Last month, the European Court of Justice dismissed Austria’s lawsuit against the classification of nuclear energy as a sustainable energy source, ruling that the European Commission was right to assume that under certain conditions, this could contribute to climate protection and therefore receive public funding.
It is a sign of the times. Across Europe, support for nuclear power has grown in recent years and higher electricity prices may have played a role. In any case, it was always odd to see those most passionately in favour of reducing CO2 emissions equally hostile to CO2-neutral nuclear power. With electricity demand expected to soar massively, not least due to artificial intelligence, this is becoming a bit of a no-brainer. Even Danish EU Energy Commissioner Dan Joergensen, once anti-nuclear, now states that “there is no scenario” where the EU can reach its emission reduction targets without nuclear power.
As a result of this public change of heart, new nuclear plants are now to be built in the Netherlands, Poland and France. The Belgian federal government is trying to save as many of the functioning Belgian nuclear reactors, reverting a policy of nuclear phase-out. In countries like Italy, Denmark and even Germany, which continued with destroying nuclear capacity even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, political moves are being made to reconsider the ban on nuclear.
New hurdles arise
Despite this pro-nuclear momentum in Europe, EDF — Europe’s leading nuclear power company — is obstructing a nuclear power project in the Czech Republic. The issue began after Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP) was selected over EDF as the preferred bidder in mid-2024 for the construction of two new reactors in Dukovany in the Czech Republic. EDF immediately launched legal challenges at the national and EU level against this. While Czech courts rejected EDF’s case, the intervention led the European Commission to launch a foreign subsidies investigation under the EU’s new Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) into the South Korean energy company, with EDF complaining that KHNP would not have been able to guarantee the price it offered for the project without “illegal state aid given the prices in the nuclear industry”.
To hear EDF complaining about illegal state aid rings hollow. The company is owned by the French state and receives multibillion loans and grants from the French government. It has also received support from the UK government, and cashed in subsidies from countries like Brazil, the United States, Vietnam and Chile. The European Commission still needs to approve a subsidised loan EDF is being granted by the French state which is expected to exceed €30bn, to cover half the construction costs of six new EDF reactors.
Obviously, in an ideal world, the energy sector would need to be completely private, but as an experienced energy expert once confided to me: “governments will rather privatise the army than energy provision.” Pretty much all over the world, from renewables over fossil fuels to nuclear power, there is large-scale government control over the energy sector. That said, nuclear power is documented to be among the least subsidized energy sources, per unit of electricity generated. In any case, it is best to dispense of any double standards here.
Excessive safety?
Ironic about all of this is also that France is the most prominent defender of nuclear energy in the EU. Paris has for example lobbied for nuclear’s inclusion in EU sustainable finance rules, for public investment, and for a leading role in Europe’s energy transition. A delay to this Czech project could set a symbolic precedent which encourages more court procedures, thereby injecting new uncertainty into the market. and nuclear planning more generally. It could furthermore lead to doubts about Europe’s ability to deliver on its nuclear commitments, thereby deterring investors as well as technology suppliers, and fuel public scepticism about nuclear’s practicality again, just when public opinion is positive about it.
Back in the 1970s, nuclear was seen as the solution to become less energy-dependent on the politically volatile Middle East. At the time, in only about six years, France expanded its nuclear fleet, while also countries like Belgium strongly went for nuclear.
Those still opposed to nuclear power argue that with today’s safety standards, that would no longer be possible, highlighting how many recent nuclear projects have been hit by delays and cost overruns. Excessive regulation effectively amounts to a shadow ban on nuclear power, proponents maintain. Former UK Conservative Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho, for example, has proposed scrapping a number of UK environmental regulations holding back the development of nuclear power plants, arguing that such legal constraints “simply add costs and do more harm than good to nature.” She noted: “At [new nuclear power plant] Hinkley Point C, for example, EDF have spent eight years negotiating the installation of a “fish disco” of 288 underwater loudspeakers, at the cost of millions of pounds, to deter a small amount of fish from swimming into their pipes. Ironically, the self-proclaimed eco-activists pushing this through the courts end up causing more harm to nature overall, since increasing the cost and time it takes to build nuclear means we end up building thousands upon thousands of wind turbines and solar farms in every corner of the country. This is insane.” She pointed out that nuclear uses 1,000 times less land than wind or solar.
It is not surprising to see this debate flaring up in Britain. According to estimates, the UK is the most expensive place in the world to build a nuclear power plant. France and Finland managed to build the same design as Hinkley Point C for around half the cost. This fact alone suggests that those arguing excessive regulation is holding nuclear power back have a point. Given the rapid innovation in nuclear power, particularly with small modular reactors (SMRs) and advances in recycling of spent fuel, it is crucial to remove unnecessary regulations, while still safeguarding safety.
France’s governance system for nuclear power may be less hostile than Britain’s, but it is far from perfect. Energy policy commentator Mark Nelson argues that France’s “reactors could make 15 per cent more power for little extra cost”, and that “French nuclear costs about €60 per MWh to produce versus $30 in the USA”, despite making use of the same reactor technology. According to him, this is because France refuels every year, whereas the global standard is to only do this every one and a half or two years, whereby he adds that in France, “it takes two months to refuel. In the USA, we do it in three weeks on the same reactor type.” Furthermore, he notes that in France, there is an “insane practice” to “turn down the nuclear plants to make money for fossil plants and renewables”, concluding that in that country, we are witnessing “insane and destructive regulatory practices from the regulator being captured by anti-nuclear forces.” He thinks France “should revert to the US NRC standards, which are plenty strict.”
Europe must tread carefully. Excessive regulation at home already hampers nuclear competitiveness. If litigation between nuclear players now becomes the norm, the sector’s fragile revival could stall. Instead of projecting nuclear as fast, feasible, and bankable, Europe risks showing it as legally entangled and commercially uncertain.
