Germany Faces Tough Questions As Nuclear Exit Nears

Gundremmingen, Germany, March 5 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 5th Mar, 2021 ) :The Bavarian village of Gundremmingen is so proud of its nuclear power station that its coat of arms is graced with a giant golden atom.

But change is coming to the village, with the plant facing imminent closure under Germany's energy transition policy.

Former village mayor Wolfgang Mayer's house has direct views of the imposing complex with its two 160-metre cooling towers -- taller than the spires of Cologne Cathedral.

The plant still produces 10 billion kWh of power per year, though parts of it have already been shut down -- enough to provide the entire Munich metropolitan region with electricity.

The power station will be decommissioned on December 31, 2021, along with two other facilities in northern Germany.

By the end of 2022, Germany will have achieved its goal of completely phasing out nuclear power, set by Chancellor Angela Merkel on May 30, 2011, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

The plan represented a dramatic change of course by Merkel's ruling conservatives, who just a few months earlier had agreed to extend the lifespan of Germany's oldest power stations.

But it was met with widespread public support in a country with a powerful anti-nuclear movement, fuelled first by fears of a Cold War conflict and then by disasters such as Chernobyl.

In Gundremmingen, however, the decision has been a tough pill to swallow.

The nuclear power station has been "as much a part of the village as the church" and it feels as though "something is dying", said Gerlinde Hutter, owner of a local guest house.

According to Meyer, it will take at least 50 years to remove all radioactive material from the site after the plant has been decommissioned.

The German government is still looking for a long-term storage site for the country's residual nuclear waste.

Gundremmingen is not the only German village facing big changes as the country strives to implement its energy transition strategy.

Renewables have seen a spectacular rise since 2011 and in 2020 made up more than 50 percent of Germany's energy mix for the first time, according to the Fraunhofer research institute -- compared with less than 25 percent ten years ago.

The declining importance of nuclear power (12.5 percent in 2020) "has been compensated for by the expansion of renewable energies", Claudia Kemfert, an energy expert at the DIW economic research institute, told AFP.

Nuclear power stations have therefore not been replaced by coal, though the fossil fuel does still represent almost a quarter of the electricity mix.