German Environment Minister Peter Altmaier said Friday his country would
never again return to nuclear energy, hitting back at a top European
Union official who doubted Berlin's commitment to phase out nuclear
power.
"I cannot see any plausible political line-up that would enable a revival of nuclear power in Germany," Altmaier told Friday's edition of the Leipziger Volkszeitung regional daily.
After the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, Germany
embarked on an ambitious "energy revolution", deciding to phase out its
nuclear power plants by the end of 2022 and bolster renewable sources
of energy such as solar and wind power.
However, concerns have mounted that this would entail a sharp
rise in electricity prices amid difficulties in building a network able
to transmit energy from the North Sea coast to the energy-hungry south
of the country.
The European Union's Energy Commissioner, Guenther Oettinger,
told Monday's edition of the Rheinische Post regional daily that there
would "still be nuclear power on the German network in 40 years."
He said there were still 140 nuclear power stations in Europe
and that nuclear fusion technology was progressing rapidly. "Maybe this
technology will one day be accepted in Germany," said Oettinger, himself German.
Altmaier also vowed to find a permanent national storage site
for nuclear waste by 2030. "We are together looking country-wide," he
said, adding that the search would be accelerated in the coming years.
The search would be "co-financed and jointly carried out" by Germany's nuclear energy companies, he said.