(March 10): The European Union (EU) made a “strategic mistake” in turning its back on nuclear energy, Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in thinly-veiled criticism of Germany’s decision to close its reactors.
“While in 1990 one-third of Europe’s electricity came from nuclear, today it is only close to 15%,” she said at the Nuclear Energy Summit in Paris on Tuesday. “I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power.”
Von der Leyen’s comments are the latest to describe the decision by a number of European countries — most notably her home nation Germany — to phase out nuclear power as an error as the region transitions to a net-zero economy and weans itself off Russian fossil fuels. The current conflict in Iran is another reminder of how exposed the European economy is to global energy markets, with prices of oil and gas lurching higher since war began.
The European Commission will on Tuesday put forward a strategy to spur the bloc’s rollout of so-called small modular reactors (SMRs), a technology that many see as key for replacing fossil-fuel generation and meeting the power demand needs of artificial intelligence (AI) and data centres. Nuclear power provides clean baseload power, which can support the grid when there’s not enough wind or solar output.
Von der Leyen said that SMRs should be operational in Europe by the early 2030s. As part of the strategy, the commission will create a €200 million guarantee to support private investment in the technology, with the financial resources coming from the bloc’s emissions trading system.
Germany retired its last nuclear plants in 2023, following a decision finalised after the 2011 Fukushima disaster by then-chancellor Angela Merkel. Von der Leyen was German minister for labour and social affairs at the time. Other nations — like Belgium — have made decisions to extend the lifetimes of their nuclear fleets.
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German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider insisted on Tuesday that the government in Berlin was right to phase out nuclear power and called the idea of building new plants “a dead end”.
“Our electricity mix is becoming clean, and above all, it’s non-radiating, and it’s safe,” Schneider told rbb24 Inforadio, adding that renewables were “cleaner, cheaper, and far less dangerous”.
“Above all, I do not want German money to be invested in such reactors via the European Union,” said Schneider, a senior member of the Social Democrats, the junior partner in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative-led coalition.
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