(updated version)

NECKARWESTHEIM/LINGEN/ESSENBACH (dpa-AFX) - It is a historic end: after a good six decades of nuclear power in Germany, the last three nuclear power plants have been shut down. According to the operators, the first to be disconnected from the grid was the Emsland nuclear power plant in Lower Saxony at 10:37 p.m. on Saturday evening. This was followed by Isar 2 in Bavaria at 11:52 p.m. and Neckarwestheim 2 in Baden-Württemberg at 11:59 p.m. This marks the end of nuclear power generation in Germany, which had caused enraged social debate for decades. Right up to the end, there had still been fierce political wrangling over the phase-out date and the possibility of a reserve operation.

"The chapter is now closed," however, the head of Emsland operator RWE, Markus Krebber, said in a statement. "Now it's a matter of putting all our energy into pushing ahead with the construction of hydrogen-capable gas-fired power plants as quickly as possible, in addition to renewables, so that security of supply remains guaranteed when Germany ideally also wants to phase out coal in 2030."

Until shortly before the end, operators had still been producing electricity through nuclear fission, but after midnight that was no longer allowed. "We work according to law and there it is clear that power operation from April 16 would be a criminal offense," the federal government's chief nuclear supervisor, the head of the department for nuclear safety and radiation protection at the Environment Ministry, Gerrit Niehaus, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

Operators must also dismantle the reactors as quickly as possible. The Atomic Energy Act has a provision that nuclear power plants must be dismantled without delay, Niehaus said. "That means, on the one hand, pushing ahead with the dismantling approval process, but also already taking the first permissible steps toward dismantling."

A good 62 years ago, Germany's first nuclear power plant went into commercial operation in Kahl in Lower Franconia. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, then Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) pushed through the final phase-out of the technology in Germany. Thus, the reactors should actually have been taken off the grid at the end of last year. However, due to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, the traffic light coalition led by Merkel's successor Olaf Scholz (SPD) decided after weeks of discussion in the fall to keep the three reactors running through the winter until mid-April.

The phase-out now marks the beginning of a new energy era: opponents of nuclear power celebrated the historic step on Saturday with festivities in Berlin and elsewhere. Several hundred people came to Neckarwestheim for a "shutdown festival" and in Munich, too, the Bund Naturschutz and Greenpeace organized a "nuclear phase-out festival". In the nuclear power plant town of Lingen in Lower Saxony, hundreds of opponents of nuclear power demonstrated against the ANF fuel element factory, which is also located there and belongs to the French Framatome Group, and also demanded its closure.

Politically, however, the nuclear phase-out in Germany remains controversial. The CDU/CSU in particular recently considered the originally agreed phase-out to be premature in view of the global situation and advocated continued operation. The coalition partner FDP wants to keep the shutdown nuclear power plants in reserve at least for energy emergencies - although a quick restart would not be possible and would require months of preparations.

According to Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder, he would like to continue operating nuclear power plants such as the shut-down Isar 2 reactor under state responsibility. To do so, he is demanding an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act from the federal government. "Bavaria is therefore demanding that the federal government give it its own state responsibility for the continued operation of nuclear power. As long as the crisis has not ended and the transition to renewables has not succeeded, we will have to use every form of energy until the end of the decade," he told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. Söder is probably aware that it is virtually impossible that the traffic light coalition will go along with this. And if it did, the question of final storage of the nuclear waste that continues to be produced in Bavaria would have to be resolved separately.

The problem is big enough as it is. "Our work is far from over with the shutdown of the last nuclear power plants," Environment Minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) had said recently. "We have used nuclear power in our country for about three generations, producing waste that will remain dangerous for another 30,000 generations."/svv/DP/he