Nuclear power popular again as energy prices soar

Photo / Reuters

Slammed by the surging cost of energy imported from volatile regions and befuddled about how to meet their pledges for tackling global warming, European countries are reviving nuclear's role in their energy strategies.

Pro-nuclear countries are pushing ahead with plans for next-generation reactors, encountering so far either minimal opposition or even acquiescence. In some anti-nuclear countries, decisions to phase out power are being reversed or are under threat.

"We need nuclear energy as part of the energy mix," the President of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Poettering, said this week before a ceremony to honour environmentally friendly projects.

Such an endorsement would have been unthinkable two or three years ago. European memories were still seared by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, when a stricken Soviet nuclear plant spewed fallout over the continent.

But in January this year, the British Government gave the go-ahead to replace 14 nuclear plants that date from the 1970s. France, which gets 78 per cent of its electricity needs from nuclear, has started work on a new-generation European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), a model that is also being built in Finland by the French firm Areva and Germany's Siemens.

Recent weeks have also shown weakening or defections among the anti-nuclear camp - Germany, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands - which either have no nuclear plants or are in the process of phasing them out.

Last week, Italy's new centre-right Government said that by 2013 it would restart building nuclear reactors, reversing a 1987 referendum vote to abandon nuclear power and shut down Italy's four nuclear plants.

In 1998, Germany vowed to phase out its nuclear plants by 2020. Its 17 remaining plants account for 28 per cent of its electricity needs. Chancellor Angela Merkel favours extending their lifespan - a view shared by 49 per cent of Germans, according to opinion polls - but has her hands tied by a coalition agreement with the Social Democrats to keep the phaseout in place.

A similar dilemma prevails in Sweden, which depends on atomic power for nearly half of its electricity needs. In 1999, the country decided to phase out all 12 nuclear power stations within the next 30 years. But new polls say that 48 per cent of the public want replacements to be built.

In eastern Europe, Lithuania is teaming up with Poland, Latvia and Estonia to build a new reactor, estimated to cost between ¬2.4 billion ($4.8 billion) and ¬4 billion, by 2015. Slovakia and Bulgaria are to build new reactors to replace Soviet-era models. Nuclear owes its European resurgence to a double whammy.