British and French resistance to "nuclear package"
By Bettina Berg
The European commission is on a collision course with Great Britain and France over its nuclear strategy. Loyola de Palacio, the energy commissioner, wants to propose at the beginning of November, a pooling of nuclear safety standards. The goal is to be able to control the candidate country nuclear power plants after they enter the European Union.
But the only way not to discriminate against new member states, would be to check the reactors in all member states. Austria is strongly for this given the controversy over the Czech nuclear power plant, Temelín.
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The UK and France, however, see this as an encroachment of their national powers. "The resistance doesn’t come from the candidates," says sources in Brussels, according to Die Presse. "For them it was rather the past situation without reference values that was a problem." Currently, nuclear power plant safety standards in the EU are a purely national question.
If a nuclear power plant should fall short of the proposed new standards, the state concerned could be fined. That is one of the reasons, why above all Great Britain and France are against the plans. Another reason is that the two countries fears for the negative impact on their atomic industry.