A forest of wind turbines spring up from fields on both sides of the highway that runs east from Vienna. But at the border with Slovakia, which stretches between Austria and Ukraine, they stop. Slovakia gets just 0.4 percent of its energy from wind and solar. Instead, it is banking its energy transition on nuclear power.
At the center of Slovakia’s nuclear strategy is the Mochovce power plant, an orange and red building flanked by eight giant cooling chimneys. There was a village here before the Soviet Union moved it to make way for the power plant in the 1980s. All that remains is a small, closed church. Cars rush in and out of the guarded security gate, and cooling chimneys spew a jet of water vapor into the sky. Inside, workers are preparing a new reactor, where nuclear fission will take place, which is expected to launch in early 2023. The 471-megawatt unit, which has spent years in controversy, is expected to cover 13 percent of the world’s nuclear needs. electricity of the country, which would make Slovakia self-sufficient. -sufficient, according to Branislav Strýček, CEO of Slovenské Elektrárne, the company that manages the factory. Slovakia is expected to reach the milestone as its European neighbors struggle for energy supplies after cutting ties with Russia, a major natural gas exporter.
Without Russian gas, Europe has struggled to avoid power outages. Every day, Paris turns off the lights on the Eiffel Tower an hour earlier, Cologne has dimmed street lights and Switzerland is considering banning electric cars. Supporters of nuclear power, like Strýček, are using this opportunity to argue that Europe needs nuclear technology to keep the lights on without jeopardizing net-zero emissions targets. “This provides an immense amount of safe, predictable and stable baseload, which renewable energy is not able to provide,” he said at the World Utilities Congress in June.
The energy crisis is not a decisive factor in the European nuclear debate, but in some countries it strengthens the pro-nuclear side of the debate, said Lukas Bunsen, research director at consultancy Aurora Energy Research. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany has announced that it will keep the country’s three remaining nuclear power plants open until April 2023. Belgium has proposed keeping its nuclear power plants operating for another 10 years. In October, Poland signed a agreement with the American company Westinghouse to build its first nuclear power plant.
But Europe remains deeply divided on the use of nuclear energy. Of the 27 member states of the European Union, 13 produce nuclear energy, while 14 do not. “This is still a very national debate,” Bunsen says. This means that public attitudes can change dramatically from one side of a border to the other. Surveys show that 60 percent of Slovaks believe nuclear power is safe, while 70 percent of their Austrian neighbors are opposed to its use, as the country has no operating nuclear power plants.
For both neighbors, Mochovce has become a focal point of the debate over how Europe should move away from fossil fuels. For Slovak supporters, Mochovce’s expansion – the launch of Unit Three is expected to be followed two years later by Unit Four – demonstrates how even a small country can become an energy juggernaut. The third tranche will make Slovakia the second largest producer of nuclear energy in the EU, after France. But neighboring Austrians cannot ignore what they see as disadvantages: the colossal costs associated with building or improving aging facilities, problems with disposing of nuclear waste and the sector’s dependence on Moscow’s regard for uranium, the fuel that powers the reactor. Last year, the EU imported a fifth of its uranium from Russia.
