The outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel sees little possibility of preventing nuclear energy from being classified as a green technology in the EU. "Germany has not given up its resistance," said Merkel in an interview with the Reuters news agency. However, the EU Commission has initiated a procedure in which nuclear power is only classified as unsustainable if 20 EU members vote no. "That is a very high hurdle and is unlikely to be the case," said Merkel, referring to the 27 member states. "The process itself can only be stopped with difficulty if the EU Commission presents something."
The Commission's procedure is a so-called delegated act based on the Taxonomy Regulation.
With this, technologies should receive a seal as sustainable and harmless, so that the financial flows are increasingly directed into green technologies.
For France, nuclear energy is one of them because it hardly produces any CO2 - Germany is against it because of the unresolved issue of disposing of nuclear waste.
In an open letter, 129 non-governmental organizations from Europe recently asked the likely next Chancellor, Olaf Scholz (SPD), not to classify nuclear energy as sustainable.
Dispute in the future coalition
A green label for certain forms of energy - such as gas - is also one of the big points of contention in the negotiations to form the first traffic light coalition in the federal government. In a leaked paper from the coalition negotiations, it can be seen that a particularly large number of points are still disputed between the SPD, Greens and FDP - recognizable by crossed out sentences and alternative suggestions for formulations.
The Greens insist that both nuclear power and gas are not recognized as sustainable technologies. The federal government in Brussels must campaign for this. The SPD wants to take one step less: “We will continue to campaign for nuclear power to be classified as unsustainable.” Together with the FDP, it does not want to denigrate “bridging technologies” - that is, gas - as dirty are under pressure in their own ranks to enforce more of their own points in terms of climate protection.
The leaked paper from the finance working group is dated November 9th, shortly before the end of the negotiation phase of the 22 working groups in the coalition negotiations. The main negotiating group is currently discussing the open questions. The coalition agreement should then be in place by next week. In the financial market paper, only vague goals for sustainable finance are undisputed. In this way, Germany is to become the leading location for sustainable financing. The EU taxonomy should be ambitious and practicable. Environmentalists fear that there could be so-called greenwashing, meaning that non-sustainable plants could be seen as green.
Merkel emphasized that the EU Commission knew that there was a cross-party opinion in Germany that nuclear energy should not be classified as “clean” with wind and solar energy.
For France, for example, nuclear power is a bridging technology.
"We say that for us natural gas has to be classified as a bridging technology," said the Chancellor in response.