What explains the diametrically opposed positions on nuclear power witnessed between France and Germany? France is arguably the most pro-nuclear energy country in the world, and Germany, while it may be having second thoughts, has been retiring its aging nuclear plants so as to gradually phase out of the nuclear energy business.
These two countries have quite a bit in common in addition to being neighbors. They have similar sized populations and economies. While Germany is a little bigger in terms of both population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the two countries’ per capita GDP figures are quite close. On a broad continuum of political governance, they are quite close together as republics with parliaments and constitutions. There is a paper that suggests that Frances nuclear power optimism is a product of a system of governance that makes it hard for dissenting interest groups to make headway into impacting policy. (Delmas & Heiman, J of Policy Analysis and Management, 20 (3), pp. 433 – 456) They both built considerable nuclear capacity initially.
First, it may be interesting to consider those commonly hypothesized explanations that don’t do so well at clarifying this divide. One might find it reasonable to expect that public opinion about nuclear energy in the two countries would be radically different, and that this is the root of the divide. However, there is a survey conducted by GlobeScan on behalf of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that shows that, while Germans do have a slightly higher proportion of their population with negative opinions on nuclear, the differences were not, in fact, massive.

In France there is not a majority of the population clamoring for more plants, and, on the other hand, the percentage of Germans that want to see more nuclear power is only a couple percentage points below what is seen in France. These results could be deceptive. “Use existing facilities, do not build more”, which is the largest response category for both countries, could mean different things to citizens of the two countries. France might be considered to be at its saturation point with respect to nuclear power. Even though it is a major electricity exporter (including to Germany), France has so much nuclear capacity that it uses it not just for base-load production but also in a load-following role that is less optimal for nuclear plants. This is reflected in the lower capacity factors seen in France than most other advanced nuclear countries. (A capacity factor is a proportion representing what a plant actually produces over what it could theoretically deliver if it operated at its rated capacity constantly over a time period.) At any rate, when a Frenchman says don’t build more, he or she may just be saying that there is enough to meet the need and it would not be cost-effective to build more, whereas a German, not being near that saturation point, may be more likely to be expressing a negative view toward nuclear energy. However, if one examines the polling data for whether nuclear energy should be expanded to mitigate climate change, French and Germans are quite similar in the proportions that want expansion (about 40% each), but Germans have a somewhat higher proportion that are opposed to building more nuclear plants for this purpose (56% to France’s 43%).
Germany has been advancing renewable energy plants. However, as I have mentioned in past posts, these sources are not yet up to replacing coal and nuclear. While it has been posited that Germans are more environmentally conscientious, as observed in their build up of renewables, it should be noted that German emissions of greenhouse gases from energy production is significantly higher than France’s, even when one normalizes per capita or per GDP dollar (i.e. carbon intensity) the French come out ahead. It is also worth noting that it has only been quite recently that Germany has outdone France with respect to either the proportion of electricity coming from renewables or the absolute value of renewable electricity generated.

Besides differing policies toward nuclear energy, what else separates France and Germany? One prominent difference is that France is a nuclear weapons state, but Germany is not. This is not to imply that there is a connection between the difference on nuclear weapons and on nuclear energy – particularly given the fact that these two countries were building nuclear energy capacity side-by-side in earlier times. However, it does act as a reminder that this policy gulf may, in fact, be idiosyncratic to the two countries in question. It may be tied to the history of each going back to the early days of the Cold War.
There are some differences that may have some generalizability. One factor is that French nuclear infrastructure is owned by firms that are super-majority owned by the French government, while German nuclear infrastructures are primarily owned by private sector firms. This may make a difference in that governments presumably have different attitudes towards risk and uncertainty than private-sector firms. Governments are used to being able to redistribute risk across the entire population, and, being expected to assume certain high consequence operations, are more used to such activities. Firms have to think about risk and uncertainty differently because they can only distribute their risk through costly insurance programs. If one considers the 53 nuclear power plants currently under construction, only two are being built in a country, Japan, where the private-sector dominates power plant ownership. Even the one plant currently under construction in the US is being built by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is one of the few Federally owned corporations in the United States. It is very common to have mixed public-private ownership of nuclear power plants, but strictly privately owned plants are a rarity, even with the many policies put in place to facilitate them.
Another notable difference is that Germany has massive stocks of coal.While Germany’s reliance on coal has been dropping, it is still true that both its production and consumption of coal are several times that of France. Coal, like nuclear, is ideal for base-load power production, and, for that reason, coal may be considered the primary competitor of nuclear power in its domain. It is true that natural gas, which is ideal for peak-load production, is also used widely for base-load capacity – particularly when natural gas prices are low.


The case of France and Germany is an interesting one for considering why one state might be bullish on nuclear power while another, facing many similar circumstances, is bearish. Of course, as mentioned it may or may not be possible to generalize from this case to others. It is certainly possible that there are idiosyncratic explanations for this difference in policy. Even some of the more generalizable explanations just beg further questions. For example, if the public-sector versus private-sector ownership is an important factor, this raises the question of why the two countries took different approaches to plant ownership. Applying the hypothesis that having an abundance of fossil fuel deposits reduces the incentive to build nuclear plants to a broader set of countries can yield ambiguous results.
Source: www.kremlin.ru
The venerated first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) will expire on December 5, 2009. The importance of this treaty lies not merely in the fact that it reduced the numbers of nuclear warheads and the platforms on which they reside in both the Soviet and US arsenals (later the five weapon holding successor states of the Soviet Union and the US.) Perhaps more important were the unprecedented levels of verification and information exchange incorporated into the Treaty- a codification of President Reagan’s often quoted “trust, but verify” line.
Currently, negotiations are underway to replace the expiring START. Reports indicate that there are two major outstanding bones of contention. The first involves the issue of ground-based mobile launchers, which the Russians have but the US does not. The US would apparently like to see more control over them, but the Russians object to what they see as a unilateral concession. This may be a gambit in search of a concession on the US side. The second issue deals with the details of the allowable numbers of various weapon platforms.
There has been talk in the US Senate of extending START I six months because, even if a new treaty is concluded in the next three weeks, it won’t be ratified and enter into force until much later.
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