Europe: Suddenly scared of nuclear power

Thanks a lot, Germany, said Jean Quatremer in Paris’s Libération. Chancellor Angela Merkel has managed to “sow panic” by transforming the Japanese nuclear disaster—which is in essence a local catastrophe, contained on the Japanese islands—into a “global nuclear energy crisis.” Without consulting any of her European partners, Merkel ordered the closure of nearly half her country’s nuclear power plants for three months for safety checks. The chancellor’s overreaction makes no sense. It’s not as if Japan’s partial meltdown occurred because of lax oversight or faulty equipment. The culprit was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, hardly a threat in tectonically placid Germany. But now she has “triggered a tsunami” of unnecessary panic in the rest of Europe about the safety of all the continent’s nuclear facilities.

Lithuania, at least, has good reason to worry, said Vytautas Pleckaitis in Vilnius’s Lietuvos rytas. Just last week, Russia lent Belarus more than $6 billion to build a Russian-designed nuclear reactor at Ostrovets, just 30 miles from the Lithuanian capital. Given that the 1986 meltdown at the Russian-designed Chernobyl plant, more than 300 miles away, contaminated our entire country with radiation, we can be forgiven for being apprehensive. Belarus is charging ahead with this plant without waiting for environmental impact assessments—and without consulting us. Why should we have to scramble around making contingency plans for “refuge in the event of radiation leaks,” especially since we won’t get any of the electricity the plant generates? Europe needs some mechanism to prevent dangerous facilities from being built on its borders.

We should go further than that, said Géal Francis in Paris’s Le Monde. It is time to abolish nuclear power altogether within EU borders. France, which gets nearly 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, likes to boast that it is greener than its European neighbors because it does not fill the atmosphere with coal or gas emissions. Yet that argument overlooks the fact that nuclear power is not simply “potentially” dangerous—it is “inherently polluting” at all stages, from the mining of uranium to the extremely hazardous storage of waste, which poisons the land for generations to come. France has allowed the “massive financial interests” of the nuclear power industry to instill its political elite with the dogma that nuclear power is safe. It is not. This is supposed to be a secular country. Can’t we “abandon the religion of the atom?”

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Let’s all take a deep breath, said Jacques Percebois, also in Le Monde. A frightening catastrophe like Japan’s causes emotions to run high. But the “debate on the role of nuclear power in France must be approached with serenity.” Let’s not forget that nuclear technology not only “contributes significantly to our energy independence,” but also “allows France to benefit from electricity prices 30 percent lower than average European prices.” Certainly we can have a national, even European, conversation about the trade-offs among cost, environmental friendliness, and safety. But to “renounce nuclear power while under the spell of emotion would be a mistake.”