Germany shuts down its last nuclear power stations

Germany will pull the plug on its last three nuclear power stations by April 15 at midnight, ending a six-decade program that spawned one of Europe's strongest protest movements but saw a brief reprieve due to the Ukraine war.

The smoking towers of Isar II, Emsland, and Neckarwestheim II reactors were to shut forever by midnight on Saturday as Berlin enacts its plan for fully-renewable electricity generation by 2035, Reuters reports.

Following years of prevaricating, Germany pledged to quit nuclear power definitively after Japan's 2011 Fukushima disaster sent radiation spewing into the air and terrifying the world.

But the final wind-down was delayed from last summer to this year after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine prompted Germany to halt Russian fossil fuel imports. Prices soared and there were fears of energy shortages around the world - but now Germany is confident again about gas supplies and expansion of renewables.

Germany's commercial nuclear sector began with the commissioning of the Kahl reactor in 1961: eagerly promoted by politicians but met with scepticism by companies.

Seven commercial plants joined the grid in the early years, with the 1970s oil crisis helping public acceptance.

Expansion, however, was throttled to avoid harming the coal sector, said Nicolas Wendler, a spokesperson for Germany's nuclear technology industry group KernD.

But by the 1990s more than a third of electricity in the newly-reunited Germany came from 17 reactors.

In the next decade, a coalition government including the Greens - who grew out of the 1970s anti-nuclear movement - introduced a law that would have led to a phase-out of all reactors by about 2021.

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative-led governments went back and forth on that - until Fukushima.