Austria to fight EU nuclear plan
As the EU moves to label energy from nuclear power and natural gas as “green” investments, Austria is gearing up to fight with a legal complaint.
The European Commission is consulting with member states and European lawmakers until Friday on its plans.
A final text could be published by end of January and would become EU law effective from 2023 if a majority of member states or the EU Parliament fails to oppose it.
“Neither of these two forms of energy is sustainable and therefore has no place in the taxonomy regulation,” Austrian Environment Minister Leonore Gewessler told AFP in an interview this week in her eighth-floor office overlooking the Danube canal that flows through Vienna.
“If the Commission continues to work with this proposal and implements it then it is clear that we will take legal action,” Gewessler added.
She said Austria had “very, very strong arguments” why energy from nuclear power and natural gas should not be labeled as green and as such she had “great confidence” a complaint at the EU Court of Justice (ECJ) could succeed.
“The question of waste disposal [from nuclear energy] has not been solved for decades… It’s as if we give our children a backpack and say ‘you will solve it one day,'” she said.
She also noted natural gas produces significant greenhouse emissions.
Austria, governed by its first conservative-Green coalition since 2020, is also lobbying other member states, including Germany, to oppose the commission’s proposal.
So far, Luxemburg has indicated it would support a legal complaint, Gewessler said.
“Whatever is labeled green, whatever is labeled sustainable must also actually contain green and sustainable investments,” she said, adding renewable energy was “cheaper, more readily available and a safer and better alternative to nuclear energy.”
In 2020, the ECJ threw out an appeal by Austria to find British government subsidies for the nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point in breach of the bloc’s state aid rules.
Austria itself has only one nuclear power plant at Zwentendorf on the banks of the Danube river about an hour’s drive from Vienna, and that one was never used.
Austria itself targets that all electricity should come from renewable resources by 2030.
Photo taken on March 25, 2021 shows wind turbines in Lower Austria, Austria. According to Austrian Wind Energy Association, at the end of 2020, 1,307 wind turbines with a total output of 3,120 megawatts generated electricity for around 2 million households in Austria.Photo:Xinhua
