Nuclear power phase-out

• 1. Introduction

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  Nuclear power phase-out is the deliberate decision by a country to stop using nuclear energy. On the 15th of April 2023, Germany switched off its last three nuclear power plants, closing a chapter that had begun with anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s. That final shutdown was not a quiet bureaucratic event. It came after a decade of reversals, lawsuits, public demonstrations, and a pandemic-era energy crisis that briefly threatened to undo the whole plan.

  Three accidents reshaped the global conversation about nuclear power: the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, the catastrophic explosion at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986, and the tsunami-triggered disaster at Fukushima in Japan in 2011. Each one triggered a new wave of shutdowns, referendums, and political about-turns in countries that had never even completed a reactor of their own.

  Only three countries have permanently closed all of their formerly functioning nuclear plants: Italy, Germany, and Taiwan. Yet even that list keeps shifting. Italy voted in a referendum in 2011 to block new plants, but in February 2025 its government approved a law to begin overturning that ban. The question at the heart of this documentary is not simply whether nuclear power is dangerous. It is how fear, politics, economics, and climate have pulled the same countries in opposite directions, sometimes within a single decade.

• 2. Three Accidents, One Shift

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  At Three Mile Island in 1979, a partial meltdown in Pennsylvania sent tremors through public confidence in nuclear power across the Western world. The 1980 Swedish nuclear power referendum followed within a year and resulted in parliament deciding that no further plants would be built and that existing ones would be phased out by 2010. Eighteen months after Three Mile Island, Italy also held a referendum opposing nuclear power.

  The 1986 Chernobyl disaster accelerated the retreat. Italy's phase-out began in 1987, one year after Chernobyl, and the country's four nuclear plants were all closed by 1990. Serbia established a moratorium on nuclear energy in 1989, the year following Chernobyl, and later passed a law prohibiting its use outright.

  Fukushima in 2011 delivered the third shock. Within weeks of the disaster, Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan closed the ageing Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant over earthquake and tsunami fears. By March 2012, one year after the disaster, all but two of Japan's nuclear reactors had been shut down. In Germany, Angela Merkel's government announced on the 29th of May 2011 that all German nuclear plants would close by December 2022. In September of that year, the engineering company Siemens announced it would withdraw entirely from the nuclear industry anywhere in the world.

  IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said in September 2011 that the Fukushima disaster had caused deep public anxiety throughout the world and damaged confidence in nuclear power. That statement captured the pattern running through all three accidents: each one was as much a crisis of trust as a crisis of engineering.

• 3. The German Reckoning

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  Germany's phase-out unfolded over more than two decades and generated more legal and political drama than almost any other country's energy transition. The First Schröder cabinet, made up of the SPD and Alliance '90/The Greens, officially announced the phase-out in 2000. The plants at Stade and Obrigheim were turned off on the 14th of November 2003 and the 11th of May 2005 respectively.

  The Fukushima disaster transformed what had been a managed wind-down into an emergency acceleration. Anti-nuclear demonstrations were held across Germany in March 2012, with organisers reporting more than 50,000 participants in six regions. Siemens, whose chairman Peter Löscher confirmed the company was ending plans to cooperate with Rosatom on dozens of reactors in Russia, became the most visible corporate casualty of the post-Fukushima mood.

  The legal battles were equally significant. In early October 2016, Swedish electric power company Vattenfall began litigation at the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington, D.C., claiming almost 4.7 billion euros in damages from the German government's 2011 decision to accelerate the phase-out. On the 5th of December 2016, Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ruled that nuclear plant operators were eligible for adequate compensation, since the exit was essentially constitutional but the utilities had made good-faith investments in 2010. E.ON, RWE, and Vattenfall were expected to seek a total of 19 billion euros under separate suits.

  A 2019 scientific paper found that the German nuclear shutdown increased carbon dioxide emissions by around 36.2 megatons per year and killed 1,100 people annually through increased air pollution. Despite those findings, the operators of Germany's six remaining plants, utilities E.ON, RWE, and EnBW, rejected calls at the end of the 2021 COP26 talks to keep plants open beyond 2022. In July 2022, faced with a looming energy crisis intensified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the German parliament voted to reactivate closed coal power plants rather than reverse the nuclear closure. By April 2024, a controversy had emerged over claims that Economy Minister Robert Habeck had misled the public in 2022 by ignoring expert advice that the facilities were still safe to operate.

• 4. Referendums and Reversals

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  Switzerland offers perhaps the most detailed record of a country repeatedly consulting its population and arriving at different answers. The Swiss held their first citizens' initiative on nuclear safety in 1979, which was rejected. In 1984, a vote on an initiative for a future without further nuclear power stations was defeated 55% to 45%. On the 23rd of September 1990, two separate referendums were held: one proposing a ten-year moratorium on new plants passed with 54.5% in favour, while an outright phase-out was rejected 53% to 47.1%. In 2003, both Moratorium Plus and the Electricity without Nuclear initiative were turned down, with the rejection of Moratorium Plus coming as a surprise because polls had indicated acceptance.

  In August 2024, the Swiss Federal Council, led by Energy Minister Albert Rösti, proposed lifting the nuclear construction ban that had been in place since 2017, citing energy security and the need to phase out fossil fuels. Any change to the Nuclear Energy Act would require consent from the Federal Assembly and potentially a further referendum.

