Berlin  - The parties setting up a new government in Germany have agreed, in principle, to prolong the country's nuclear era, an official of the junior party said Thursday.

But a decision on a precise timeline will wait for now.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic supporters campaigned ahead of last month's general elections on a platform of canceling a planned phase-out of nuclear power. That legislation requires the last reactor to go offline in about 2021.

Confirming details previously offered by sources demanding anonymity, Gudrun Kopp, a negotiator on energy issues for the planned junior coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), said agreement in principle had been reached in talks to allow the reactors to operate for longer.

Germany currently has 17 licensed reactors at 12 locations. But some are offline for long-duration repairs. The coalition agreement is to fix all the key policies of the new Merkel government for the next four years.

Sources say the new Merkel government, with the pro-business FDP as junior partner, will not try to build any new nuclear power plants. Germans have passionately disagreed with one another for the past three decades about whether nuclear power is safe.

Kopp told the German Press Agency dpa that the negotiators had recommended to party leaders that they commit to extending the permitted lives of the reactors without specifying a number of years of service or a windfall levy on the electricity companies which will benefit.

"We have agreed on the fundamentals, but disagree on the details," she said.

A consumer advocate appealed Wednesday to the new government to not only claw back the extra profits the companies will earn from longer use of existing plants, but also to insist that 80 per cent of the sum goes back to consumers.

The money could, for example, be used for a fund that would offer grants to improve the energy efficiency of buildings, said Gerd Billen, president of the Federal Consumer Protection Federation, in remarks to the newspaper Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung.

The phase-out was legislated by a previous government of Social Democrats and Greens. (dpa)