European Energy Transition

For the first 29 years of the country’s independence, nuclear power was not used in Belarus. It was not until 7 November 2020, the anniversary of the October Revolution, that the first nuclear power plant was inaugurated in Ostrovets, close to the border with Lithuania.

In former evacuation zones of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, although the government of Japan pronounced it safe to resume normal life, some returnees found such a life elusive. To make life possible on their once-abandoned land, they decided to tackle radiation in their own ways. 

The EU’s Sustainable Taxonomy Regulation - the list of green activities contributing to the green transition - is currently being discussed. The political debate is now focusing on two types of energy that were at first excluded: nuclear energy and fossil gas. How might these discussions undermine the taxonomy that is potentially a central tool to enhance investments in the green transition and why should they be banished from this instrument?

Currently, there is no nuclear power station that operating commercial electricity in Southeast Asian countries. However, pro-nuclear comes up with many reasons aiming to materialize the nuclear power which ranging from growing of domestic power demand to boost economic activities, reducing the electricity cost – in the case of the Philippines, to producing no Green House Gases emission, in particularly CO2.

I visited Chernobyl for the first time two and a half years after nuclear disaster. Over the decades, during which time I returned to the Exclusion Zone at least every ten years, I have come to understand that a nuclear disaster has no ‘afterwards’. The consequences of the biggest nuclear incident to date are still affecting many people of the former Soviet Union, having destroyed their future.

It was 28th April 1986, early morning in Poland. The radiation monitoring station in Mikołajki, Mazury area (north-eastern region of Poland) showed that the radioactivity in the air was 550,000 times higher than the day before. The radioactive cloud from Chernobyl had travelled to Poland. The story of the catastrophe began here.

There are great hopes pinned to the Moroccan energy transition – not just in the North African kingdom itself, but also in Europe and Germany.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s first State of the Union speech showed an ambitious and a strategic approach to the many crises hitting Europe and the world. However, words are not enough. They must be backed up by actions and coherent policy measures.

Transport is one of the sectors that were hit the hardest by the coronavirus pandemic. Can the German EU Council Presidency find a way out of the crisis and boost sustainable mobility for Europe? 

Will the EU witness a Digital Green Deal? Strengths and weaknesses of the digital age have become more apparent over the course of the pandemic, but how can policy makers address these challenges and interlink them with a comprehensive and ambitious ecological approach?