New document release reveals the astounding fraud, deception and idiocy accompanying the German nuclear phase-out

All of our countries are crazy in various ways, but when it comes to energy policy Germany is an undisputed champion of crazy.

In 2011, a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. If you check a map, you’ll notice that Fukushima is in a country called Japan, which it turns out is a different country from Germany. The Fukushima disaster had zero to do with the Federal Republic, but then-Chancellor Angela Merkel felt the need to solve the problem of Fukushima by phasing out nuclear power in Germany, even though tsunamis and earthquakes are not a problem in Germany, because Germany is a country in Central Europe and not an island nation in Asia.

That is crazy enough, but it gets much crazier. Months before announcing the nuclear phase-out, Merkel’s government had passed energy transition legislation to secure Germany’s path towards a zero-emissions future. We resolved to ditch our most significant source of emissions-free power, in other words, just months after resolving an energy transition to emissions-free power. At this point you would be justified in wondering if Germany suffers from some kind of shamanistic cultural phobia of electricity in general, that is how crazy this is. These insane choices had the near-term consequence of increasing our dependence on Russian natural gas. Otherwise, they ensured that power generation in Germany would be vastly more expensive than necessary and also vastly more carbon intensive than necessary.

Now, crazy demands explanations, and observers have proposed various theories for the German climate nuclear crazy. Two of them deserve mention here:

1) The 1968 generation in Germany suffered from unusual radicalism, sharpened by moral anxiety over National Socialism, and resolved to outcompete all others in the project of self-abnegating virtue. Our culture developed a deranged anti-nuclear movement that in a fit of typical German thoroughness also came to embrace opposition to nuclear power. The Chernobyl disaster radicalised the pink-haired anti-nuclearists still further, and these cretins grew up to become news anchors, school teachers and book authors, effectively indoctrinating the next generation according to their parareligious delusions.

2) German politicians after the Cold War – especially Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel – harboured a subtle and not entirely unreasonable desire to strengthen ties with resource-rich Russia. They decided that the anti-nuclearists and the Green Party could be instrumentalised towards this end. The energy transition and the nuclear phase-out increased our dependence on Russian gas, and this was a feature more than it was a bug.

These are mutually supporting theories, but I don’t think either of them can fully account for the bizarre phenomenon before us. Germany energy crazy is a very deep problem and it will keep historians busy for many generations.

In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Germany under Merkel’s successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, decided along with the rest of the liberal West that Russia was bad, bad, bad and that evil Putin had to be punished with self-immolating sanctions, sanctions, sanctions. This new spasm of high-minded moralising further attenuated our energy situation, ushering in an entirely self-made energy crisis. The Greens, now in government, were determined to proceed with the last stages of the nuclear phase-out, even with our natural gas supplies in doubt. Only when they saw themselves staring into the abyss of political doom did they grudgingly agree to give our last nuclear plants a three-and-a-half month lease on life. We Germans and our energy policy had out-crazied everyone else, we had made ourselves the laughing stock of the entire world, that is how crazy we were.

The Greens fought ruthless bureaucratic battles to shut off the last remaining nuclear power plants, and in the years since they have fought ruthless legal battles to keep the records of all this under seal lest their idiocies ever see the light of day. In open court, they argued that these documents must remain secret, because the German Sonderweg in all things nuclear “has to be defended in the future, both domestically and to our international and European partners” and “if the documents were to be disclosed, the negotiating partners of the Federal Government could counter our arguments.” Yes, you read that right: Lawyers for the German Ministry of Economic Affairs stood before a judge last year and begged him not to release internal records relating to the German nuclear phase-out because their contents were so discrediting that they would make the policy impossible to justify at home and defend abroad.

Our government, then, is not only crazy. They also know that they’re crazy, they love being crazy, they wish to persist in their crazy and they hope only that nobody else finds out about their crazy. It is like a middle-aged man with a crippling addiction to foot porn worried that his wife might stumble across his browsing history, except transmogrified into the form of a major European industrial power.

Happily, journalists for the excellent news magazine Cicero won their court battle and succeeded in forcing the release of the deeply embarrassing nuclear memos. Today Daniel Gräber has published his long-awaited analysis of these records, and what it reveals is really and truly abysmal. These documents show high civil servants literally falsifying expert reports. They show these same officials withholding information from their boss, Economics Minister Robert Habeck, lest he inconveniently arrive at the right conclusions. And they show an oblivious and wilfully deceived Habeck, still dreaming of becoming chancellor one day and terrified of alienating the rabid antinuclearists of his own party.

Before we get to the highlights, I must introduce you to our cast of characters. They are a colourful bunch indeed. At the pinnacle of this tragicomedy is of course Habeck himself, our valiant Minister of Economic Affairs. He hails from the technocratic, so-called “realist” wing of the Green Party, which means that he is Hard-Headed Very Serious Visionary and not just another crazy leftist hippie.

Habeck as he wishes to be seen and as state media strive to portray him: the far-sighted, deeply intellectual statesman. In fact, as we will see, he is a total idiot.

Habeck’s even stupider colleague, Annalena Baerbock, ended up being the Green chancellor candidate in the 2021 elections because feminism. Frustrated ambitions can ruin the best of men, to say nothing of petty pseudointellectual children’s book authors.

