German cabinet agrees to nuclear energy phase out

The German cabinet agreed on Monday to plans for the nation to phase out nuclear energy by 2022.Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to abandon a decision made just last year to extend the life of Germany’s nuclear power facilities following the crisis which engulfed Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant in March. Instead, Berlin is to exit nuclear energy over the next 11 years.

Germany to abandon nuclear power by 2022

Germany’s coalition government agreed early on Monday to shut down all the country’s nuclear power plants by 2022, the environment minister 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 that were already taken off the grid pending safety inspections following the catastrophe at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant in March will remain offline permanently, Norbert Roettgen added. The country has 17 reactors in total.

An alternative to nuclear power - Natural gas, the lesser evil among fossil fuels, is an attractive choice. (Opinion)

The Fukushima crisis could not have come at a worse time for the global energy industry. With China looking to add several atomic reactors to augment its generation capacity and India planning to switch to light water reactors after the agreement with the United States, nuclear power was poised to make a big comeback. That possibility may have melted along with the fuel rods at Fukushima. Globally, there is bound to be a slow-down in the nuclear power industry, at least for a couple of decades, if we go by the earlier experience of two accidents. No doubt, the situation today is a bit different — Asia is poised on an energy-intensive growth trajectory and is competing with the developed economies for access to adequate fuel. Conventional fuels are scarce, are depleting or are controversial. It is indeed tempting to believe that we no longer have the luxury of rejecting nuclear power.

Govt gives a big push to nuclear safety

The govt on Tuesday decided to go ahead with the Jaitapur nuclear project with plans of a new compensation package as a decision to this effect was taken in a meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Pushing ahead with the controversial Jaitapur atomic power plant, government today said it has decided to have a stand-alone safety system in the designs of each reactors, two of which are expected to be operational by 2019 and announced a bill would be brought to create an autonomous nuclear regulatory body.