As Germany ends nuclear era, activist says there is still more to do

The 1986 Chornobyl tragedy showed 24-year-old nuclear physics researcher Heinz Smital how far nuclear pollution may go.

He waved a damp cloth out of a window at the University of Vienna to sample the city’s air a few days later and was astonished by how many radionuclides he saw under a microscope.

“Technetium, Cobalt, Cesium 134, Cesium 137…Chornobyl was 1,000 miles away… “That made an impression,” Smital, 61, told Reuters of his lifelong anti-nuclear power campaign in Germany.

Germany will shut down its final three reactors on Saturday, ending six decades of nuclear power that helped produce Europe’s greatest protest movement and the Greens, Berlin’s ruling party.

“I can look back on a great many successes where I saw injustice and many years later, there was a breakthrough,” Smital said, exhibiting a 1990s photo of himself in front of the Unterweser Nuclear Power Plant, which shuttered in 2011 after the Fukushima tragedy in Japan.

After Fukushima, former Chancellor Angela Merkel passed a bill to quit nuclear by 2022, a first for Western leaders.

After Fukushima, 50,000 German protesters constructed a 45-kilometer (27-mile) human chain from Stuttgart to the Neckarwestheim Nuclear Power Plant. Merkel announced Germany’s nuclear withdrawal within weeks.

“We stood hand in hand at a certain point. I was too… “That formed impressively,” Smital observed.

“That was a great feeling of a movement and also of belonging…a very nice, communal, exciting feeling that also develops power,” Smital remarked.

In the 1970s, the movement stopped a nuclear project in Wyhl, western Germany.

Germans worried that their country could become a battlefield during the Cold War also started a peace movement.

“This produced a strong peace movement and the two movements reinforced each other,” said KernD’s Nicolas Wendler.

The movement gained power when the Greens party was founded in 1980.

In 2002, a Greens-led coalition passed the first nuclear phase-out bill.

“The nuclear phase-out is a Greens project… and all parties have practically adopted it,” said Rainer Klute, chairman of pro-nuclear non-profit Nuklearia.

Smital and Klute protested near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on Saturday, one celebrating nuclear power’s demise, the other grieving it.

“We must accept the phase-out for now,” Klute remarked.

Smital’s campaigning continues after reactor closures.

“We have a uranium fuel assemblies factory in Germany and uranium enrichment, so there is still a lot that needs to be discussed here and I will be on the street a lot…very gladly,” he stated.