250,000 Germans protest nuclear energy

[Auxin]

Tens of thousands of people on Saturday turned out in Germany's largest cities to protest the use of nuclear power in the wake of Japan's Fukushima reactor disaster, police and organizers said.

In Berlin alone more than 100,000 took to the capital's streets to urge Germany's leaders to immediately abolish nuclear power, police spokesman Jens Berger said.

Organizers said some 250,000 people marched at the "Fukushima Warns: Pull the Plug on all Nuclear Power Plants" rallies in the country's four largest cities, making them the biggest anti-nuclear protest in the country's history.

"We can no longer afford bearing the risk of a nuclear catastrophe," Germany's environmental lobby group BUND said.

The disaster at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility triggered Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative government last week to order a temporary shut down of seven of the country's older reactors pending thorough safety investigations. Officials have since hinted several of them might never go back into service.

Protesters shouted "Fukushima, Chernobyl: Too much is too much!" or "Switch them off," urging the government to shut down the country's 17 reactors for good. They also held a minute of silence to remember the victims of Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

In the northern port city of Hamburg some 40,000 turned out and more than 30,000 were on the streets in southern Munich, police said. Cologne police did not provide a figure and referred to the organizer's estimate of 40,000 protesters.

BUND, in turn, said some 120,000 turned out in Berlin, 50,000 in Hamburg and 40,000 in Cologne and Munich each.

Saturday's turnout easily topped rallies last April following safety incidents at a northern German nuclear power plant near Hamburg that had seen 140,000 people taking to the streets, BUND spokesman Thorben Becker said.

Nuclear power has been very unpopular in Germany ever since radioactivity from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster drifted across the country.

A center-left government a decade ago penned a plan to abandon the technology for good by 2021, but Merkel's government last year amended it to extend the plants' lifetime by an average of 12 years. In a complete U-turn, the government has now put that plan on hold.

The cascade of failures at Japan's Fukushima plant has reignited the political debate on the use of nuclear power in Germany, Europe's biggest economy, and many opposition lawmakers have called to shut down all reactors even before 2020.

Germany — which stands alone among the wold's leading industrialized nations in its determination to overcome nuclear power — currently gets some 23 percent of its energy supply from its reactors, 17 percent from renewable energies, 13 percent from natural gas and more than 40 percent from coal. The Environment Ministry maintains that renewable energy will be able to contribute 40 percent of the country's overall electricity production in 10 years.

[1]

Thats 0.3% of the entire nation in the streets at one time, screaming for a halt to their reactors.

Should be interesting to see if it leads anywhere.

[FancyPants]

I was watching tonight's German news on a very badly receptioned SBS. From what I gather, two of Germany's states have recently had an election, too, and their Green's party got in at around 13% and the two main parties both had a loss to the Greens' apparently largely because of the Japan situation and nuclear power safety.

[Evil Genius]

Yeah, greens have a new all time record high. And i dont mean the ones they used to have in the 80s. Those fuckin moron politicans from the other parties really piss me off with their hypocracy. Half a year ago, Merkel and the other fuckwits were talking about prolonging the runtimes of the nuclear reactors and that we would need them soooo much. Now they act like they foresaw everything and that they were against nuclear energy right from the start. The FDP pretty much lost the most because many people have problems with their leading Figure, Westerwelle. Well, it looks like the Greens will be the political winner of the next few elections. Not only because of the nuclear desaster but also because of some other stuff that was going on with Stuttgart 21. The Government was pretty hard on some ultra green demonstrants and that left a very bad impression on most of the people in that area. bye Eg

Edited March 28, 2011 by Evil Genius