Robert Habeck: “Technically false claims” – nuclear power plant operator makes serious accusations against the minister

The committee of inquiry into the nuclear phase-out had already been meeting for almost nine hours on Thursday when a witness entered the meeting room E.800 in the Paul Löbe House of the Bundestag in Berlin and fundamentally contradicted Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) on a central point. The committee should clarify whether Habeck and Environment Minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) have actually examined openly whether the service life of the last three nuclear power plants should be extended in the energy crisis. At the beginning of March 2022, shortly after the start of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine, the two ministers initially rejected the continued operation of the nuclear power plants in a note.

A decisive argument from Habeck and Lemke at the time was that the power plant operators did not want an extension of the operating time and would see high technical hurdles for doing so. But Guido Knott, of all people, doesn’t want to know anything about it. Knott is managing director of PreussenElektra, the E.on subsidiary that operated the Isar 2 nuclear power plant in Bayer until April 2023. “In my view, the balancing decision is politically motivated and it was to be expected,” says Knott. “It is unexpected that there were technical false claims or that it was due to the operators’ unwillingness.”

The PreussenElektra boss claims to have offered right at the beginning of the energy crisis in February 2022 that his power plant could run longer. Continued operation is certainly possible beyond the turn of the year 2022/23. He offered to talk to the Ministry of Economic Affairs about this, but no one responded for a long time.

It sounds like a sensation, like a key witness against the economics minister and Green candidate for chancellor. But Knott’s allegations are also so surprising because they not only contradict the statements of the competition. RWE boss Markus Krebber reported the opposite directly to him in the committee.

The files also contain documents that can hardly be reconciled with Knott’s statements. Although no one from the government had actually spoken to the PreussenElektra managing director for a long time – they had spoken to his boss, E.on CEO Leonhard Birnbaum.

The lawyer whispers advice to the nuclear power plant operator several times

PreussenElektra is a wholly owned subsidiary of E.on. And according to the minutes, Birnbaum spoke to Habeck and his ministry about the nuclear power plants several times in the days after the start of the war. According to the minutes, in a telephone conference on March 5, 2022, together with the other nuclear power plant operators and the minister, he declared so-called stretch operation, i.e. extending the service life by a few months with the same fuel elements, to be ruled out.

Knott squirms during his interrogation when the SPD and Green MPs point out this contradiction to him. His lawyer whispers advice in his ear several times. But in the end he sticks to his statement: Of course it would have been a challenge to keep the power plants running, but it was said shortly after the start of the war that it was possible.

RWE boss Krebber, on the other hand, describes the hurdles as significantly higher. “Basically, almost everything is technically possible,” he says. But procuring new fuel elements, as was the case at the time, would have taken at least a year and a half.

Krebber also says: It was a political decision, but in spring 2022 the hurdles appeared to be very high and the benefits seemed low. At least that’s what RWE boss Habeck said in writing at the time. Two days after the start of the war, he emailed his assessment again to the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The then State Secretary Patrick Graichen, who later had to resign due to a relatives affair, forwarded it as “operator paper”. In his email, which can also be found in the files, it sounds as if all three energy companies agreed with the RWE boss’s assessment.

But Knott objects. He says he saw the paper and expressly did not support it.

RWE boss confirms a statement from Habeck

With his statement, RWE boss Krebber supports Habeck’s statements that the situation changed in the course of 2022 and that the term was therefore extended by three and a half months. In early summer – after the ministers’ negative note – the “criticality increased,” says Krebber. At that time, it became clear that the French nuclear power plants would be out of service for longer than expected, and gas supplies from Russia stopped completely. “You always know better in hindsight,” states Krebber.

And the RWE boss confirms another statement from Habeck: The companies did not want to bear the financial risk of an extension of the term. “We lacked confidence that it would be politically stable,” says Krebber. “If that’s what we want to do, then we’ll do it, but we don’t want to take on the political risk.” Here he agrees with Knott, he too would have wanted contractual coverage of his costs from the Federal Republic in order to keep Isar 2 running.

But like so many things in this investigative committee surrounding the nuclear phase-out, contradictions remain here too. On the one hand, Krebber says that he did not want to take the financial risk, but when it was briefly discussed that only the competition’s two nuclear power plants should be kept at least as a reserve so that they could be switched on again if necessary, he had his chief lawyer check whether whether RWE could then also sue for backup operation for its nuclear power plant.

The idea of ​​a “cold reserve”, i.e. the idea that nuclear power plants could be switched on and off as needed like an emergency power generator, was discarded after a short time. PreussenElektra boss Knott wasn’t the only one who didn’t think it could be implemented. On Thursday morning, an expert from TÜV Süd also said that the cold reserve was “the latest gag”. He suspects that the Greens only made this suggestion so that they could then say that the operators rejected continued operation.

TÜV physicist wrote about Habeck: “This statement is simply a lie”

The TÜV physicist also clearly criticized Habeck’s note in which he rejected continued operation. Two arguments in particular were clearly overemphasized: how long it would take to procure new fuel elements and the need for the so-called periodic safety inspection (PSÜ), which actually has to take place every ten years in every nuclear power plant. According to the TÜV employee, it was already clear at the time that it would not take one and a half to two years to procure new fuel elements, but that it would also be possible in one year.

And the safety check is actually just a supplement to the routine checks at all nuclear power plants. “It’s not the case that you have no idea what’s happening in a system and only take a look every ten years,” says the department head. Above all, the fact that Habeck claimed on television that nuclear power plants had not been inspected for 13 years still annoys the expert to this day. In an email at the time he wrote: “This statement is simply a lie.” Today he would be a little more diplomatic publicly, he says: “I would say that doesn’t correspond to the facts.” Overall, he had the impression that the purpose of the note was “to end a discussion as early as possible,” says the TÜV man. Was there an open-ended test? “Personally, I didn’t have the impression that it was.”

The physicist thus comes to the same conclusion as the power plant operators and most of the experts who were also heard in the investigative committee that day: In the end, the decision to continue phasing out nuclear power was a political one.

Not even PreussenElektra boss Knott has much hope that it could be revised again. “A restart might still be theoretically possible, but there are a lack of suppliers, a lack of resources and there are significant regulatory and legal hurdles,” he says. “We are no longer available as a company to continue operating, that is no longer an option for us.”