Germany grows greener

When the German energy company E.On quietly removes the Stade nuclear plant from the grid Friday, Germany will take the first step toward a future of rooftop solar panels, wind farms, and natural gas-burning plants.

The closure spells joy for people like Michaela Hustedt, an environmental expert for Germany's Greens, who engineered Germany's ambitious law to phase out nuclear power over the next 20 years. "It's, of course, wonderful, and the first of many [plants that will close]," she says.

But the plan is coming under increasing criticism from energy companies and opposition politicians, who say the prohibitive cost of renewable energy and recent blackouts in the United States prove the country still needs to rely on its nuclear plants.

"Looking at it technically, renewable energy can't cover as our basic source of energy," says Peter Poppe, a spokesman for Vatenfall Europe, one of the four utility companies to agree on the "Nuclear Consensus" in 2000. "The sun, we all know, isn't a regular in Germany, and the wind, as it says in the Bible, the wind blows where it wants to."

Under the 2002 law, Germany's 19 nuclear reactors will close down after the newest of the plants reaches 32 years in production. When the last reactor goes off the grid in 2023, nuclear and coal power, which currently provide the country with 80 percent of its electricity, will have bowed out in favor of so-called "renewable" energy.

That could spell disaster, opponents of the nuclear phaseout warn. Nuclear reactors, which are heavily subsidized by the government, still provide the more stable source of energy, the critics say. They point to other European countries that have sworn off nuclear energy yet continue to rely on their reactors. Sweden, for example, has so far taken only one reactor off the grid and has been hesitating recently on shutting down a second.

With the Kyoto Protocol requiring countries in the future to limit carbon emissions like those from coal-burning plants, German energy experts are concerned that the country won't have a stable source of power to make up for the 40,000 megawatts lost when nuclear and coal plants go off line in the coming two decades.

"You either phase out nuclear energy, or you reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but you can't do both," says Wolfgang Pfaffenberger, director of the Bremen Energy Insitute.

Germany's four big energy companies - Vatenfall, Energie Baden-Württemberg, E.on and RWE - are hoping the country will delay the deadlines for shutting reactors, says Mr. Pfaffenberger. The chances of this would be boosted if in the 2006 federal elections the opposition Christian Democrats manage to unseat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's coalition government, which includes the environmentalist Greens as junior partner.

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