Planned EU-wide rules on nuclear energy unveiled

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Two previous proposals failed; European Commission seeks greater interest in nuclear energy.

All nuclear activity in the EU will be subject to common safety rules, if a draft directive adopted by the European Commission wins the backing of member states.

Under the plans, published on 26 November, international nuclear safety standards – the 1996 Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS), and the 2006 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Fundamentals – would form the backbone of legislation that would be mandatory for all EU member states.

Both sets of standards are currently voluntary.

Ferran Tarradellas, a European Commission spokesman for energy, said today that some nuclear installations in the EU currently fall below international standards.

But last week, the European Nuclear Regulators' Group, created by the Commission in 2007 as the high-level group on safety and waste management to develop common approaches on nuclear safety, expressed concerns about the Commission's plans to harmonise standards.

Andrej Striar, who chairs the group, said that common standards were a problem for big member states, since it would be difficult to find common rules that would satisfy them all.

“Every big country has an established system. None of them is bad or better [than the others]. They are simply different,” Striar said, in comments made to European Voice last week.

This is one of the obstacles that the Commission will need to clear if its plan is to succeed. It supersedes to proposals that failed when they were presented in 2003, when member states could not reach a consensus.

Since then, interest in nuclear energy, which already accounts for one-third of the total energy produced in the EU, has intensified, which the draft directive argued “makes the timing of this revised proposal particularly appropriate”.

The proposal advocates nuclear energy as a means of curbing CO2 emissions and of increasing the security of energy supplies.

The Commission also sees nuclear electricity as “relatively” shielded from the price fluctuations when compared to oil and gas markets.

The Commission's position echoes a resolution passed by the European Parliament in October 2007 stating that nuclear energy was “indispensable” to meeting Europe's energy needs.

The rules, should they be agreed, would cover the full life-cycle of a nuclear installation from its design and location through the construction phase to the maintenance and decommissioning of a plant and the management of spent fuel and radioactive waste.

Additional rules would also be included for any new nuclear reactors built, and the regulatory power of national nuclear regulators would be enhanced.

Andris Piebalgs, the European commissioner for energy, said the directive would “benefit EU citizens by improving their safety and giving them legal certainty”.

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