Sweeping away the convenient fallacy that what had happened in Chernobyl had been a once-in-a-million-years fluke, the Fukushima accident stifled the nuclear renaissance in the cradle: the Japanese government immediately took all of its remaining forty-eight nuclear reactors off-line, and Germany shut down eight of its seventeen reactors, with the announced intention of closing the rest by 2022 as part of a move to renewable energy. Existing plans for all new reactors in the United States were suspended or canceled.
