Exit Germany: The unfinished business of the mass movement that buried nuclear energy.

• Author: Hockenos, Paul

If you keep your eyes peeled while cycling through the streets of Berlin, you're almost certain to spot a weather-battered yellow flag or bumper sticker emblazoned with the red image of a smiling sun and the message: "Atomkraft? Nein Danke" ("Nuclear power? No, thanks"). The anti-nuclear movement's cheerful icon is so familiar almost everywhere in Germany that it's become part of national identity: a symbol of people power, the supremacy of scientific reason, and the payoff of perseverance.

Shortly before midnight on April 15, Germany's last three nuclear reactors--the remnants of a nuclear energy program that began in the 1950s and peaked at nearly thirty reactors in 1989--were switched off. Multiple generations of activists motivated by concerns about the safety of nuclear power could finally claim victory after almost fifty years of demonstrations and blockades, collective strategy sessions, and battles with police.

But in the first few months of 2023, as the shutdown date grew nearer, the German government's resolve appeared to waver. Russia's embargo of natural gas exports to Germany--in response to Germany's sanctioning of Russian oil exports after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022--had caused energy prices to skyrocket, prompting the German government to impose emergency conservation measures on consumers, and companies to throttle back energy use.

But Germany remained resolute and followed through on its promise to shut the plants down, bringing its postwar chapter on nuclear power to a close--for now.

Over the decades, from the occupation of power plant construction sites by protesters in the early 1970s, through the disasters at Three Mile Island in Middletown, Pennsylvania, in 1979, at Chernobyl in Pripyat, in the then Soviet Union (now northern Ukraine) in 1986, and at Fukushima in Okuma, Japan, in 2011, an increasing number of Germans grasped that the atomic generation of electricity was neither safe nor necessary.

"The dogged demonstrations, the obstruction of railway routes for nuclear waste, the sabotage of nuclear facilities, and the occupation of construction sites simply proved too costly for the utilities and the government," German journalist Manfred Kriener, a chronicler of the movement, tells The Progressive. "They needed tens of thousands of police officers to secure the sites. This hard-nosed stripe of civil disobedience proved successful, together with peaceful protests and other actions."

This campaign from the...