Europe’s Nuclear Power Dilemma

Few decades ago nuclear power was hailed as one of the cleanest sources of energy, with a few hiccups caused by the concerns about possible meltdowns and radiation leakage, multiple nuclear plants were set up in developed nations. Although there have been speculations about the sustainability and safety of nuclear plants, most of the scientific community has agreed that they are pretty safe if constructed with proper precautions and with proper safety measures away from population, even the Fukushima disaster is seen as an anomaly. Nuclear power has for long been a source of clean energy before solar power became a popular and economically viable option. And as the world races to eradicate the dependence on fossil based electricity generating systems, the role of nuclear energy cannot be underestimated as it constitutes a large portion of the electric consumption in many countries.

European nations lead the charts with Sweden, Switzerland and Finland generating about 30% , Bulgaria 40%,Hungary nearly 50% and France 70% of its electricity from nuclear sources as of the year 2020. Germany however, is following a different route, it used to have over 20% of its energy needs met from nuclear sources which came down to about 11% in 2020 and by the end of  2022 it is expected to come down to zero. Germany is going to be the first country to phase out the entire fleet of its nuclear reactors, which is starkly contradictory to its goal of eradicating its coal energy dependence by the year 2030. 

In the cold war era anti nuclear voices were mainly aimed at the proliferation of nuclear weapons and had some reasonable questions about safety of the power plants, but were insignificant in the face of large scientific consensus about the safety of nuclear plants.

The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in Russia(now Ukraine) started a global political debate around the subject of safety of nuclear power plants.It sparked fear in many European countries including France where the government lied to people about there being no radiation from Chernobyl affecting the French citizens, just to protect its nuclear program, but the German reaction was along different lines. Karena Kalmbach from Freie Universität Berlin in her interview to The Clean Energy Wire says “ [In Germany] Chernobyl was taken on board by saying, “We’ve always told you it could happen.” It wasn’t so much a surprise as a confirmation of what had been talked about for years. In other countries it was more of a surprise, like “Oh, it can happen!” “. 

However, the reason behind Germany’s atypical reaction to nuclear power is not a result of an overnight fear sparked because of the Chernobyl disaster it is going on since the 1970s, people organizing protests, occupying nuclear plant construction and radioactive waste disposal and processing sites have been pretty common. In 1998 the Green Party came into power in Germany, it was born out of pro environment and anti-nuclear power movements, it proposed to eventually phase out the nuclear power plants in Germany, the then opposition party leader Angela Merkel objected to this decision. In 2009, Merkel after becoming the chancellor, extended the lifespan of the nuclear power plants that were to be phased out, the move was termed as “the phase out of the phase out”. The decision was immediately met with massive protests in Berlin.Two years later in March 2011, in Fukushima Japan, there was a violent earthquake and subsequent tsunami which resulted in absolute power failure at one of the nuclear power plants before cold shutdown could be attained and there was a severe radiation leakage. 

Following this accident which again started the debate over safety of nuclear power plants. In June of 2011 the plan to shutdown all the nuclear reactors by 2022  in Germany was proposed and it passed pretty much unanimously with only opposition being some members of parliament who wanted to make the phase out timeline to be shorter.

Some other European countries are on a similar trajectory, with Switzerland deciding to decommission all of its nuclear power plants although with no fixed timeline, in 2017 Swiss people voted for a ban on nuclear power and switching entirely to renewables like wind and solar.

Belgium is shutting down its aging reactors because of the pressure it’s facing form neighboring countries which deem it’s reactors to be unsafe, including Germany, although it has plans of reviving nuclear power but nuclear power plants take years to build and Belgium’s 50% electricity came from nuclear power plants in the year 2015,  according to the World Nuclear Association. 

All this this while other countries are racing to construct more nuclear reactors, many trying to get their hand on the Uranium enrichment technology, news of nuclear scientists being assassinated over accusations of nuclear weapon proliferation is not uncommon and Iran has been at a constant state of tension with the US over its nuclear power plants that are allegedly being used as a Uranium enrichment site for weapon manufacturing purposes,resulting in sanctions, threat of military action and even the infamous Stuxnet cyber attack on its nuclear centrifuges that is termed as the one of the most invasive actions against a sovereign nation state since the second world war.The countries in the middle east are tearing themselves apart for attaining nuclear power technology.

Even if we leave the middle eastern and American countries out because they may have other intentions for obtaining nuclear power technology, there are stark differences in how nuclear power is perceived within Europe. In France and Britain, although the solar and wind based generating systems have been deployed at a faster pace,nuclear has not been phased out entirely, France has invested about 35 billion dollars into a new kind of modular reactor which will be faster to build and safer than conventional ones and Britain is investing 286 million dollars into modular reactors. Czech Republic and Poland are also constructing new reactors. Even Japan still has its nuclear reactors running, they were not entirely shut down after the Fukushima disaster.

Germany’s argument in favor of total phase out and pushing other European nations towards total nuclear phase out is that solar and wind are available and economically viable sources of renewable energy with such a fast enough pace of deployment that phasing out nuclear power entirely will not affect the sustainability goals much. But these claims sound shaky as the countries doing away with nuclear power are having at least 30% of their energy needs met from nuclear power and they still don’t have enough solar or wind power generating capacity to switch entirely to them without switching temporarily to coal and taking some steps back from sustainablity.