ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses and presents how the public task of ensuring security, especially energy security, has been coupled with the nuclear power sector in the German legal and constitutional system. Particularly interesting is the verification of whether ensuring security (including energy security) kept its high priority during different phases of developing the nuclear energy sector in Germany (including two nuclear phase-out regulations in 2002 and 2011, and two operation extensions in 2010 and 2022).
For this reason, the chapter depicts seven main threads of the constitutional dimension of energy security: (1) the provision of energy security in the jurisprudence of the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe; (2) the impact of the lack of energy supply on the ability of the modern constitutional state to fulfil basic public tasks; (3) the provision of energy security as a public task entrusted to private actors; (4) the constitutional framework for the provision of state aid for the realisation of energy security; (5) the constitutional admissibility of expropriation on the grounds of the public interest in the form of the provision of security of energy supply from the perspective of the protection of life and health of the population and the protection of the environment; (6) the statutory termination of commercial nuclear reactors and the constitutionally admissible forms of expropriation; (7) structure of sources of law in the area of safety of nuclear installations.
