The equipment for the super meltdown is stored between St. Martin’s lanterns and sleeping bags in the basement of the Hermens family in Aachen. In plastic containers with the atomic symbol – a small black circle on a neon yellow background, surrounded by three black wings – there are 25 protective suits, including respiratory masks and iodine tablets, neatly packed. Food supplies for two weeks are also replenished again and again. The fact that the last three German nuclear power plants will be shut down on April 15 will not change that. The Tihange nuclear power plant in Belgium, less than 60 kilometers away from Aachen, will remain in operation.
“We’re not a prepper family,” emphasizes civil engineer Gereon Hermens – alluding to people who constantly fear the worst and hole up accordingly. “But we just asked ourselves: What if something really happens? Wouldn’t we then say: ‘If only we had gotten protective suits in time!'”
He and his wife even came up with a little contingency plan: if Tihange blew up, the three kids from school would come to Dad’s downtown office and take him home as quickly as possible. There they would stay in the house for two weeks to avoid the radioactive rain – the fallout. The children insisted that if the worst came to the worst, the guinea pigs should also be brought in from the garden.
thing not over yet
In a way, Gereon Hermens is symptomatic of Germany’s nuclear phase-out, which can be summed up as follows: “We’re out – but we’re also the only ones.” So the matter is not over yet. Can the Germans ever be done with nuclear power? For decades it has decisively shaped the history of the Federal Republic.
Put simply, one could say that the Germans rehearsed civil protest with the nuclear controversy. Sure, there were big demonstrations before, for example against the Vietnam War. But in the anti-nuclear movement, broad sections of the population came together for the first time. The logo “Nuclear power? No thanks!” imported from Denmark with a laughing red sun became the most well-known sticker of a whole generation. “The controversy over nuclear energy was the biggest public controversy in the history of the Federal Republic to date,” says environmental historian Joachim Radkau, author of the standard work “Rise and Crisis of the German Nuclear Industry” (1983).
For example, the planned construction of a nuclear reactor in Wyhl in Baden in the mid-1970s got both left-wing Freiburg students and conservative vintners and farmers on their feet. There were also close ties to the French anti-nuclear movement that had emerged years earlier. “In France, however, the military-industrial complex was simply too strong,” says Radkau. “There, demonstrations were beaten up much more brutally than here.”
Never just an energy question
The clashes between demonstrators and police officers at the time were violent. Both sides proceeded from the premise that this was not just about an energy issue, but about the future of the young German democracy. “Nuclear power requires the police state,” was a well-known statement by Green Party co-founder Petra Kelly. Conversely, some politicians saw the large demos in a line with the RAF terror, which was at its peak at that time.
The fact that the protest of the opponents of nuclear power was granted long-term success refutes the thesis of a nuclear state as clearly as possible. The 79-year-old Radkau warns against black-and-white thinking along the lines of: Here the activists, there the nuclear lobby. “The engineers and technicians in particular knew about the risks of nuclear power right from the start, and that’s why there were well-known skeptics in the energy industry and in corporations like RWE.” There were contacts and talks between the two sides behind the scenes early on.
Radkau also doesn’t believe in the thesis that a “German Angst” prone to hysteria fueled the German anti-nuclear movement. “Especially those who knew about it had concerns. There were buzzwords like “nuclear psychosis” and “nuclear hysteria” – but on the contrary they stood for a naive enthusiasm for nuclear power.”
A surprising number of women
In the course of the nuclear power controversy, the Germans not only practiced demonstrating, but also many other forms of mobilization, such as holding town meetings and influencing administrations through petitions and lawsuits in court. “Today, too little attention is paid to the fact that anti-nuclear activists found support in the courts at an early stage,” says Radkau, referring to the Würgassen ruling, which put security above profitability as early as 1972.
The fact that a striking number of women were involved in the protests right from the start is also hardly known to the general public today. She was often driven by concern for the health of her children. Reports about the consequences of the radioactive fallout from American atomic bomb tests had been burned in. They transferred this to the civil use of nuclear energy. Counter-propaganda like the Walt Disney documentary “Our Friend the Atom” (1957) didn’t change anything.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 dramatically confirmed the fears of those opposed to nuclear power. After the Greens, the SPD now also committed itself to phasing out nuclear power. The protests against the Gorleben nuclear waste storage facility in Lower Saxony and the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant in Bavaria continued for decades afterwards. Blockades against the Castor transports with nuclear waste to Gorleben were added. Opponents of nuclear power initially took the beginning of the “climate alarm” as a diversionary maneuver. “It wasn’t until the 1990s that I realized that it had to be taken seriously,” Radkau admits.
After Fukushima it was over
In 2002, the red-green federal government decided to end nuclear power production after a “regular term” of 32 years per power plant. New buildings were no longer allowed. Eight years later, the CDU/CSU/FDP coalition extended the terms again, but after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) pushed through the final exit against internal party criticism. “That’s it,” she said at the time, according to “Spiegel” in a circle of confidants about the future prospects of nuclear energy.
For Gereon Hermens, the citizen of Aachen who is involved in many different ways, the exit is overdue. “I find it frustrating that such an unbelievable effort had to be made over such a long period of time to recognize the associated dangers and the eternal costs and then ultimately act. Now it has worked, and that may be a certain thing on my part It’s a relief. But I don’t feel any satisfaction.” And the protective suits in the basement? “From that I hope that has been the most wasted investment of my life.”
