OPINION | DAVID HESS
The phase-out of the phase-out
For decades nuclear energy globally has existed in a precarious balance. For every country that launched a nuclear energy programme there was another that didn’t make it or which plotted a course to closure. We are now past that point. Almost.
David Hess, senior VP DeepGeo
HE GROWTH OF NUCLEAR ENERGY has not been smooth or uniform the world over. Rather, there have been successive waves of development triggered by major energy crises and policy initiatives such as Atoms For Peace. On the other hand, there have also been events, principally nuclear accidents,
that put a handbrake on this development. In other words, the nuclear industry has historically grown in fits and starts – and sometimes those starts have turned out to be false ones. The history of nuclear energy is speckled by countries that initiated their nuclear development journey and reached various milestones, only to turn around and give up. Most notorious amongst these, of course, are the phase out countries. Those nations that went through the difficult steps of building and operating nuclear plants but then arbitrarily decided to close them all down and institute a policy block on new-builds. Thankfully this is a short list, one that includes Italy, Germany and Taiwan.
Italy once had as many as four nuclear power reactors
operating, but the Chornobyl accident in 1986 prompted a government-mandated phase-out that was fully enacted by 1990. This was a brutally short time frame that left little room for mind-changing. Germany and Taiwan are both within recent memory, alas, and were decisions triggered by the accident at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011. The German phase-out, completed in 2023, remains a devastating loss to the nuclear industry at large. Especially in the end phases, the country was left with large, high-performing plants that closed far in advance of when they should have. Taiwan probably takes the prize for the most self-harming nuclear phase-out of all time, given the regular grid and supply challenges it now faces, and which were always pretty obvious, even to outsiders. On an adjacent list to the phase-out countries are those that had nuclear energy but then lost it for some reason, although with no apparent ill will from government. The shutdown of nuclear power here was coincidental rather than desired or planned. Lithuania heads this list. The country was home to the
©Alexy Kovynev
If I had known when I was young that my country would begin phasing out nuclear power, I would have… still gone to work in the nuclear power industry.
14 | July 2026 |
www.neimagazine.com
Ignalina nuclear power plant but was essentially forced to close this facility – an RBMK – as a condition of joining the EU. Kazakhstan belongs here as well. With a story that would depress many a fan of advanced nuclear technology today, this country was once home to a small sodium-cooled fast reactor that provided desalination in addition to electricity. It was decommissioned for economic reasons when it reached the end of its originally planned life and no replacement has been constructed so far. On yet another list are the countries that got as far as beginning to construct nuclear power plants but never achieved first criticality. Counted here are Austria, the Philippines, Poland and Cuba. In two notable cases, these plants (Bataan and Zwentendorf) were basically complete and ended up serving as destinations for technical tours – allowing visitors a rare glimpse of the inner sanctum. While they were never the powerhouses they were supposed to be, they still managed to provide some benefit to nearby communities and the nuclear sector globally. The story behind each of these nuclear false starts or premature ends is unique and probably deserves its own
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