Germany’s centre-right parties have called for a reversal of the country’s anti-nuclear policy.
Leading members of the CDU/CSU alliance and the liberal FDP want to restart decommissioned reactors and build new ones, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports.
The German government decided to shut down its civil nuclear industry after the 2011 Fukushima Diiachi disaster. The last three of its 17 reactors stopped generating in April.
Among those condemning the move is Bavaria’s state premier Markus Söder, who said those three should be restarted “immediately”.
Saxony’s state premier Michael Kretschmer, CDU secretary general Carsten Linnemann, and parliamentary faction co-leader Jens Spahn also want to revive nuclear power in the country.
Zeitung says there’s an “overarching consensus” among the two conservative sister parties for that, owing to the loss of cheap Russian gas to German industry.
Söder said the decision to do without nuclear had “burst on contact with reality”.
“There have to be fundamental political changes now, especially in the field of energy,” he told the newspaper.
Critics of a nuclear renaissance argue that redeploying the technology would involve investor uncertainty regarding costs, and would meet with popular resistance. All former operators of nuclear power plants have ruled out a return to the market.
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