On air at 1100GMT: Is Germany right to give up on nuclear energy?
| 10:17 UK time, Monday, 30 May 2011
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In just 11 years time Germany will have shut down all of it's nuclear power plants. The decision by the country's ruling coalition came after Chancellor Angela Merkel set up an ethics panel to look into nuclear power following the disaster at the Fukushima plant in Japan.
While nuclear only accounts for 23% of its energy, Germany is the first major industrialised power to turn it's back on nuclear power.
But the announcement which came in the early hours of today, raises many more questions than it answers. What will replace nuclear energy? Can that be achieved by 2022? What will the cost be to to the German economy? Is this just knee jerk reaction to the disaster in Japan? And could a change of government in Germany bring a u-turn?
Last month thousands of people in France and Germany staged protests against nuclear power.
It was a response to the 25th anniversary of the and earlier this year.
think it is poorly thought through and it's the environment that will suffer.
This piece is written by friend of the programme, the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's Germany Correspondent Stephen Evans...
The difficulty is that many nuclear power stations are in the south.....The idea is that wind farms in the north might take up the slack. But that implies new high-voltage cables with very high pylons to match. As Johannes Teyssen, chief executive of the huge energy company E.On put it: "We lack the necessary power lines to transmit wind-generated electricity from the north. This could lead to massive problems in the grid, even power outages."
We'll look at Germany's options and how people in germany and beyond are responding to the news.
