French push to classify nuclear power as “green and sustainable” divides Europe

Last Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled a $ 1.16 billion mini-nuclear reactor development program that he plans to export to other countries like Poland that still rely on coal, one of the worst sources for Greenhouse gas emissions. Keeping nuclear power alive, Macron said, “is absolutely critical because we know we will continue to need this technology.”

Nuclear proponents welcomed Macron’s announcement as a signal for a renaissance of the energy source, which has been largely avoided in Western Europe since the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011. Even in France, where it provides more than 70 percent of its electricity, only half of the population consider nuclear power to be an asset, although 53 percent consider it essential for France’s energy independence, according to a recently published survey by Orano.

The adoption of nuclear power by some leaders comes as the world seeks ways to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global climate change. In June, Bill Gates, co-founder of a high-tech nuclear company, spoke at the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, DC, advocating imperfect technology as a planetary savior. “We need more nuclear reactors,” Gates told the assembled crowd, “to prevent a climate catastrophe.”

French President Emmanuel Macron will deliver a speech on Wednesday. (Ludovic Marin / AFP via Getty Images)

However, the German Environment Minister vehemently contradicts this. “In the coming years,” Svenja Schulze told Yahoo News, “it will be important to direct large investments to where they are most urgently needed for our climate and environmental goals – clean and safe technologies and climate-friendly infrastructure. Nuclear power is certainly not one of them. “

Critics see Macron’s enthusiasm for nuclear power as a threat to the European Green Deal, as the European Union’s far-reaching plan to combat climate change is called. Concern among anti-nuclear EU countries like Germany, Belgium, Austria, Denmark and Spain was heightened last week when France, along with nine Eastern European countries, began to influence the EU to put nuclear energy in their recommended list of greener and more sustainable Technologies.

The story goes on

Known as the financial taxonomy, the list – which already includes wind, solar and hydropower – is the EU’s green seal of approval for sustainable energy investments that can help attract private investment and allow tax breaks and the use of EU funds for development.

“If the EU Commission were to include nuclear power in its taxonomy, additional billions of euros would end up in an energy policy impasse instead of investing in truly sustainable climate protection,” said Schulze Wende in climate policy, “which would lead to the taxonomy” both loses value as well as credibility ”.

Cooling towers of the Électricité de France nuclear power plant in Belleville-sur-Loire. (Benoit Tessier / Reuters)

“The inclusion of nuclear energy” on the approved sustainable energy list “has been the subject of intense debate,” an EU official close to the matter told Yahoo News. “Although nuclear energy is consistently recognized as a low-carbon energy source, opinions differ mainly on the possible effects on other environmental goals.” This includes the still unsolved problem of the management of radioactive waste, which can be dangerous for thousands of years.

This toxic legacy, along with the high start-up costs of nuclear power, long construction times and notable risk factors ranging from accidents to possible terrorist attacks, has convinced many analysts in Western Europe that new nuclear power plants should be removed from future energy programs and investments should be made instead on renewable energies such as wind and sun, new storage facilities, the retrofitting of old buildings and the preparation of the network for electric vehicles.

“Atomic energy is dead. It is a technology from the last century that is over,” Jens Althoff, director of the Paris office of the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, told Yahoo News. “The whole idea of ​​climate protection is not to leave a difficult, problematic legacy for future generations. So why should you choose an energy that does just that? “

Raphael Hanoteaux, senior policy advisor at Brussels-based energy consultancy E3G, agrees that nuclear energy has too many disadvantages to be viable. “New nuclear energy has no place in the net-zero framework,” he said. “The decarbonization of energy can and should take place without nuclear power, which is utter nonsense in terms of price. Any new nuclear project will be extremely expensive and won’t be online until the 2030s. ”He added,“ We ​​have sun, we have wind, we have storage. And it’s cheaper than nuclear power – and in 12 to 15 years it will be even cheaper. “

Solar panels in the Urbasolar photovoltaic park in Gardanne, France. (Jean-Paul Pelissier / Reuters)

In response to Macron’s announcement, Hanoteaux and others point out the limits of Électricité de France (EDF), the majority state-owned company that builds French nuclear power plants and is currently negotiating the sale of half a dozen French reactors to Poland. “EDF has two flagship projects,” he said. One in Flamanville, France, broke ground in 2007 – “and should be ready in 2012”. It still doesn’t work. The same goes for EDF’s other star project in Finland, which after 16 years is still ongoing. Both have massively exceeded the budget.

Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, Director of the Jacques Delors Energy Center in Paris, is also skeptical of EDF’s French project, which uses a new pressurized water technology. “The costs for the Flamanville reactor have skyrocketed from an initial 3 billion euros” [$3.5 billion] to 19 billion euros [$22 billion] – for a single reactor, “Pellerin-Carlin told Yahoo News, adding that Macron is expected to soon announce” a plan to build six new nuclear power plants “using the same technology.

But while many Western European energy analysts are not in favor of investing in new nuclear power plants, many doubt the usefulness of decommissioning existing power plants, which typically have a 40-year lifespan, before their time is up. Italy started shutting down its nuclear power plants after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Germany and Belgium will shut down the last of their nuclear reactors in the next two years, and Spain and Switzerland are also expanding their plants.

A rescue worker sets a flag in front of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant during an exercise organized by the Ukrainian Emergency Ministry in 2006 to signalize radioactivity. (Sergei Supinsky / AFP via Getty Images)

“At this point, shutting down nuclear power plants that we already have is a little crazy,” said Thorfinn Stainforth, a low carbon energy analyst at the Brussels Institute for European Environmental Policy. “We have already invested a lot of money in it and nuclear energy is a low carbon source of energy, it is relatively clean and is generally well managed in Europe. it should be safe. So as long as it is properly maintained, there should be no problem keeping the systems running for the next few decades. “

Roland Freudenstein, Director of the GLOBSEC Brussels think tank, believes the shutdown of all German plants is premature. “It was never debated in the Bundestag,” he told Yahoo News. “Three or four days after Fukushima, Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to phase out all German nuclear power plants within a very narrow framework. And the biggest joke is that Germany still imports nuclear power from neighboring countries like [the Czech Republic] and France. “

The concerns about Stainforth are “the negative effects that the decommissioning of nuclear power plants in Germany has already had on the preservation of coal-fired power plants. And some of that nuclear capacity will not be replaced by renewable energy; it is being replaced by gas. And that’s not a good deal in terms of the climate. “

The current “energy crisis” in Europe at a time of record temperatures, stagnant winds and increasing demand for electricity, which caused natural gas prices to skyrocket, has led to the realization that reliance on natural gas can be dangerous, “especially during this transition period, in who we know that we will not have enough renewable energies, ”said Nicolas Berghmans, climate and energy scholarship holder at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris. “It therefore makes sense for Eastern European countries that are dependent on natural gas and coal to“ look at the nuclear option with more interest ”.

A bucket wheel excavator in the Garzweiler coal mine in Germany. (Ina Fassbender / AFP via Getty Images)

Pellerin-Carlin agrees that one energy formula may not fit everyone. “There is no point in closing nuclear power plants in countries where the majority of people are okay with nuclear power,” he said. The question for him is when will the reactors reach the end of their life, as is the case with a large part of the nuclear fleet in France. “The big question is, should we spend more public money on developing new reactors or using new renewable energies?” He said, adding that energy investments should take into account the will of residents. “Does nuclear power have a place in the German, Austrian or Italian energy transition? The answer is clearly no. But could nuclear power also have a place in countries like Slovakia or Hungary, where the population largely prefers nuclear power and there is only very limited solar and wind capacities? Yes absolutely.”

Yet the nuclear issue continues to divide those who are planning energy programs to combat climate change. “Some think it’s great and very green,” said Jonathan Stern, distinguished fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “Some people think it’s a disaster and point to Fukushima and Chernobyl. But it is important to remember that even if countries choose nuclear energy, it will not bear fruit for 10 years. And until then we still have so much to do. “

____

Read more from Yahoo News: