One of the biggest poker games in recent German history was set to begin on Thursday in Berlin as the government begins to negotiate a partial retreat from the country's 2001 move to abandon nuclear energy.

Ronald Pofalla, Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff, invited the executives responsible for nuclear power at Germany's top four energy utility companies as well as senior officials from the Economics and Environment ministries for top-level meetings about the future of atomic energy in the country. The government is playing down the importance of the meeting, with the Economics Ministry describing it as "routine." Participants belong to the so-called Monitoring Group, a panel formed by the former government of Gerhard Schröder's center-left Social Democrats and the Green Party to monitor Germany's atomic energy phase-out at regular intervals.

...Concerns about aging reactors are significant, and the government could ultimately shut some of the old ones down in order to make the extension of other plants more palatable to a German population that is already opposed to nuclear energy. "The CDU knows that the people don't like nuclear energy and could use the prospect of closing down older reactors," said Wolfgang Pfaffenberger, the head of the Bremen Energy Institute. "We currently have an excess supply of electricity. If some of these plants are shut down, the lights are not going to go out in Germany."

Meanwhile, the environment ministry is plotting a drastic cut of the feed-in rates for photovoltaics. (Fran posted this but it's worth to re-post.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}