The EU’s nuclear reckoning is finally here
For years, the EU’s political establishment treated nuclear energy as something between an embarrassment and a moral transgression. The consequences were predictable – and increasingly impossible to conceal.
The green dogma has come due
Germany provides the clearest case study. In 2011, nuclear power supplied roughly a quarter of the country’s electricity. Twelve years later, Berlin shut down its final three reactors.
This was not an unavoidable act of economic modernization. It was a political choice, heavily influenced by fashionable environmental dogma and woke ideologies that treated technological progress as morally suspect whenever it conflicted with an approved political narrative.
Now the same establishment that demanded the shutdown is quietly admitting that it got the calculation wrong.
German Energy Minister Katherina Reiche has called the nuclear phase-out a “huge mistake.” Chancellor Friedrich Merz has described it as a “serious strategic mistake.” International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol has agreed that Germany’s decision deserves to be reconsidered.
Even Brussels has begun to change its tune. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has recently acknowledged that the EU’s retreat from nuclear power – from around one-third of electricity generation in 1990 to roughly 15 percent today – was strategically misguided.
The lesson is almost embarrassingly simple: you cannot run an industrial economy on political slogans. Electricity must be generated whether politicians feel virtuous about the generation technology or not.
The nuclear comeback is already happening
Reality is beginning to defeat ideology.
Across the EU, governments are reopening the nuclear question. Sweden is moving ahead with plans for new reactors. The Netherlands is pursuing new nuclear capacity. Belgium is no longer headed for an automatic nuclear exit. The Central and Eastern European countries together with France have been particularly determined to preserve and expand nuclear power generation. This is a recognition that modern industrial civilization requires enormous amounts of dependable energy.
Wind turbines and solar panels might have their place. But a serious energy system cannot be designed around the assumption that the weather will cooperate with the industrial timetable. Intermittent generation requires grids, storage, backup generation and enormous investment in transmission. The more electricity-intensive an economy becomes, the more valuable reliable baseload and dispatchable generation become.
Nuclear power offers exactly that. It also offers something Europe desperately needs: industrial sovereignty.
The continent now faces the unpleasant possibility that it surrendered technological capacity in pursuit of political purity – and must spend vastly more money to rebuild what it once possessed.
Russia was declared toxic
This is where the discussion becomes politically inconvenient. Europe has spent years trying to make Russia economically radioactive. Yet nuclear technology stubbornly refuses to obey the warfare narrative.
In July, the authorities in Lower Saxony, Germany authorized Framatome to manufacture Russian-designed nuclear fuel assemblies at its Lingen facility. The project involves cooperation with TVEL, the fuel division of Russia’s Rosatom, and incorporates Russian technology and components.
Berlin can declare that dependence on Russian energy is strategically dangerous. It can insist that European industry must “decouple” from Russia. It can build an entire political narrative around reducing Russian economic influence. And yet, when the issue is highly specialized nuclear technology, reality suddenly becomes rather more complicated.
Nuclear technology is fundamentally different from buying a cargo of liquefied natural gas. Reactor designs, fuel assemblies, safety procedures and technical standards are embedded in long-term industrial ecosystems. Replacing one supplier with another can take years and requires extensive testing, licensing and qualification.
Politics cannot simply decree that this accumulated technical knowledge has disappeared.
The Lingen decision demonstrates that even under hostile political conditions, economic cooperation can survive when the practical benefits are sufficiently compelling.
Rosatom is not a political fantasy
The hostility toward cooperation with Russia also suffers from another problem: it ignores the scale of the country’s nuclear industry.
Rosatom is not simply a Russian corporation selling reactor designs. It operates across the entire nuclear value chain, including reactor construction, fuel production, engineering, financing, research and long-term servicing.
Its international order book is among the world’s largest, with Russian-designed reactors being built or planned across Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. There is a reason governments continue to hire the company.
Hungary’s Paks II project is a particularly striking example. Budapest has continued with construction of two new Russian-designed reactors despite the broader deterioration in relations between Russia and the European Union.
Russia is providing substantial state financing for the project, demonstrating that nuclear cooperation can involve not merely technology but long-term industrial and financial arrangements.
Türkiye has reached a similar conclusion. The Akkuyu nuclear power plant is being developed under a Russian build-own-operate model, with Rosatom responsible for the project. Once all four units are operating, the plant is expected to provide a substantial share of Turkish electricity.
And Türkiye is a NATO member. That fact alone should puncture some of the more theatrical arguments about nuclear cooperation with Russia being inherently incompatible with Western security.
The rest of the world is building while the EU debates
There is an even larger geopolitical irony. While EU politicians spent years debating whether nuclear power was morally acceptable, much of the Global South was asking a rather more practical question: How do we produce enough electricity to become richer?
The answer increasingly involves nuclear power. Russian-designed projects are progressing in Bangladesh, Egypt, Türkiye, India and China. China itself is pursuing one of the world’s most aggressive nuclear construction programs. Egypt is building its first nuclear power plant at El Dabaa. Bangladesh has begun the process of bringing its first nuclear facility into operation.
These countries do not have the luxury of turning energy policy into a cultural performance. They have growing populations, expanding industries and rising electricity demand.
Europe, meanwhile, has been trying to persuade itself that reducing its own energy-production options somehow constitutes strategic sophistication. It does not. It is strategic self-harm.
Paradoxically, the numbers expose the gap between Brussels’ rhetoric and Europe’s actual nuclear economy. According to Eurostat, EU countries imported more than €312 million worth of enriched uranium, €465 million in nuclear fuel assemblies and related components, and another €4 million in reactor components from Russia in 2025.
In other words, even as Brussels has pursued ever tighter sanctions against Moscow, Europe’s nuclear sector has remained deeply intertwined with Russian supply chains. That reality makes calls for an outright ban on Rosatom’s activities in Europe look like political theater.
If the EU is genuinely committed to restoring nuclear power, it cannot afford to turn one of the world’s most experienced nuclear suppliers into a taboo simply for ideological reasons.
The nuclear reckoning is coming
The central issue is larger than Russia and Rosatom. It is about whether the EU can recover the ability to distinguish between ideological delusions and common sense.
Russia is not disappearing from the global nuclear market simply because European politicians disapprove of it. Rosatom is not disappearing because Brussels would prefer it to. The reactors already operating around the world will not suddenly stop requiring fuel, maintenance and technical expertise. Europe’s electricity demand will not disappear either.
The choice is consequently straightforward. The EU can continue treating nuclear energy as a political culture war, endlessly debating which technologies and suppliers are sufficiently virtuous.
Or it can return to the old-fashioned principles that built Europe’s industrial prosperity: engineering competence, economic calculation, technological ambition and the willingness to cooperate when cooperation serves national interests.
The atom does not care about ideological fashion. Reactors do not care about slogans. They simply have to work. European politicians would do well to remember the same principle.
