Why politics, money, and construction capacity will limit any European turn toward nuclear power generation

Last week European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told a nuclear energy summit meeting that Europe had made a strategic mistake by turning away from nuclear power generation. In coming years, she vowed, that will be reversed. The EU will take steps to favor more nuclear investment and technology development and simplify regulations. But these steps will hardly scratch the surface of what’s needed.

The history of nuclear power, including in Europe, has been marked by a few initial decades of weighty investment, followed by political, technical, and economic challenges, flattening growth, and ultimate disinvestment. Between the mid-1950s and the end of the 1980s, the United States, Europe, Russia, and Japan built more than 300 nuclear power plants. China has recently replicated these countries’ achievements, building the world’s second largest nuclear fleet in little more than two decades.

The EU now hopes to reestablish the role nuclear power played in Europe’s electricity grid when it provided about a third of the bloc’s electricity supply, double its current share.  However, Europe’s industrial capacity, financial challenges, and politics are major obstacles.

Europe’s nuclear buildup was powered by French, German, Swedish, and British companies able to construct power plants in short order, backed by partnerships with innovative American engineering companies and equipment and fuel suppliers in the low countries, Italy, and Spain. Today, only one EU state, France, possesses sufficient capacity to build large-scale nuclear power plants.

Yet, even France’s best days appear to be behind it. When President Emmanuel Macron in 2022 announced that France would reverse his government’s energy policy and build six new nuclear power plants, government auditors warned him that, without taking corrective actions and making investments, a lack of supply chain capacity might trigger cost overruns and construction delays. After all, the recent track record of French plant projects in France, Finland, and the U.K. is less than impressive: At Hinkley Point, French-led construction of two power reactors is currently at least five years behind schedule and five billion pounds over budget.

Von der Leyen and others hope that Europe can tackle these challenges in part by building smaller modular reactors (SMRs); vendors claim they can build series of these less powerful reactors faster and cheaper than traditional large commercial reactors. However, no SMRs are operating, have received full regulatory approval, or have fully operating supply chains. Most of these designs are still on the drawing board in the United States, where nuclear technology has been increasingly focused on SMRs for two decades. Until recently, the European nuclear industry viewed SMRs as a niche technology; industrial deployment of these units at a scale that makes a difference would require heavy investment and many years.

Finally, there’s politics. Von der Leyen and Macron called for more EU transboundary commerce and harmonization; this may help open the way for France’s nuclear power companies to contribute more to a greater nuclear power upswing in Europe. But at home, ambitious French nuclear power investment plans may be stymied by an ongoing and severe national financial crisis fueled by political dysfunction.

In Germany, which once generated most of its carbon-free power in nuclear reactors, Chancellor Friedrich Merz brushed off Von der Leyen’s statement and its implicit criticism of Angela Merkel’s decision in 2011 to switch off all the country’s power reactors after the Fukushima nuclear accident. Merz, von der Leyen, and Merkel are all Christian Democrats. Merz’s group has no parliamentary majority and is surrounded by antinuclear left-of-center parties in the Bundestag. The German nuclear phase-out, Merz said after the summit, “is irreversible. I regret it, but that’s how it is.”

In principle, Europe could call on foreign partners to help with or even lead nuclear reinvestment, as it relied on partnerships with US firms half a century ago. A few EU states might enlist vendors in Korea and the United States to build a handful of reactors. But non-EU companies likewise face similar capacity limits and will be pressed to commit to projects elsewhere, including in their home markets. Overall, the geopolitics for foreign cooperation with Europe are negative. Today, the world’s leading nuclear power plant-building firms are state-owned enterprises in Russia and China. They won’t likely be part of Europe’s nuclear plans.