Slowly but surely, the European Union is accepting the fact that renewables are not enough and it will need nuclear energy in its fight to reduce fossil fuel dependence. This EU-turn sounds like a step in the right direction for millions of Europeans who need nuclear power, not to meet green targets, but to help keep the lights on and industry working.
Just after the European Commission unveiled its new climate targets on Tuesday, February 6th, it also announced it was launching an industrial alliance to develop small modular reactors (SMRs), while the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union came to an agreement about labeling nuclear power as a “strategic technology” for decarbonization and therefore allow subsidies to speed up nuclear development.
The newly unveiled 2040 climate targets pursue a (perhaps overly) ambitious CO2 reduction by 90% compared to the 1990 levels, that is meant to help the EU reach the previously set final goal of complete ‘climate neutrality’ by mid-century.
It seems, however, that the European institutions also realized that inefficient renewables would not be enough on their own to help them reach net zero, and began pushing for nuclear energy development after years of neglecting or advocating against it.
In March last year, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Brussels did not consider nuclear as “strategic” for the EU’s decarbonization plans and would focus its efforts on renewables instead.
But now, after months of intense negotiations, the different bodies in Brussels finally came to an agreement on the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA)—a massive green subsidy program that’s similar to the Inflation Reduction Act in the U.S.—aimed to speed up the development of renewable energy and, finally, nuclear technologies as well.
Along with the different types of renewables, nuclear has been officially put on the list of “strategic technologies,” the label required for NZIA benefits.
Concretely, factories producing nuclear components will benefit from simplified administrative rules, with deadlines ranging from 9 to 18 months depending on the size of the projects, which will also be prioritized in public procurements.
Renewables and nuclear “are finally being treated equally as part of the reindustrialization process,” French MEP Christophe Grudler, of the liberal pro-EU Renew group, said. France has the most nuclear-heavy energy mix in the EU, and is therefore one of the very few countries where even the political Left has been pushing for nuclear subsidies.
Grudler was also the face of a joint parliamentary effort between French liberals and the conservative parties to secure subsidies for nuclear power within the EU’s electricity reform package last year. Their motion, however, was struck down by the European Parliament’s leftist majority.
The trilogue agreement—that is, an agreement between the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commission—includes already-established nuclear technologies (traditional reactors), as well as ongoing innovations such as small modular reactors (SMRs) and advanced modular reactors (AMRs).
SMRs, representing a new and innovative branch of nuclear power generation, are much cheaper and quicker to construct, more cost-effective to maintain, have smaller environmental footprints, and are generally considered safer than traditional reactors.
In December last year, the European Parliament already endorsed wide-scale SMR development, calling for the other two institutions to create and finance a specific industrial strategy to speed up the technology’s deployment.
On Tuesday, the Commission finally answered the call and announced the creation of an “industrial alliance” on SMRs in order to “facilitate the deployment of the first reactors by 2030 in countries that choose to do so,” Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson confirmed.
Some EU countries have already been investing in SMR deployment without the EU’s help. Belgium, Romania, and Italy recently joined the U.S. in establishing a research and development consortium on lead-cooled SMRs, with the aim of making the technology commercially available for every European country within the next decade. Others, such as France, are doing research and development on their own and looking to have viable models by 2030.
Nonetheless, both the inclusion of nuclear power in the NZIA subsidy scheme and the EU’s new SMR industrial alliance can help these projects to reach their goals much sooner, along with encouraging other countries to invest in nuclear as well.
Naturally, Tuesday’s decisions were not met kindly by nuclear energy’s biggest opponents, Germany, Austria, and Luxembourg, as well as several leftist members of the Parliament. Ironically, Germany continues to lead Europe’s anti-nuclear coalition even though the closure of all of its own power plants has turned it into the biggest electricity importer in the bloc, heavily dependent, among others, on Polish coal-generated energy. Luckily for Berlin, the Czech Republic is in the process of massively expanding its nuclear energy output, with the primary market in mind being Germany.
