Germany Shuts Down Its Last Nuclear Power Reactors – By Alexander C. Kaufman (Huffington Post) / Apr 14 2023
Europe’s largest economy is the biggest nation yet to quit atomic energy, choosing coal over fission in a struggle with high stakes for climate change and geopolitics.
Germany is set to complete its controversial phaseout of nuclear power Saturday, shuttering its last three reactors just months after Europe’s largest economy turned to coal, candlelight and chopping wood to survive last winter’s energy crisis.
The closures cap off a decades-long struggle that began in the Cold War as a fight against atomic weapons and morphed this century into a dramatic referendum on whether it’s safer to live with or without fission’s abundant carbon-free energy in an era when geopolitical tensions are rising alongside global temperatures.
On the eve of victory, the anti-nuclear movement whose followers once filled the streets by the thousands offered only muted triumph, having seen its numbers dwindle in recent years as fossil fuel emissions reached crisis levels and environmentalists refocused on climate change.
Groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth made little or no mention of the milestone on their websites or social media pages. Youth activist Greta Thunberg, who despite opposing nuclear energy had urged Germany against closing its plants while coal was still in use, remained mum on the issue on Friday. In Berlin and Munich, the capital of the southern state of Bavaria, Greenpeace organized a “nuclear phaseout fests” with DJs.