Next, you must meet Habeck’s powerful state secretary, Patrick Graichen. This odious man, who was forced to resign May 2023 in the face of a nepotism scandal, was Habeck’s energy tsar during the 2022 crisis. He came to Ministry following years as a lobbyist at Agora Energiewende, a think-tank responsible for devising and promoting much of the present German renewables lunacy.

Third in line is Stefan Tidow, who looks like what would happen if you blended a shark with an accountant. He also has a background at Agora, where he worked for a time under his friend Graichen. When the Scholz government came to power, Tidow became state secretary in the Ministry for the Environment, responsible for nuclear supervision.

Finally, there is Tidow’s subordinate, an insane lawyer named Gerrit Niehaus. Like his boss Tidow, Niehaus appears to truly loathe nuclear power for unfathomable reasons, and that is very unfortunate, because the Green Environmental Minister placed him in charge of “Department S,” the division responsible for nuclear regulation. I cannot find a good picture of Niehaus, so for the purposes of this post I invite you to imagine an unpleasant male visage of your choosing.

As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Habeck and his Ministry knew that their plans to abolish nuclear power were in doubt. Habeck initially suggested he was open to delaying the phase-out, and his subordinates commissioned an assessment from internal experts on whether extending the lifetime of our last nuclear plants would enhance energy security. These politically neutral civil servants produced a four-page memo explaining in detail all the reasons that shutting down power plants in the face of a looming energy crisis might be a bad idea, and why it might be wise to keep them running through the winter. All the arguments that would emerge in the autumn as the energy crisis deepened were thus, as Gräber explains, “on the table right from the start … well-prepared by civil-servant experts whose job it is tend to the welfare of the entire country rather than of any specific party.”

Fascinatingly, Habeck claims that he never saw the assessment. His energy tsar Graichen, intent on phasing out nuclear power by the end of the year even if it meant freezing to death in the dark, seems to have sent it directly to the waste bin – condemning his boss to say stupid and wrong things on television for months to come.

Meanwhile, Graichen’s counterpart in the Ministry of the Environment, our accountant-shark Tidow, was working just as hard to subvert inconvenient reports on his end. On 1 March 2022, his Ministry commissioned an assessment on “scenarios compatible with nuclear safety,” should the last nuclear plants be allowed to run beyond 31 December. The authors of the report – including two outside consultants – affirmed that safety concerns did not stand in the way of extending plant lifetime “for several years” beyond the scheduled phase-out date.

Tidow’s subordinate in “Department S,” Gerrit Niehaus, found this document to be highly inconvenient, and he immediately began rewriting it. Amusingly, he replaced every occurrence of the word for “nuclear power” (“Kernkraft”) with the slightly more ominous-sounding “atomic power” (“Atomkraft”). “Then,” Gräber writes, “he set about turning the core message of the memo into its opposite.” It took him two days to do this. On 3 March the new, falsified memo was ready, now scrubbed of the original authors’ names and sourced only to “Department S.” It argued that extending the life of Germany’s final nuclear plants by even a few months represented too great a risk to contemplate. And once again, Habeck was kept in the dark. Niehaus’s boss, Tidow, withheld the original assessment and forwarded only Niehaus’s doctored version to Graichen at the Economics Ministry. With it came a note: “Don’t formally deliver, only for you.”

There ensued an astounding comedy of the absurd. Apparently doubting that Habeck would have the appetite to read even the doctored memo, Graichen drew up an entirely new document, entitled “An examination of the continued operation of nuclear power plants in view of the war in Ukraine.” Of course, this was yet another bureaucratic invention that recommended against extending the life of the last German nuclear plants, and this on an even more egregiously pseudointellectual basis. Graichen promptly forwarded this fraudulent derivation of a falsified memo of a genuine assessment to Habeck – who of course really, really loved it.

It was a Friday evening, but Habeck’s intellectual orgasm was so intense that he spent the evening and much of the next day rewriting Graichen’s farce into a long question-and-answer dialogue. Having finished this labour of love, our proud schoolboy happily forwarded it to Graichen and Tidow, explaining that he had reworked Graichen’s “marvellous paper” into an FAQ, “because I believe this has to be NARRATED. If you want to read about this, so will everyone else.” Habeck suggested that they send this fourth narrative derivation of Graichen’s fraudulent reconception of Niehaus’s falsified memo of a genuine assessment to the nuclear plant operators the next day, at noon.

Our bureaucratic wizards now had a very delicate problem. As Niehaus explained, Graichen’s memo (derivation number three) was a complete disaster – “grossly wrong in legal terms” and mistaken in other respects as well. Habeck had unknowingly taken all of this ignorance into his NARRATIVE and was now demanding they use this monument of ideological idiocy to tell the actual experts – the nuclear plant operators – how things had to be. There followed, as Gräber writes, “a lively email exchange in which Habeck’s people wondered what they should do about the story written by their boss, which was based on false facts.” They finally posted a “radically shortened” and “heavily rewritten” version to the Ministry website on 8 March.

In the end, the Green bureaucrats lost the battle but they won the war. All the fake, invented reasons why the nuclear plants could not be left running into the spring melted away as the energy crisis deepened and the government found themselves toeing the brink of political annihilation. The plants did go offline, however, if a little later than Graichen, Tidow and Niehaus had hoped. The Greens declared victory and Habeck dreams of his future chancellorship to this day. What remained in the archives of Habeck’s ministry were the awkward leavings of their radicalism, ignorance and will to deceive, which in this case at least they failed to keep from us.