Germany to keep its seven oldest reactors shut

Berlin: Germany is set to keep its seven oldest nuclear reactors shut down for good, officials said Friday, as the country pushed ahead with its determination to leave behind nuclear power completely.

The seven reactors built before 1980, of a total of 17 in the country, were initially taken off the grid for three months following Japan's Fukushima disaster, pending a safety review. But federal Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen and ministers from Germany's 16 states agreed Friday at a meeting in the central town of Wernigerode that they should be kept shut down permanently when the moratorium is up, news agency DAPD reported.

The decision could still be reversed, but that seems unlikely since nuclear power is deeply unpopular in Germany, Europe's biggest economy, and the country plans to eventually shut down all of its reactors and replace them with renewable energy sources.

The government is to determine early next month when Germany's last reactor is to be taken off the grid, possibly in about a decade.

The seven reactors account for about 40 per cent of the country's nuclear power capacity — which in turn makes up a bit less than a quarter of Germany's energy mix, about the same share as in the US.

Roettgen said the states' positions on when to take the last plants off the grid ranged from 2017 to 2022. Leaders of Chancellor Angela Merkel's national coalition also are divided so far over exactly when to shut down the remaining plants.

With the seven reactors shut down by the government and others temporarily taken off the grid by utility companies for regular maintenance work, since March Germany has increasingly imported electricity from its neighbours who rely heavily on nuclear power.

But the agency overseeing Germany's electricity grid said Friday that the country still has "a self-sufficient power supply without additional imports."

If utilities still choose to import electricity, the decision is merely "based on lower production costs in neighbouring countries," the Federal Grid Agency said.

Contrast to warnings

The agency's analysis stood in contrast to warnings by the utilities that have said shutting down reactors will endanger Germany's power supply and might ultimately lead to costly blackouts.

Many Germans have been dead set against nuclear power since radioactivity from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster drifted across the country. A centre-left government a decade ago penned a plan to abandon the technology for good because of its inherent risks by 2021, but Merkel's government last year amended it to extend the plants' lifetime by an average of 12 years.

However, her government performed a U-turn and put that plan on hold only days after Japan's Fukushima nuclear facility was ravaged by an earthquake and a tsunami on March 11.