancellor Kohl (CDU), on the other hand, is in a dilemma: For him and his black and yellow federal government, Chernobyl is no reason to “exit” from nuclear energy – a word that just came up in the context. German nuclear power plants are the safest in the world, Kohl emphasizes again and again. At the same time, he could not ignore Chernobyl either. So he makes a sign and picks up new ministry from the baptism, one for “Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety”. The Ministry of the Environment is thus the second, after the Ministry of Research, to be rooted in the history of nuclear energy.
One of the most prominent in this office was Klaus Töpfer, who had the two GDR power plants in Lubmin and Rheinsberg shut down after reunification.
Kohl governs until 1998. After the change of power, the red-green government under Gerhard Schröder decides to phase out nuclear energy. The black and yellow government under Angela Merkel reversed it in 2010. A year later, after the Fukushima disaster, Merkel changed her position and announced that German nuclear power plants would be phased out by 2022.
Why did the anti-nuclear movement become so big?
France wants to build new nuclear power plants. Great Britain too. In Germany, on the other hand, the opponents of nuclear power have now achieved their goal. Switzerland and Austria are actually on an exit course. Why these differences? For historian Joachim Radkau, one of the main causes lies in the political framework: “My impression was that the decisive factor was that there was no powerful nuclear military apparatus here.”
In other words, when combined with military use, investments in nuclear technology are very different than without.
After the successful protests against the Gorleben reprocessing plant, Radkau says, a nuclear manager confessed to him how grateful he was to the opponents of nuclear energy – they had saved the energy industry from one of the biggest bad investments.
The energy companies took payment for their agreement to phase out nuclear power – they hardly fought against it.