http://www.boston.com/dailynews/348/world/German_parliament_passes_law_t:.shtml

German parliament passes law to close down all country's nuclear plants by 2021

By Associated Press, 12/14/2001 14:36

BERLIN (AP) The parliament approved a plan Friday to shut down Germany's 19 nuclear power plants within 20 years, the final hurdle for a pledge by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to the environmentalist Greens party.

The law, signed by Schroeder in June, was passed by the lower house of parliament with votes from the coalition government of Schroeder's Social Democrats and the Greens. It does not need approval in the upper house.

The leading opposition party, the conservative Christian Democrats, had argued that eliminating nuclear energy would force Germany to use dirtier power sources.

Germany is the world's largest industrialized nation to forgo the technology willingly.

Eliminating nuclear power has been a pet cause of the Greens, which for years backed protests focused on halting nuclear waste transports. The new legislation will end those transports by mid-2005.

Social Democratic lawmaker Horst Kubatschka called the passage a ''great reform'' by the governing coalition.

Under the new legislation, the first of the plants will be closed in 2003 and the last in 2021; nuclear waste will be permitted to be stored in the plants for up to 40 years.

The measure includes a ban on the building of new nuclear power plants and regular safety checks until the current ones are taken off-line.

The plants currently provide nearly a third of Germany's electricity.

-- Anonymous, December 14, 2001

Answers

What is their plan to make up for the loss? Do they have one?

-- Anonymous, December 14, 2001

I will repeat a story I read a few years back. Remember, the only purpose in using nuclear power is to generate heat which then is used to boil water into super heated steam to run the turbines which turn the generators. Any good source of heat will do that and we don't need nuclear reactors just for a heat source.

Anyway, there was a nuke plant under construction in Michigan, if memory serves, and they were having a lot of delays getting the approvals for finishing the nuclear reactor part of the plant. The management finally threw up their hands and just stopped further construction on the nuke section and switched to natural gas. They used the natural gas for a heat source and the rest of the system including the turbines and generators worked just fine that way.

The big surprise was that it turned out to be cheaper to generate power after the conversion to natural gas, very little pollution since natural gas burns very clean, and of course no nuclear waste.

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2001