Germany To Phase Out Nuclear Plants

The German parliament on Friday approved a plan to shut down all of Germany's 19 nuclear power plants within 20 years, the final hurdle for a key pledge made by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's coalition with the environmental Green's 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 Democratic Party and the Greens, with the opposition weighing in against it. It does not need approval in the upper house.

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

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

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

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.

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