Support justice-driven, accurate and transparent news — make a quick donation to Truthout today!
Sydney – Germany will close down all of its nuclear power plants by 2022, according to reports out Monday, as fallout from Japan’s disaster continues more than two months after the event.
“There will be no clause for revision,” Germany’s Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen said, according to a BBC report.
The German government had been reviewing the role of nuclear power in the country’s electricity needs after an earthquake and tsunami crippled Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in March.
The power station‘s operator and the Japanese government are still struggling to control the situation at the reactors.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco — operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant — won’t be able to stabilize all reactors at the complex this year, Kyodo News reported Monday, citing senior officials. See report on outlook to contain Japanese nuclear reactors.
Tepco said in April it was aiming to bring the reactors at the plant into cold shutdown, or a stably cooled condition, within six to nine months.
Japan is currently facing power shortages, as nuclear energy provided around 30% of the country’s electricity needs before the disaster.
Germany isn’t as dependent on nuclear power as Japan had been, although the technology provides just over one-fifth of the country’s electricity, the reports said.
China is also reportedly reviewing its nuclear energy policy after the disaster.
We lost 15 percent of our traffic overnight.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.
We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.
The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.