The Countries That Banned Nuclear — And Are Now Having Second Thoughts
Four decades of anti-nuclear laws are unraveling fast, and the reasons why say a lot about where energy policy is headed.
Nuclear bans used to feel permanent 🔒. Countries wrote them into law after Chernobyl, after Fukushima, after Three Mile Island, and for decades those laws sat there like settled history. Not anymore. Belgium repealed its phase-out law. Italy is rewriting its constitution-adjacent referendum consensus. Germany’s chancellor calls his own country’s shutdown a strategic mistake, out loud, on the record. The reversal wave sweeping Europe right now isn’t a fringe movement, it’s happening in parliaments, cabinet meetings, and government coalition agreements. Here’s who’s changing course, and why the timing lines up so neatly with rising electricity prices and a war that keeps reminding everyone what energy dependence actually costs 💡.
Belgium: from phase-out to full nationalization in under two years
Belgium might be the fastest, most dramatic reversal on the list. The country’s 2003 phase-out law banned new reactor construction and mandated that all seven of its plants close after 40 years of operation. For two decades that law sat untouched. Then, in a single parliamentary session on May 15, 2025, Belgium’s federal parliament voted 102 to 8, with 31 abstentions, to repeal it entirely, removing both the mandated closure dates and the ban on new construction.
That vote wasn’t the end of the story, it was the opening move. By spring 2026, Prime Minister Bart De Wever announced Belgium intended to nationalize its nuclear fleet outright, negotiating a full takeover of the country’s reactors from French energy company Engie and halting all decommissioning activities immediately. Energy Minister Mathieu Bihet has set an explicit target: 8 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2035, split evenly between extending existing reactors and building new ones, including Belgium’s first small modular reactor.
What makes Belgium’s case worth studying:
Public opinion never actually turned against nuclear the way the 2003 law implied. Polling found 71% of Belgians support continuing to use nuclear power, with only 14% favoring a full phase-out
Nuclear still supplied over 55% of Belgium’s power mix even as the phase-out clock ran down
The reversal happened under a five-party “Arizona coalition” government that formed specifically around energy security concerns
Engie itself resisted the plan, with its CEO calling further extensions “unthinkable,” which is exactly why the government moved toward nationalization instead of negotiation
Have you noticed how often the “public turned against nuclear” narrative doesn’t actually hold up once you look at the polling? Belgium is a pretty clean example of a government’s own law lagging years behind what voters actually wanted.
Italy: reversing a referendum that’s been law since Chernobyl
Italy’s case is arguably the most symbolically loaded reversal on this list, because Italy didn’t just phase out nuclear administratively. Italians voted to ban it, twice, first after Chernobyl in 1987 and again after Fukushima in 2011. Those referendums gave the public direct control over nuclear policy, which is part of why Italy’s about-face feels so significant now.
In October 2025, Italy’s cabinet approved a draft enabling law to begin unwinding the ban. That proposal moved into committee hearings at the Chamber of Deputies starting January 21, 2026, with testimony ranging from small modular reactor designs to the country’s waste-management backlog. Italy currently sits on more than 32,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste in temporary storage, a legacy nobody has fully resolved even as the political mood shifts. At the March 2026 Nuclear Energy Summit in Paris, Environment and Energy Security Minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin formally committed Italy to a global pledge to triple nuclear capacity by 2050, joining 37 other signatory nations.
The realistic timeline matters here, because it undercuts any sense that this is happening overnight:
Italy’s national energy plan doesn’t expect nuclear to contribute meaningfully until after 2040
Site selection would take another 2 to 3 years once legislation passes
Licensing and construction stretch well into the 2030s before residents see any real infrastructure
Italy is explicitly skipping the large pressurized water reactors of the 1960s in favor of advanced SMRs and fourth-generation lead-cooled fast reactors
Italy technically bypassed direct public consultation this time around, relying on parliamentary legislation rather than another referendum, which is its own quietly significant detail given how the original bans came about.
Germany: the phase-out its own chancellor calls a mistake
Germany closed its last three nuclear plants in April 2023, completing a phase-out that traces back to a 2011 decision under Angela Merkel following Fukushima. Fast forward to today, and Chancellor Friedrich Merz has publicly called that phase-out a “serious strategic error.” That’s not an opposition talking point, that’s the sitting head of government describing his own nation’s flagship energy policy in those terms.
And yet Merz has also called the phase-out “irreversible,” which sounds contradictory until you look at the coalition math. Merz’s CDU wanted to explore reactivating decommissioned plants before the 2025 election. Once the CDU formed a coalition with the center-left SPD, that plan didn’t survive negotiations. Merz has been blunt about it: <em>”The SPD did not want that and we had to accept that.”</em> Nuclear experts like Rainer Klute dispute the “irreversible” framing on technical grounds, arguing decommissioning is not the same as permanent destruction and that some plants could theoretically return to service more cheaply than new construction.
What’s actually moving in Germany right now, short of a full reactor restart:
Merz has signaled he’ll withdraw Germany’s opposition to classifying nuclear as “renewable” under EU legislation, a largely symbolic but telling shift
Germany posted the highest household electricity prices in the entire European Union in the first half of 2025, according to Eurostat, a fact that keeps getting cited in domestic nuclear debates
Small modular reactors are increasingly floated as the realistic path forward, since traditional large-reactor economics remain politically toxic
Germany’s only path to a fast reversal would likely require cooperation with the pro-nuclear AfD, which Merz has explicitly ruled out
Germany is the clearest case of a country where elite opinion has shifted well ahead of what the current governing coalition can actually deliver.
Denmark and the quieter reversals
Not every reversal comes with parliamentary drama. Denmark banned nuclear construction back in 1985, and that ban sat almost entirely unchallenged for forty years. Then, in the same week Belgium repealed its phase-out law, two-thirds of Danish MPs voted to approve a formal government analysis into the potential use of nuclear power for energy security. Climate and Energy Minister Lars Aagaard put it plainly: Denmark has essentially no living institutional memory of nuclear power, which is exactly why an analysis needs to happen before anything more concrete can move forward.
Spain offers a different flavor of second-guessing. The government confirmed a full phase-out policy in December 2023, with the first reactor closing in 2027 and the last by 2035. By April 2025, though, the same government indicated it would consider proposals from plant operators to extend those closure dates if any were submitted, a soft walk-back that hasn’t become a formal reversal but keeps the door open. Add in Greece opening public debate on SMRs despite historical seismic concerns, and the pattern across Europe becomes hard to miss: nuclear opposition that once felt like settled consensus is now openly contested inside government, not just outside it.
For anyone trying to track which of these reversals are actually moving through legislation versus which ones are still just political signaling, SMRbrief Pro members can search, filter, and export the full intelligence picture behind developments like this one, which matters a lot when the difference between “committee hearing” and “operational reactor” can span a full decade.
Nuclear energy provides around 23% of the EU’s electricity and roughly half its low-carbon electricity, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has now called the continent’s earlier retreat from nuclear a “strategic mistake.” That’s a remarkable sentence for an EU official to say out loud in 2026. So here’s the real question worth sitting with: are these reversals driven by a genuine reassessment of nuclear’s safety and economics, or mostly by an energy price shock and a war that made everyone nervous about depending on someone else’s gas? Probably some of both, and which one dominates will shape how fast, and how far, this reversal wave actually goes.