German engineering and industrial giant Siemens says it is withdrawing entirely from the nuclear industry.

Siemens Chief Executive Peter Loscher announced the move Sunday in the German news magazine Der Spiegel.  He linked the decision to withdraw from the nuclear sector to Japan’s March 11 nuclear power plant disaster at Fukushima.

Loscher said his company will stop work on a long-planned joint venture with Russia’s state-controlled Rosatom nuclear firm.  But he said the Siemens group will continue to manufacture energy plant components such as steam turbines, which can also be used in conventional power plants.

Reactor meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi power plant, triggered by a massive earthquake and tsunami that left 20,000 people dead or missing, prompted debate in Germany about the future of nuclear energy.

Two months after the disaster, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced plans to shut all 17 of her country’s nuclear reactors by 2022, making Germany the first industrialized country to abandon atomic energy in favor of renewable energies.

Before the Fukushima disaster, nuclear power accounted for 23 percent of electricity production in Germany.