BERLIN: When Chancellor Angela Merkel called up the boss of Germany’s biggest power producer RWE two days after the first explosion at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, there was no mention of a u-turn in her energy policy.
Twenty-four hours later, Juergen Grossmann learnt through the media that Merkel was planning to shut down the country’s oldest nuclear plants and bid farewell to a technology she had vowed was critical just six months earlier.
There was great hysteria,” Grossmann, RWE’s CEO until 2012, said during a hearing at the state of Hesse parliament this year.
“The government thought at the time that Germany was close to a nuclear disaster,” said Grossmann, 63, known to his critics as “nuclear Rambo”, according to transcripts of the hearing seen by Reuters.
The decision, one of the biggest policy turnarounds in Germany’s history, lays bare a lack of coordination untypical for Merkel, a physicist by training and known for her disciplined step-by-step approach.
