The predicament of Europe's nuclear power industry

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The new German government's decisions "have a half-life of only a few hours," raged Environment Minister Juergen Trittin in mid-February, as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder backed away from a decision to close down all nuclear power stations in the country.

Schroeder replied robustly that what the quarrelsome Social Democrat-Green coalition needed was "less Trittin". It was just another chaotic day in the Punch-and-Judy show that passes for a government in Bonn, but it conveys a larger truth about the unloved nuclear power industry in Europe, and even elsewhere. Unloved it may be, but it is very hard to get rid of.

Europe, a rich and densely populated but resource-poor continent, accounts for just over half of the world's nuclear power stations: 221 out of 437. The major European countries' reliance on nuclear reactors for their electricity ranges from a high of 78 percent in France to a still impressive 27.5 percent for Britain.

As in North America, which accounts for most of the rest of the world's nuclear plants (123 installations), no new plants have been built in Europe for many years. The narrowly averted disaster at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979, followed by the widespread fallout of lethal radiation in the near-meltdown at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, put an end to all plans for expanding the industry. But it just won't go away, as the new German government rapidly found out after taking office last October.

The Greens made a phasing-out of Germany's 19 nuclear power stations a pre-condition for entering a coalition with Schroeder's Social Democrats, and Schroeder loyally tried to keep the deal. But two days before legislation was due to go before the Bundestag on Jan. 27, he suddenly dropped it.

The immediate cause was the threat of multi-billion dollar lawsuits from Britain and France, which have long-term contracts to reprocess German nuclear waste (together with their unsubtle promise to send dozens of trainloads of radioactive waste back to Germany if Schroeder didn't back off). But the longer-term problem was that nobody had figured out how to replace the 35 percent of German power consumption that currently comes from nuclear plants.

There are certainly not 19 German cities that want a new coal- fired station built on their outskirts, nor do the Germans want to raise their dependence on natural gas that comes via Russian pipelines. In any case, the amount of money involved was far beyond the normal constraints of the budget. So Bonn is now talking about a 5-to-10-year phase-out on reprocessing contracts, and an equally long schedule for decommissioning the actual power plants -- which means that no plant will be shut before the next election.

None may be shut down afterwards, either. As an example of the lasting clout of the European nuclear power industry, consider the story of the European Union (EU) and Chernobyl.

Ukraine, which suffered 32 immediate fatalities but tens of thousands of other deaths due to radiation-related cancers from the Chernobyl catastrophe, understandably wants to shut down the other two aging reactors in the same complex as soon as possible.

President Leonid Kuchma's preference is to replace the power they provide with new generating plants that use natural gas.

The EU, which is concerned that the winds could again blow fall-out from a nuclear accident in Eastern Europe onto its own territory, has committed large amounts of money for aid to clear up the problem of aging Soviet-built nuclear reactors. But will it let Kuchma use the money to build new non-nuclear generating capacity? Of course not.

If public opinion stops the EU's nuclear industries from building more plants at home, then they need contracts elsewhere. So the EU, which has already paid to refurbish Chernobyl-style reactors in Bulgaria and Lithuania and to reopen a Soviet pressurized-water reactor in earthquake-prone Armenia, will soon be paying US$590 million to complete construction work on two nuclear power stations in Ukraine, at Rovno and Khmelnitsky, that were left unfinished when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.

The project, says Tobias Muenchmeyer of Greenpeace International, "is simply an excuse to get the taxpayer to underwrite a huge subsidy to the nuclear industry to keep it alive.

The French, German, Belgian, British and Finnish nuclear industries have been putting pressure on their governments to agree to this scheme because they all get a slice of the action in Ukraine." Whether that's how Ukraine wants the money spent or not.

Meanwhile, the industry can take heart from the story of Sweden, where a referendum to shut down all the country's atomic plants passed in 1980. At that time it had six plants in operation, and six under construction. All twelve were running, and supplying almost half of Sweden's electricity, by the time the Swedish parliament actually voted in 1991 to shut two of them down by 1995.

Then a new government in 1991 scrapped that deadline. When yet another government came to power in 1997 and finally singled out one plant, Barseback-1, for shutdown by last July, its private- sector owners immediately appealed to the courts, claiming that the Social-Democratic government was showing favoritism to the state- owned plants. It will be months before the court even decides.

If there were a 'Bill Clinton Memorial Prize for Political Survival in Improbable Circumstances', the nuclear power industry would be a natural winner. In the twenty years since Three Mile Island, few new plants have been built, but even fewer have been shut down. And there is always the hope of better times.

As the fear of greenhouse gasses from burning coal, gas, or oil to generate electricity begins to overtake the fear of long- lasting radioactivity from nuclear power generation, the long- term prospects of the industry are looking up. The largest stand and the biggest lobby at the global warming talks in Argentina in November belonged to the nuclear power industry.