Europe has some of the world’s leading adopters of carbon-free energy, but it’s also home to major disagreement among neighbors about whether nuclear-generated electricity should be part of the energy mix to enable a transition away from fossil fuels.
Those disagreements threaten to disrupt the European Commission’s efforts to forge a plan categorizing sustainable energy sources that’s palatable to the European Union’s various member states. Some recent developments demonstrate just how states, and the EU’s executive governing body itself, have strongly competing views on the importance of nuclear power as the bloc works to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Germany, Europe’s largest economy, just shuttered three nuclear plants at the end of last year, leaving only three plants in operation. Those three final plants will be closed at the end of this year.
On the same day as the scheduled closures, a leaked draft of the European Commission’s taxonomy on “environmentally sustainable economic activities” revealed the body proposes treating nuclear power, as well as natural gas, among its “green” energy project investments under specific conditions.
For nuclear in particular, a new project would be considered green if its permitting were approved by 2045 and developers established a plan for waste disposal.
Steffen Hebestreit, a spokesman for the German government, said following both events that German officials “consider nuclear technology to be dangerous” and brought up management of radioactive nuclear waste. Hebestreit said Germany rejects the European Commission’s draft plan.
Elsewhere in Europe, Leonore Gewessler, Austria’s climate minister, threatened to sue over the inclusion of nuclear and gas if the European Commission approves the energy taxonomy proposal as written.
Other nations are also overseeing a shift away from their existing fleets. For example, Belgium has its own plans to shut down all seven of its nuclear reactors, although unlike Germany, it plans to invest in newer technology with small modular reactors.
“I think you can say that the Germans have one of the most vocal, anti-nuclear perspectives, but they’re hardly alone,” Nikos Tsafos, an analyst for the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner.
Tsafos pointed also to South Korea, where authorities recently made public an energy taxonomy akin to the EU’s that excludes nuclear power, although it includes liquefied natural gas.
Meanwhile, France maintains the largest nuclear fleet on the continent, sourcing a large majority of its electricity from nuclear, and French President Emmanuel Macron has emphasized the need to keep nuclear central to its economy with emphasis on new technologies. Macron has committed to spending $35 billion over the next decade to “reindustrialize” France, a plan that includes new reactor builds, and said in October that the “No. 1 objective is to have innovative small-scale nuclear reactors in France by 2030, along with better waste management.”
The United Kingdom, although it’s no longer an EU member and wouldn’t be bound by the EU’s proposed taxonomy, gets about 21% of its electricity from nuclear, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson similarly seeks a revival of the source. Johnson said in October that the U.K. has “got to get back into nuclear” as it works toward 100% clean electricity by 2035.
In pursuit of that goal, Johnson’s government has devoted 210 million pounds ($284 million) in grant support to Rolls-Royce for the development of small modular reactor plants.
The posturing of Macron and Johnson contravene historical trends and policies in both countries, which have seen reductions in nuclear power generation in recent years for various reasons, but they represent a decided departure from some of Europe’s leading nations.
Other smaller economies in Europe, including Romania, Poland, and Ukraine, are also pursuing new nuclear power generation facilities with help from the U.S.
“There’s a global reawakening that nuclear has got to be part of the solution,” Rich Powell, the executive director of pro-nuclear energy policy group ClearPath, said in an interview. “There’s nothing like an energy crisis to make nuclear look really good.”
Powell noted nuclear’s strong reliability and low-emissions profile, discounting the premise that dangers posed by radioactive waste outweigh its benefits.
“When you think about the scale of all of the other problems that are confronting us, the scale of the potential impacts of climate change in Europe and on the global environment that is already underway, when you think about the scale of the problems of energy access around the world … and you put them up against the real, very minor, and manageable risks of spent nuclear fuel — I mean, in my book, it’s almost laughable,” Powell added.
Rita Baranwal, who served as assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the Department of Energy during the Trump administration, argued that no existing technology besides nuclear has the ability to serve a grid’s baseload needs without emitting greenhouse gases.
“Study after study has shown that you can get [to net-zero emissions] up to 80% of the way with renewables, but that remaining 20%, if you truly want to maintain a clean energy portfolio, has to come from nuclear,” said Baranwal, who is now the chief nuclear officer for the Electric Power Research Institute.
Baranwal also asserted that plant operators and regulators are already well equipped to manage waste fuel safely, whether by recycling it as some French generators do or by burying it as the Finns are preparing to do or by maintaining it on-site as the U.S. does.
“The nuclear industry is one of the only facets in the entire energy industry that is fully regulated, cradle to grave, and that’s fine. Those are the rules, and you have to play by them,” she said. “But the amount of used fuel that’s generated is quite small and it’s managed and it’s been managed for decades.”
Still, nuclear skeptics, opponents, and those who generally view the exponential growth of renewables as a sufficiently viable path for “greening” electricity grids chart the success of places like Germany.
The Germans got nearly 46% of their total electricity from renewable energy sources in 2021, and the onshore wind was responsible for the largest share of that, according to data from the Munich-based Fraunhofer Institutes. Total wind-powered electricity could have been higher if it weren’t for weak winds, which caused a drop in output of some 16% as of late December 2021, Fraunhofer analyst Bruno Burger told Reuters.
Tsafos pointed further to data showing that Germany has been able to wind down its nuclear and coal power generation both over the last decade while keeping its use of gas relatively stable — all while more than doubling power generation from renewables.
“There is a challenge presented by intermittent renewable energy that we have to deal with, but we are coping with levels of renewable energy that we didn’t think were possible 15 years ago,” he said. “The reality is that we’re getting better at it — better at managing the system.”
