Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-12-Speech-1-140"
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"en.20040112.9.1-140"2
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".
Mr President, the Commissioner has been on the receiving end of much criticism, so please allow me, outside my speaking time, to hasten to her aid and thank her for putting two proposals before us, enabling us, for the first time in this Parliament, to discuss nuclear safety. That is something quite tremendous and quite new, for which, Commissioner, many heartfelt thanks; Mr Linkohr knows what he is talking about when he says that the Commissioner has put her head a long way over the parapet.
On the subject of the Breyer report, let me say, as the Committee on the Environment’s rapporteur and also with real conviction, that we cannot imagine this House approving these proposals in their present form. The granting of Euratom loans for new nuclear power stations cannot be accepted under any circumstances. We all know that Euratom loans support the nuclear industry in a way that distorts competition; with their more favourable interest rates and their high political risks covered, nowhere in the whole of the energy sector is any other form of investment even comparable. The Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy has made it abundantly clear that, of the European Union’s fifteen Member States, six have never taken up the production of nuclear energy, and six have decided to abandon it, which leaves just three Member States. That is something that must be borne in mind. We have also made it very clear that the issue of the final storage of nuclear waste remains unresolved until it is resolved worldwide. We may well know where we would like depositories to be, but we will not have them for another twenty years, so the building of new nuclear power stations is simply not acceptable. Funding should be given solely to projects to improve nuclear safety and to decommission installations, and not, as the Commission proposal envisages, to plant already in use. That is not acceptable.
We do, though, want to have research projects, into pilot installations for safe final storage and into nuclear plant, and we want to see these supported. The introduction of uniform and binding safety standards throughout the EU is unreservedly to be welcomed, and for that thanks are due to the Commissioner. This standard is to reflect the state of the art. I believe that we are doing much as people did in the Middle Ages, when they dumped their ordure on the streets and wondered why they got ill. In that we have no final depositories, but merrily go on producing waste, we are still in the Middle Ages. I believe in human intelligence; we should do our research, look for solutions, and only when we have them should we produce."@en1
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