  Taiwan's journey was shorter but equally dramatic. The government elected in 2016 announced a phase-out by 2025. In 2021, a referendum rejected completing the Lungmen Nuclear Power Plant. The last operating station in Taiwan, the Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant, was shut down in May 2025. A referendum held on the 23rd of August 2025 on restarting Maanshan failed to reach the 25% threshold of eligible voters required for success, reaching only 21.7% in favour with 74.2% of voters participating.

  Austria built a complete reactor at Zwentendorf in the 1970s but a 1978 referendum prevented it from ever starting up. On the 9th of July 1997, the Austrian parliament voted unanimously to maintain the anti-nuclear policy. The reactor was converted into a museum and used as a movie set and a training facility. It is described as uniquely suitable for that purpose because it contains every aspect of an actual nuclear power plant except the radiation itself.

• 5. The Climate Calculation

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  A 2019 study examining the German and Japanese closures concluded that if both countries had continued operating their nuclear plants after Fukushima, they could together have prevented 28,000 air pollution-induced deaths and 2,400 megatons of carbon emissions between 2011 and 2017. That figure sits at the centre of a growing tension between two overlapping crises: the fear of nuclear accidents on one side, and the accelerating damage from fossil fuels on the other.

  Proponents of nuclear power argue it produces virtually no air pollution and is the only viable path to energy independence for most Western countries. They point out that more than 90% of spent nuclear fuel in the United States could be reprocessed, potentially extending nuclear power generation by hundreds of years. The IPCC stated in 2014 that nuclear energy is a low-carbon electricity source, comparable to wind and lower than solar in lifecycle emissions.

  The Washington Post reported in May 2023 that if Germany had kept its nuclear plants running from 2010, its coal share of electricity generation could have been 13% rather than the actual 31%. The article noted that more lives might already have been lost in Germany alone from coal air pollution than from all the world's nuclear accidents combined, including Fukushima and Chernobyl.

  Several countries that had been moving toward phase-outs have reversed course specifically because of climate concerns. Belgium's federal parliament, which passed phase-out legislation in 2003, promulgated an act on the 17th of May 2025 formally repealing that law. The Philippines signed an agreement in 2024 with Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power to study refurbishing the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, which was completed but never commissioned. In South Korea, candidate Yoon Seok-Yeol won a close election in 2022 on a platform of cancelling the phase-out and developing new nuclear technology for export.

• 6. The Safety Ledger

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  Benjamin K. Sovacool reported that there have been 99 accidents at nuclear power plants worldwide. Fifty-seven of those occurred after the Chernobyl disaster, and 57% of all nuclear-related accidents have taken place in the United States. The serious accidents cited in the source are the SL-1 accident in 1961, Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and the three simultaneous events at Fukushima-Daiichi in 2011.

  An interdisciplinary team from MIT estimated that given the expected growth of nuclear power between 2005 and 2055, at least four serious accidents would be expected in that period. The historical record through the era of generation II reactors works out to roughly one serious accident every eight years worldwide.

  Stuart Arm has stated that apart from Chernobyl, no nuclear workers or members of the public have ever died as a result of exposure to radiation due to a commercial nuclear reactor incident. For a 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plant, the complete nuclear fuel cycle from mining to waste disposal generates a radiation dose of 136 person-rem per year. The equivalent coal-fired plant produces 490 person-rem per year.

  The Fukushima evacuation itself became a subject of reassessment. Subsequent scientific analysis concluded that the evacuations were more damaging than the radiation could have been, and recommended that populations be advised to remain in place in all but the most severe radiological release events. That finding has not penetrated public debate to the same extent as the images of the exclusion zone, which covers a 20 kilometre radius around the plant, mirroring the 30 kilometre Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that remains in effect decades later. The gap between measured risk and perceived risk has been the most persistent driver of phase-out politics in every country examined here.

• 7. What Comes Next

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  At least 100 older and smaller reactors worldwide will most probably be closed over the next 10-15 years, according to projections in the source. Meanwhile, China has 11 units under construction, and new reactors are being built in Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, India, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, Slovakia, South Korea, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

  Countries exiting nuclear power face an immediate replacement problem. Switzerland's International Energy Agency warned in 2018 that the phased withdrawal would force increasing reliance on imports from European neighbours, especially in winter months when low water levels reduce output from hydroelectric plants. Spain confirmed a phase-out plan in December 2023 with the first reactor closing in 2027 and the last in 2035, but by April 2025 the government indicated it would consider proposals from operators to extend those closure dates.

  Denmark, which passed a law in 1985 banning nuclear plant construction, was reported in 2025 to be considering scrapping that prohibition. In Germany, an opinion poll conducted in March 2025 found that 55% of those polled supported restarting the closed plants, with 36% against, though only 32% supported building entirely new reactors. An accelerator-driven subcritical reactor called MYRRHA, described as the world's first large-scale demonstration of that technology, is being built in Belgium for the purpose of nuclear transmutation of high-level radioactive waste.

  The Olkiluoto 3 reactor in Finland, after years of delays and cost overruns, came online on the 12th of March 2022, and when it reaches full output roughly 90% of Finland's electricity generation will come from clean, low-carbon sources, with nuclear supplying around half of that total. That single data point from northern Europe captures the unresolved argument: the same technology that triggered mass evacuations and decades of phase-out politics is also the reason one country is close to eliminating fossil fuels from its grid entirely.