In June 2017, Germany established KENFO - the Fonds zur Finanzierung der kerntechnischen Entsorgung. A public fund with one job: manage the EUR 24.1 billion that Germany's nuclear operators paid to cover the cost of storing spent fuel and decommissioning reactors.
In April 2023, Germany shut down its last three nuclear power plants.
Let that sit for a moment. The country that built one of the most sophisticated nuclear waste financing vehicles in the world - a fund with a professional investment committee, managed by people who deeply understand nuclear technology and its lifecycle costs - decided that the technology itself has no future.
This is not just irony. It is a case study in how ideology overrides economics, and how a country can simultaneously possess the institutional knowledge to manage nuclear's challenges while refusing to capture nuclear's benefits.
The numbers that don't add up
Germany's electricity prices for industrial consumers are among the highest in Europe. In 2025, German industry paid roughly EUR 0.15-0.20/kWh. French industry, powered largely by nuclear, paid EUR 0.08-0.12/kWh.
Since shutting down its reactors, Germany has increased its reliance on natural gas and, in peak demand periods, coal. The country that lectures the world about climate targets burns lignite - the dirtiest fossil fuel - when the wind doesn't blow.
Meanwhile, KENFO sits on EUR 24 billion, invested across global markets, generating returns to pay for the cleanup of a technology the government decided to abandon. The fund's investment committee included people like Jochen Wermuth - a climate impact investor who understands both nuclear economics and sustainable finance at the deepest level.
Germany has the money. It has the institutional knowledge. It has the engineering talent. It has industrial demand screaming for affordable, clean baseload power. And it has a political consensus that nuclear is finished.
What KENFO actually proves
KENFO's existence proves something important: nuclear waste is a solvable problem. It is not the existential threat that anti-nuclear campaigners have spent decades claiming.
The fund demonstrates that you can quantify nuclear waste costs, finance them responsibly, and manage them over generational timescales. The operators paid. The money is there. The institutional framework works.
If waste management is solved - and KENFO proves it is, at least financially - then what exactly is the argument against nuclear? The arguments that remain are political, not technical. They are rooted in the anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s and 1980s, movements that formed their worldview before climate change was understood as an existential threat.
The generation gap
Here is what makes the paradox even sharper: the generation that shut down German nuclear grew up protesting Chernobyl. Their fears were reasonable in context. A Soviet-era RBMK reactor with no containment building, operated in violation of safety protocols, exploded and spread radioactive material across Europe. That was terrifying. That fear shaped policy for four decades.
But we are not building RBMK reactors. We are not even building the pressurized water reactors of the 1970s. Thorium molten salt reactors operate at atmospheric pressure. The fuel is already liquid - there is no "meltdown" in the traditional sense. If temperatures exceed design limits, a freeze plug melts and the fuel drains passively into cooled tanks. No operator action. No backup power. Physics handles it.
The waste profile is radically different too. Thorium MSRs produce 3.1% of the long-lived waste of conventional reactors. What waste they do produce decays to background radiation in roughly 300 years, not 10,000. KENFO would need a fraction of its current endowment to manage thorium waste.
What should happen
Germany should do three things:
First, acknowledge that the 2023 shutdown was a policy error driven by political path dependency, not by evidence. Every serious climate scientist - including the IPCC - includes nuclear in viable decarbonization pathways.
Second, use KENFO's institutional knowledge as a foundation for next-generation nuclear deployment. The fund's staff understand nuclear economics, waste management, and long-term liability structures better than almost anyone in Europe. That expertise should be building the future, not just cleaning up the past.
Third, engage with the new generation of reactor technology. Thorium MSRs, small modular reactors, and advanced fuel cycles are not theoretical. China has built and operated a thorium MSR. The technology exists. The question is whether Europe will participate in this future or watch from the sidelines while buying Chinese and American technology two decades from now.
The broader European lesson
Germany's paradox is Europe's paradox. The continent has some of the world's best nuclear engineers, the deepest regulatory expertise, and the most urgent need for clean baseload power. It also has a political culture that treats nuclear as a settled question rather than a live engineering challenge.
13 EU member states now classify nuclear as essential for meeting their climate targets. The regulatory door is opening. But doors don't stay open forever.
The EUR 24 billion sitting in KENFO is a monument to what Europe knows how to do but refuses to do again. That needs to change. Not because nuclear is perfect, but because the alternative - burning gas while hoping for enough wind - is already failing.
The irony of KENFO is that Germany built the perfect institution to prove nuclear waste is manageable, then used that proof to justify doing nothing.