Ten EU countries call for nuclear to be marked ‘sustainable’

Ten of the 27 member countries of the European Union recently sent a letter to the European Commission calling for nuclear power to be labeled as sustainable in a new rulemaking that pertains to powering data centers and artificial intelligence.

While the EC's decision could have significant impact on the future deployment of nuclear across the continent, this call to action also represents a broader positive reconsideration of nuclear power in Europe in recent years.

Letter details: Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden are the signatories on the letter. Some of those names will come as no surprise to readers of Nuclear News. France, for instance, boasts the largest nuclear power sector in Europe, and Sweden is actively pursuing new nuclear power capacity. Other countries stand out as more surprising. Italy, for instance, has opposed the development of new nuclear power. In recent months, however, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has called for the country to overturn its four-decade nuclear moratorium and invest in new capacity.

In the letter, which is not publicly available in its entirety but was seen by Politico, the countries criticize newly proposed changes to the EU's Energy Efficiency Directive. The scope of this directive describes it as "establish[ing] a common framework of measures to promote energy efficiency within the Union" and "lay[ing] down rules designed to implement energy efficiency as a priority across all sectors; remov[ing] barriers in the energy market; and overcom[ing] market failures that impede efficiency in the supply, transmission, storage and use of energy."

The EU is planning to amend this directive, in part, by adding a new sustainability label to every data center in the Union. However, as the letter details, the draft version of this amendment does not include nuclear power in its definition of "sustainable." The letter argues that these changes do "not comply with the principle of technological neutrality" and that nuclear should be labeled as sustainable alongside renewables like solar and wind.

The letter further states that, in technical discussions during the drafting of these amendments, EU officials argued that "there was no political mandate to promote low-carbon energy sources other than renewables for powering data centers," according to Politico's E&E News. The 10 countries pointed out, in fact, that political mandate arguably can be constituted by recent comments from EC President Ursula von der Leyen supporting new nuclear development. Furthermore, in March, the EC published a small and advanced modular reactor road map that dedicates an entire section to the use case of nuclear for data centers. This road map advocates for broader nuclear deployment in Europe and describes it as a key source of "clean energy" and "decarbonized heat and steam."

The details of the final change are set to be discussed at an EC meeting on June 3, as part of broader discussions of an EU "tech sovereignty package." E&E previously reported that the EC aims to formalize energy labeling for data centers by 2027.