“Tinne Van der Straeten is negotiating to fail”, said Bart De Wever on Sunday on the set of VTM, about these talks conducted since the beginning of spring by Minister Groen and Prime Minister Alexander De Croo with Engie, the energy company French company which operates the power stations via Electrabel. He thus implies that the minister favors a failure so that, in the absence of an agreement, all the nuclear power plants close in 2025.
For her part, the CEO of Engie, Catherine MacGregor, wrote to Mr. De Croo to ask that the Belgian State shares the risk linked to the dismantling of the five reactors the oldest after 2025 and become a cooperator of the reactors extended by ten years.
“I would like us to increase this participation and ensure that the power stations come back into our hands, declared the president of the Flemish nationalists. But then we have to extend the nuclear power stations over a realistic period (20 years according to him, editor’s note ) and you have to negotiate to succeed.”
The opposition party is demanding that Minister Groen be removed from the file in favor of Alexander De Croo alone. Bart De Wever considers that environmentalists are “obsessed” with “polluting and expensive” gas-fired power stations. He accuses Ms. Van der Straeten of underestimating energy needs and relying too much on imports from France “which will not come”. Half of French nuclear reactors are currently shut down for maintenance or because of corrosion problems. For the mayor of Antwerp, Alexander De Croo would even do well to land the government ecologists. “We are ready to provide a majority of spares.”
Asked on the set of “It’s not every day on Sundays” (RTL-TVi), Ecolo MP Samuel Cogolati refuted any desire of the Greens to want to defeat the negotiation. “We want to bring this negotiation to a successful conclusion,” he said. The elected official recalls the agreement signed in mid-March by all the Vivaldi parties and the need to guarantee energy supplies. “But there is no question today of giving a blank check to Engie-Electrabel and having the Belgian taxpayer pay the bill for radioactive waste”.
Also present on the set, the former Minister of Energy Marie Christine Marghem (MR) did not hide her concern about the success of the negotiations, in view of the leak of the letter from Engie in the press. But she said she was happy with Mr. Cogolati’s comments. If the MR also demands respect for the polluter-pays principle for Engie, Ms Marghem does not rule out a formula for the acquisition of State participation which would be reduced to the extension of the two reactors, and which “does not would prevent the State from taxing the company, or from benefiting from the surplus profits reaped in this period of high prices”.