Magazine / Current / Nuclear energy / Article | 30/07/2008

No to nuclear energy

Leaks at French reactors, unsafe final disposal of radioactive waste, the danger of terrorist attacks: For all these reasons nuclear power is a controversial issue. What arguments does Europe have against uranium?

Too expensive, too dangerous, too unsafe. The Europeans have many reservations about nuclear energy even though Europe with its 151 nuclear plants is the largest reactor park in operation world-wide, and even though the French EU Presidency is campaigning for an expansion of nuclear energy.

Photo: AP

Indeed, a number of European countries have rejected the nuclear option or decided to phase out existing reactors – some of them years ago. One of them is Austria, which banned nuclear power in 1978 and even enshrined the ban in its constitution in 1999. Other countries include Spain, which wants to shut down all its plants by 2028, Sweden and Belgium, which adopted a law phasing out nuclear energy in 2001. Two further opponents of nuclear power are The Netherlands and Germany, where the law phasing out nuclear energy stipulates the successive shut-down of the country's reactors by 2021.

Secrecy versus transparency

Critics have been put off nuclear energy for some time by the nightmare vision of a nuclear accident with all its dramatic consequences. Following the accidents at the reactors at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland voted in referendums against the further development of nuclear power. And despite the self-assuring rhetoric of the nuclear lobby, the new generation of nuclear power stations is not faultless. Two years ago the French anti-nuclear organisation Sortir du nucláire published a secret security document that outlined the weaknesses of the new reactor EPR in Flamanville in Normandy (which had not yet gone into operation) in the event of an air attack. The latest radioactive leaks from the nuclear power station at Tricastin in the French district of Drôme et Vaucluse in July, which were made public only after a long delay, illustrate the difficulties of achieving the necessary degree of transparency in an industrial sector that is accustomed to secrecy.

Clean energy?

In view of rising oil prices and global warming some countries traditionally opposed to nuclear energy, such as Italy, Britain or Switzerland, are currently reconsidering their stance. For advocates of nuclear power – one of the most vehement of which is France – it is the number one source of clean energy. The environmental consequences of nuclear power are difficult to assess, however.
Today only 3 percent of all the energy used world-wide and 17 percent of electricity consumption come from nuclear energy; and the International Energy Agency plans to reduce the latter figure. In order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 6 percent by 2050, 1,400 reactors would have to be built - a mere drop in the ocean. For if one considers that the reactors already in operation are aging, a return to nuclear power would entail major investment: old reactors would have to be refurbished and new ones built. "That is not desirable but rather completely illusory. For there are neither enough building materials nor enough fuel available,” was German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel's assessment of this proposal.

Local communities reject nuclear disposal sites

Can nuclear power protect us from rising oil prices? Nothing is less certain than that. Even France, which covers 80 percent of its electricity needs with its 58 active reactors, has, like other countries, been affected by the unbridled increase in the price of petrol and other fuels. Another unresolved issue is what to do with the nuclear waste: How can one support an industry that produces waste that will be around for millions of years. Only recently doubt was cast on the supposed safety of the storage facility for nuclear waste in Gorleben in Germany after radioactive brine leaked from a disused salt mine in Asse, where nuclear waste has been stored for more than 30 years. In France so far not a single community has been prepared to accept a radioactive waste disposal site on its territory. So is nuclear power perhaps not so clean after all?

Public opposition to nuclear power

Despite all the entreaties of the European Commission and the French EU Presidency a return to nuclear power in Europe is not yet a reality. Even if Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi and the British government want to resume construction of atomic power stations in their countries, these decisions do not reflect the opinion of the public or the political class. There is nothing to suggest that the aging atomic power stations can solve the energy crisis and prevent climate change. The costs involved in dismantling a nuclear power station and the question of storing nuclear waste remain open – not to mention the fact that the natural reserves of uranium, the fuel used in nuclear reactors, are running out and hence becoming more expensive. A much more serious problem is that any country capable of enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium is also in principle able to produce nuclear weapons.
"We don't want atomic energy and we don't want to need it,” Martin Bartenstein, the Austrian energy minister stated last year in response to the plans of the European Commission to expand nuclear energy. He thinks hydroelectric power and renewables are sufficient. Only once these new forms of energy and alternative power stations have been further developed on a large scale will we be able to respond in a realistic fashion to environmental issues and energy policy. Only then can we turn our backs on nuclear energy.

Stéphanie Pichon

Stéphanie Pichon, born in Paris in 1976, has been working as a freelance journalist for French websites in Berlin since 2007. She writes on social, ...
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