Every week, International mail explains his editorial choices and the debates they sometimes arouse within the editorial staff. In this issue, we come back to the European Union’s project to grant the “sustainable energy” label to nuclear power and natural gas. A conception of the energy transition that divides the foreign press. Even if the picture of the atom has changed considerably recently. Explanations.
Like a sleight of hand… The European Union should soon grant the “sustainable energy” label to nuclear power and natural gas to promote energy transition. The taxonomy project, detailed on December 31, divides the foreign press. How did we get here ? This is what we are trying to understand in our dossier this week. And if, in one, we have chosen to first highlight the return to favor of the atom, the question of gas is far from being anecdotal; we obviously address it in our pages.
“Until there are enough renewables, like green hydrogen, we will need gas and nuclear. […] We won’t get to the 100% renewable energy goal by snapping our fingers or with wishful thinking”, explained the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to The time mid-January.
For the German weekly, it is a regression, the consequence of decades of political failures, particularly in France and Germany. Paris and Berlin have favored their particular interests and lobbied to include gas and nuclear in the European green labeling project, to the detriment of the climate crisis, accuses the newspaper. “The taxonomy was meant to mark the starting point for Europe’s transition to climate neutrality, scheduled for 2050. Its rules were to serve as a model for green finance around the world, encouraging banks and investors to place their billion in sustainable projects. But it is a failure. Future generations will inherit two big problems: gas causes far more CO2 than renewable energies, while nuclear generates, among other inconveniences, toxic waste.”
More nuanced, Financial Times he believes that‘“Including natural gas in the taxonomy as a ‘transitional fuel’ is justified, but only on a temporary basis and under strict conditions”. There is urgency, writes the British daily, and if theEU wants to achieve its ambitious climate goals, we must certainly get out of fossil fuels, but renewable energies will not be enough. For everyday economics, you have to be pragmatic.
The taxonomy should not be rigid and should recognize that technologies aimed at mitigating climate change are not either green or brown, but span a spectrum including olive green, bright green and dark brown.”
On nuclear power, the tide has already turned for a few months, and probably before, writes The Atlantic in the article which opens this file and which explains how, little by little, the atom once again became “an essential element of decarbonization strategies around the world, in both right and left regimes”. It is enough to follow the presidential campaign in France: rare are the voices to be raised against nuclear power. We are far from the demonstrations of Creys-Malville in 1977: the disasters of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are behind us.
It must be said that nuclear power has arguments, according to The Atlantic :
Globally, nuclear power plants provide more carbon-free energy than solar and wind combined.”
No wonder under these conditions that, from China to the United States, most major countries have chosen the atom for the next few years: to achieve carbon neutrality, Beijing wants to build 150 reactors in fifteen years; in the United States, Joe Biden has planned to invest 1.8 billion dollars in the sector.
Today explain The Atlantic, only a serious accident could revive the mistrust of nuclear supporters. Some ecologists have taken the plunge, as in Finland, where the Greens party supports the European taxonomy project and recognizes nuclear as a sustainable energy. At the end of December, the first EPR marketed by Areva started in Olkiluoto, more than twelve years late. “Olkiluoto is the nuclear country”, writes the Swedish daily Today’s News. This is where the country’s nuclear waste will soon be stored for eternity, 500 meters underground.. “How do you know if the device will still work in a hundred thousand years?” asks the newspaper. That’s the whole question.
Claire Carrard