Germany’s coalition government agreed early yesterday to shut down all the country’s nuclear power plants by 2022, German Minister of the Environment Norbert Roettgen said, making it the first major industrialized nation in the last quarter century to announce plans to go nuclear-free.
The country’s seven oldest reactors already taken off the grid pending safety inspections following the catastrophe at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in March will remain offline permanently, Roettgen added. The country has 17 reactors total.
Roettgen praised the coalition agreement after negotiations through the night between the governing parties.
“This is coherent. It is clear,” he told reporters in Berlin. “That’s why it is a good result.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel pushed through measures last year to extend the lifespan of the country’s 17 reactors, with the last one scheduled to go offline in 2036, but she reversed her policy in the wake of the Japanese disaster.
“We want the electricity of the future to be safe, reliable and economically viable,” Merkel told reporters yesterday.
Germany’s energy supply chain “needs a new architecture,” necessitating huge efforts in boosting renewable energies, efficiency gains and overhauling the electricity grid, she added.
“We have to follow a new path,” Merkel said.
Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, stands alone among the world’s major industrialized nations still using nuclear power in its determination to gradually replace it with renewable energy sources.
Through March — before the seven reactors were taken offline — just under a quarter of Germany’s electricity was produced by nuclear power, about the same share as in the US.
Energy from wind, solar and hydroelectric power currently produces about 17 percent of the country’s electricity, but the government aims to boost its share to about 50 percent in the coming decades.
Many Germans have been vehemently opposed to nuclear power since Chernobyl sent radioactive fallout over the country. Tens of thousands repeatedly took to the street in the wake of Fukushima to urge the government to shut all reactors.
A center-left government a decade ago first penned a plan to abandon the technology for good because of its inherent risks by 2021. However, Merkel’s government last year amended it to extend the plants’ lifetime by an average of 12 years.
However, the conservative chancellor reversed her pro-nuclear stance after the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant on March 11, triggering nuclear meltdowns.
Merkel’s government ordered the country’s seven oldest reactors, all built before 1980, shut down four days after the Fukushima incident. The plants accounted for about 40 percent of the country’s nuclear power capacity.
Germany used to be a net energy exporter and the agency overseeing its electricity grid said on Friday that the country remains self-sufficient even without the seven reactors and another plant that has already been offline for more than a year for maintenance work.
The coalition government’s decision broadly follows the conclusions of a government-mandated commission on the ethics of nuclear power, which on Saturday delivered its recommendation to abolish the technology by 2022. Details of the final report were to be presented later yesterday.
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