Three nuclear plants in Germany switched off

Germany on Friday is shutting down half of the six nuclear plants it still has in operation, a year before the country draws the final curtain on its decades-long use of atomic power.

The decision to phase out nuclear power and shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy was first taken by the center-left government of Gerhard Schroeder in 2002.

His successor, Angela Merkel, reversed her decision to extend the lifetime of Germany’s nuclear plants in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and set 2022 as the final deadline for shutting them down.

The three reactors now being shuttered were first powered up in the mid-1980s.

Together they provided electricity to millions of German households for almost four decades.

One of the plants - Brokdorf, located about 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of Hamburg on the Elbe River - became a particular focus of anti-nuclear protests that were fueled by the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe in the Soviet Union.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, energy transition minister of the state Brokdorf is located in, said it would take time to dismantle the power plant.

"If we work well, we can start dismantling from 2023," he said. "It will be several decades before the building is no longer visible here."

The other two plants are Grohnde, about 40 kilometers south of Hannover, and Grundremmingen, 80 kilometers west of Munich.

On Thursday, Greenpeace protesters projected large text onto one of the Grohnde plant's cooling towers reading "For a Europe without electricity generated by nuclear power."