Relaunching Nuclear Energy: an Uphill Battle

Nuclear energy is dead—long live nuclear energy? In Europe, the pivot to small modular reactors (SMRs) is stumbling badly amid delays, dependencies, and a cascade of failures.

Less than two months separate two stunning admissions.

On January 15, 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz bluntly called his country’s nuclear phase-out a “huge mistake” that inflicted massive economic damage.

Then, on March 10, 2026, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen confessed at the Nuclear Energy Summit in Paris that Europe’s deliberate reduction in nuclear’s share—from about one-third of electricity in 1990 to roughly 15% today—was a “strategic mistake.”

Von der Leyen’s mea culpa marks a belated U-turn after two decades of European energy schizophrenia on nuclear power. She announced a fresh Commission plan to catch the already-departing train of “new” nuclear: SMRs, those compact, modular reactors touted for faster, cheaper, more flexible electricity and industrial heat production (claims still very much unproven).

The timing of these confessions is damning. Germany’s original exit was decided under Angela Merkel—with von der Leyen herself as a key minister. Since 2019, under von der Leyen’s Commission presidency, Germany has spread its anti-nuclear poison to Belgium, Spain, and beyond—though nowhere as irreversibly as in Germany itself, where political and technical reversal is now near-impossible.