Europe warms to nuclear power

In Germany, meanwhile, conservatives are taking the opportunity offered by this week's gas scare to challenge the 2020 deadline for an end to nuclear energy that the previous government imposed at the insistence of the Green Party.

In negotiations to form her government last year, Chancellor Angela Merkel was unable to persuade her Social Democrat coalition partners to drop the deadline. But supporters of nuclear energy are unlikely to give up, suggests Hermann Ott, director of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy.

"It will be a constant fight for the next 20 years," predicts Mr. Ott. "Renewable energy has the potential to replace existing fossil fuel supplies....But if that does not happen fast enough, it is likely that the life of the nuclear reactors will be extended."

Not that many Germans would be happy with that. Only 38 percent of them are in favor of nuclear power, according to a European Union opinion poll last June which also found that across the EU, 55 percent of citizens oppose nuclear energy.

If the nuclear industry is to overcome this hostility, says the IEA's Mr. Ramsay, "it will have to demonstrate that it can handle nuclear waste."

Over the past couple of years, nuclear supporters have sought to deflect attention away from the problem of nuclear waste by highlighting the problems associated with fossil fuels, most notably greenhouse-gas emissions. They have enjoyed some success: 62 per cent of respondents in the 2005 EU poll agreed that nuclear power was advantageous in terms of cutting greenhouse gases - up from just 41 percent four years earlier.

As European policymakers begin to reconsider the nuclear option "it is Kyoto and the need to reduce emissions that is the driver," says Patrick Heren, founder of Heren Energy Ltd, which publishes which reports on the power markets.

Antinuclear activists insist that nuclear power is as potentially dangerous as ever, that nobody has yet found a safe way to dispose of highly radioactive waste, and that uranium deposits are too small to ensure long-term fuel supplies to nuclear plants. European governments would be much better advised to invest more heavily in wind and solar power, they argue.

For most of the past two decades, antinuclear ecologists have had the argument pretty much all their way in Europe. Today, acknowledges Sven Teske, energy expert for Greenpeace, "there is more of a debate."

For Mr. Heren, who also opposes the expansion of nuclear energy, the signs are obvious. "Quite clearly," he says, "the wind is blowing in favor of nuclear across Europe."

• Finland began construction on a nuclear reactor last year.

• France has given approval for a similar one and has plans for another.

• Bulgaria is expected to award a contract this month for building two units.

• Romania has resumed building a power station after a 15-year lull.

• The Czech Republic has plans to build two more nuclear plants by the end of the decade.

• Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, and Germany are all reconsidering previous plans to cap or phase out nuclear programs.

• Andreas Tzortzis contributed to this report from Berlin.

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