Belgium’s political parties have reached a conditional agreement to shut down the country’s two remaining nuclear power stations, according to a government spokeswoman.
The plan for a shutdown of the three oldest reactors by 2015 and a complete abandonment of nuclear energy by 2025 is conditional on finding enough energy from alternative sources.
“If it turns out we won’t face shortages and prices would not skyrocket, we intend to stick to the nuclear exit law of 2003,” a spokeswoman for Belgium’s energy and climate ministry said.
Belgium, which has seven nuclear reactors at two plants, passed a law in 2003 outlining the planned shutdowns. The country is in the throes of agreeing a new government. It has long considered a complete exit from nuclear.
Public hostility has grown since Japan’s nuclear catastrophe earlier this year, which prompted Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, to announce it would phase out all its atomic plants by 2022.
Atomic generation is carbon-free and Germany’s plans have raised concerns that more polluting fossil fuels will be used instead. In 2009, Belgium decided to keep its oldest nuclear reactors running for 10 years longer than planned in 2003, but this change never came into force as the government that decided the measure lost power.