After two decades during which the "old" Europe has slid down the slope towards a nuclear power phase-out and the newly independent countries of central and eastern Europe struggled to maintain the nuclear plants they inherited from the Soviet era, decision-makers in a growing number of countries are starting to talk openly about a new nuclear era for the continent.
Europe is also a litmus test for public acceptance of the nuclear option.
Nuclear power now provides about one-third of the European Union's electricity supply, making it the world's region most dependent on nuclear.
But the political and social fallout from the 1986 accident at Chernobyl in the then-USSR, abundant and low-cost natural gas, and a surplus of baseload electricity supply through the end of the last century combined to make new nuclear power a near taboo in all but a handful of countries.
Italy shut its three operating reactors and stopped construction on a fourth after a 1987 referendum that rejected new nuclear plants.
Swiss citizens approved a 10-year moratorium on new nuclear construction that was extended for another decade.
Three countries in western Europe that get between 30% and 50% of their power from nuclear power - Sweden, Germany and Belgium-passed formal legislation mandating closure of existing power reactors and forbidding new ones.
Breaking with a tradition of indigenous reactor design, the UK built a US-style pressurized water reactor (PWR), but when it went online in 1983 it was the most expensive such reactor ever built, and no nuclear plant has been ordered in the UK ever since.
Austria, Ireland and Luxembourg remained fiercely antinuclear, combating their neighbors' nuclear installations at every turn.
Meanwhile, the European Union extended its influence over member countries' energy infrastructures with legislation to liberalize electricity and gas markets, destabilizing the national monopolies that had launched nuclear power programs in the 1970s and 1980s, but failed to unite EU countries in a common energy policy.
In its first attempt at a comprehensive EU energy policy in January 2007, the Commission for the first time openly supported new nuclear generating capacity in the name of supply security and carbon emissions reductions.
But it stopped short of criticizing member states with phase-out legislation still on the books and set no numerical target for nuclear's contribution to the EU's future electricity supply.
A few countries, however, nurtured Europe's nuclear faith during the doubting period.
For example, operators of the Netherlands' lone power reactor at Borssele fought long and hard in the courts against politically ordered decommissioning, eventually winning the right to run the plant until 2033-30 years longer than once anticipated.
Despite its 25-year-old nuclear phase-out law that led to closure of two reactor units so far, Sweden still gets nearly 50% of its power from reactors, and the legislation hasn't prevented operators from making major power uprates that will have added the equivalent of a large power reactor to the grid by next year.
Spain has done roughly the same, although one small reactor was forced to close last year and new nuclear construction is politically blocked there, too.
France, thanks to a highly centralized organization, firm political will, and a legal and administrative system that discouraged challenge, managed to steadily add to its nuclear generating capacity even after election of a president (Francois Mitterrand) in 1981 on a platform that included a vague nuclear phase-out pledge.
France now has 63 gigawatts of nuclear capacity online, more than any other country except the US, and meets over 80% of domestic electricity demand with those plants, while exporting over 60 terawatt-hours a year of baseload power.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc
Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc eventually brought six largely pronuclear countries, heavily dependent on nuclear power and with long histories of power reactor operation, to the EU.
Beyond the controversy over the safety of Soviet-era reactors and the push to close them prematurely--which some in the East see as commercially motivated because the old reactors produce some of Europe's cheapest electricity-these countries have not only continued to operate most of their Soviet-built plants but also are in the forefront of countries planning new nuclear plants in the near term.
Bulgaria has shut four 440-MW Soviet-design PWRs, known as VVER-440s, under its EU accession agreement, but has just begun a project to build two new VVER-1000s.
Romania, which had planned five Canadian-design heavy water reactors during the Ceaucescu era, managed to finish two of those 700-MW units since it joined the West and is actively planning the third, and perhaps the fourth.
Slovakia, too, sacrificed two old VVER-440 units to the EU (one closed on December 31 and the other is scheduled for closure in December 2008), but has completed two VVER-440 units with help from Russian and western European industry and is preparing to complete another pair under the aegis of Enel, new majority owner of national utility Slovenske Elektrarne.
The Czech Republic, which had central Europe's strongest nuclear engineering and construction industry in Soviet times, has maintained that capacity, with national champion Skoda JS having now been acquired by Russia's OMZ group.
CEZ, the state-owned utility, has successfully operated four VVER-440s at Dukovany for 20 years and at the turn of the century completed two Soviet-era VVER-1000s at Temelin with fuel and instrumentation & control from Westinghouse, making them the only such East-West plants in the world. CEZ is now actively talking about another pair of large reactors at Temelin to meet growing demand for carbon-free electricity in the region.
Lithuania, forced to shut the two Chernobyl-design RMBK units at Ignalina, a total of some 2,400 MW and the source of 80% of the country's power generation, in 2005 and 2009 respectively, is moving steadily toward a project to build a new reactor or two, probably of western design, at the same site.
The project now has national utilities of Latvia, Estonia and Poland on board, and other players have also expressed interest.
On the eastern edge of the EU, Ukraine, which got almost 50% of its electricity from nuclear last year, is considering addition of up to 11 new nuclear plants by 2030.
And Russia, whose nuclear and nuclear power industries struggled to survive in the post-Chernobyl and post-Soviet years, is now on a crash course to build up to three modern nuclear power units per year to bring nuclear's share in the country's electricity supply to 23% by 2020, compared to 16% at present.
In parallel, a vast government program is under way to corporatize Russia's important nuclear industry companies, long part of the state bureaucracy, in a bid to boost domestic nuclear power expansion and support Russian vendors on export markets.
Other parts of the world like the United States or China, where electricity demand is fast outstripping supply and new power plants are needed quickly, are more likely than Europe to be at the forefront of the near-term world nuclear renaissance, at least in quantitative terms.
The fate of nuclear in Europe
But the fate of nuclear in Europe still has an immense impact on what happens elsewhere, if only because Europe was one of the cradles of nuclear power development, wields high political and commercial influence, and hosts two of the world's four or five major nuclear reactor equipment vendors.
Europe is also a litmus test for public acceptance of the nuclear option. The memory of Chernobyl, almost 21 years ago, is still vivid in the minds of many, and European lands and people still suffer from the consequences of that accident.
Europeans remain skittish about reliance on nuclear: in the latest Eurobarometer survey on EU citizens' attitudes toward energy policy, more than 60% of those polled wanted to see nuclear's role reduced due to concerns over safety and waste management, with only 30% saying more nuclear plants should be deployed to combat climate change.
Indeed, most EU member states are acutely aware that despite fears of climate change, the public's apprehensions about the risks of managing long-lived nuclear waste must be assuaged if new nuclear power plants are going to be sited, financed and built.
As the continent prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the European Atomic Energy Community treaty, in which the six original EU states pledged to develop civilian nuclear technology together for the common good, the larger Europe seems poised for some kind of nuclear renaissance. But how fast and how big that renaissance may be is a story that remains to be written.
Created: Mar 7, 2007
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