 BERLIN - Some 200,000 people on Saturday turned out in Germany's largest cities to protest against 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 210,000 people marched at the "Fukushima Warns: Pull the Plug on all Nuclear Power Plants" rallies in the country's four largest cities.
| You folks do have a plan to replace the power you'll lose, right? |
| They'll only recharge their mobile phones when they're down to almost zero bars. That should do it. |
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.
| I suppose we'll eventually get the Libyan oil flowing again. Or perhaps there's enough coal in the Ruhr Valley. What's a little smog? |
Protesters shouted "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.
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. |