Energy: in Europe, the nuclear camp has the wind in its sails

The Bugey nuclear power plant (Ain). The France is still heavily committed to nuclear energy. © Mourad ALLILI/SIPA

Text by: RFI Follow

2 min

Germany is giving up nuclear power this Saturday, April 15, with the closure of its last three plants. The country wants to turn the page on an energy considered in Germany as too dangerous since the accidents of Chernobyl and Fukushima. A choice that is far from being shared in Europe: several countries also refuse nuclear power, Switzerland for example, but others, starting with France, want to revive the sector, in the name of the fight against greenhouse gas emissions.

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With 56 reactors and a new programme to build six more by 2035, France remains Europe's nuclear energy champion. But she is not the only one to campaign for the atom. Four other countries have plants under construction: the United Kingdom, Finland, Slovakia and Hungary. And others are planning to build new ones: this is the case of the Netherlands and Poland, which wants to emancipate itself from its coal-fired power plants, by betting on the atom.

► Read also: Germany says goodbye to nuclear power with the shutdown of its last three reactors

The nuclear camp, stunned by the Fukushima disaster in 2011, thus finds arguments – with the fight against global warming in particular – and supporters. So much so that Paris has managed to form within the European Union a kind of "alliance of the atom" with ten other capitals. Within this pro-nuclear club, there are many Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary or Poland, but also the Netherlands and Finland. Sweden is likely to join the coalition in the coming months.

The objective of this alliance: to campaign within the European Union for nuclear power to be considered as a means of combating global warming, in the same way as renewable energies such as solar and wind power.

Whatever the choice of nuclear France, the priority must be the development of renewable energies. Because even in the most pro-nuclear scenario, it won't be enough. It will really be necessary to put the package on renewable energies to succeed in the French energy transition.

Thomas Pellerin-Carlin (I4CE) on nuclear policy in France

Jeanne Richard

► Read also: Nuclear: a controversial asset of the energy transition

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Read on on the same topics:

  • Energies
  • Nuclear
  • France
  • Germany
  • Fukushima
  • Climate
  • Climate change