Germany will pull the plug on its last three nuclear power stations by Saturday (April 15), ending a six-decade programme that spawned one of Europe's strongest protest movements but saw a brief reprieve due to the Ukraine war, Reuters reports.
The smoking towers of Isar II, Emsland and Neckarwestheim II reactors were to shut forever by midnight on Saturday as Berlin enacts its plan for fully-renewable electricity generation by 2035.
Following years of prevaricating, Germany pledged to quit nuclear power definitively after Japan's 2011 Fukushima disaster sent radiation spewing into the air and terrifying the world.
But the final wind-down was delayed last summer to this year after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine prompted Germany to halt Russian fossil fuel imports. Prices soared and there were fears of energy shortages around the world - but now Germany is confident again about gas supplies and expansion of renewables.
Germany's commercial nuclear sector began with the commissioning of the Kahl reactor in 1961: eagerly promoted by politicians but met with scepticism by companies.
Seven commercial plants joined the grid in the early years, with the 1970s oil crisis helping public acceptance.
Expansion, however, was throttled to avoid harming the coal sector, said Nicolas Wendler, a spokesperson for Germany's nuclear technology industry group KernD.
But by the 1990s more than a third of electricity in the newly-reunited Germany came from 17 reactors.
The next decade, a coalition government including the Greens - who grew out of the 1970s anti-nuclear movement - introduced a law that would have led to a phase out of all reactors by about 2021.
Former Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative-led governments went back-and-forth on that - until Fukushima.
"It is the very real danger that is posed by this power plant and by all nuclear power plants around the world," Louis Herrmann, member of a citizen's 'forum against nuclear power', told Reuters TV as he stood next to one of the remaining power plants, ISAR II, in the Bavarian town of Essenbach. "And that's why I think it's so particularly important that we in Germany manage to phase out nuclear power. And then I hope that this will have a signal effect for other countries as well."
Many residents of Essenbach as well as its mayor, Dieter Neubauer, don't share his opinion.
"I would still let a power plant like KKI II (ISAR II), which is the safety world champion as well as the performance world champion, run as long as you are not sure whether you actually have the energy on hand," Neubauer said.
The last three plants contributed only around 5% of electricity production in Germany in the first three months of the year, according to the economy ministry.
And nuclear power made up just 6 % of Germany's energy production last year, compared to 44% from renewables, data by the federal statistics office showed.
Still, two thirds of Germans favour extending the lifespan of reactors or connecting old plants back to the grid, with only 28% backing the phase-out, a survey by the Forsa institute showed earlier this week.
According to energy policy advisor Kasimir Nuhr of the Environmental Institute in Munich, keeping plants on the grid is not as easy as it could seem.
"On the one hand, we have the safety review, which has been overdue for three years. It would take several years to do that now, which would have to be done to keep the reactors running, and we would need new fuel elements, which would also take one to two years to order." Buhr explained.
The government says supply is guaranteed after the nuclear phase-out and that Germany will still export electricity, citing high gas storage levels, new liquid gas terminals on the north coast and renewable energies expansion.
However, nuclear power proponents say Germany will have to go back to nuclear eventually if it wants to phase out fossil fuels and reach its goal of becoming greenhouse gas-neutral across all sectors by 2045 as wind and solar energy will not fully cover demand.
"Nuclear power plants are still being built and technological development continues. So, there are new reactor types that are being planned that have even better safety concepts than the already very safe, especially German nuclear power plants," said Torsten Dame, head of pro-nuclear non-profit association Nuklearia.
With the end of the atomic power era, Germany has to find a permanent repository for around 1,900 highly radioactive casks of nuclear waste by 2031.
The government also acknowledges that safety issues remain given that neighbours France and Switzerland still depend heavily on nuclear power.
