Germany's Spiegel Online magazine is reporting that Siemens, one of the world's largest companies, is divesting itself completely of its involvement in nuclear plant construction and development.
http://www.spiegel.de/...
Siemens has long been one of the largest global players in the sector of energy production technologies and was involved, in one form or another, in the construction of every single nuclear power plant in Germany. Until Fukushima, Siemens had been continuing with its nuclear division in international joint ventures while simultaneously increasingly investing in and developing renewables. They are one of the world's largest producers of high quality wind turbines and have recently made strong moves into the solar power sector. Until the disaster at Fukushima took place, Siemens seemed content to continue to expand its renewables division while continuing to also participate in global nuclear projects with partners such as the French Areva and the Russsian Rosatom. The disaster at Fukushima, however, has led to a complete rethinking at Siemens: They will now divest themselves of their partnerships in nuclear energy projects.
This means that Siemens will now be doubling down on their expansion of their renewables division, as Germany ramps up its renewable electricity production to 35% by 2020 and the world increasingly shifts to renewables. It also means that Siemens will likely strongly increase its research and development in renewables, its involvement in renewable energy projects, and its involvement in the North African Desertec(http://www.desertec.org/...) initiative to construct a solar power infrastructure and industry in North Africa.
Last but not least, this shift at Siemens shows that even many of the larger global companies now increasingly realize that renewable energy is the future So, instead of seeing big announcements on the construction of nuclear power plants from Siemens, as in the past, in the future we can expect to see more and more major announcements of major offshore wind parks and solar thermal power plants being constructed. To top it all off, this move will likely give other energy-production related companies the impetus to conduct stronger shifts towards renewable energy production, as they will be in danger of falling behind if they don't follow suit.
And that would be a good thing; for Germany, the global community, and Planet Earth.
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Edit: Thanks for hieving this positive news on to the reclist, all.
Hopefully we'll be seeing more positive news like this in the near future.