JAPAN's nuclear crisis in the wake of a huge earthquake is likely to increase opposition to plans for a major nuclear expansion in Europe and focus attention on the vast potential costs of a nuclear disaster. The crisis will reignite concern over nuclear safety as Japan fights to avert a meltdown at crippled nuclear reactors, describing the quake and tsunami, which may have killed more than 10,000 people, as its biggest crisis since World War II. The disaster is a setback to the nuclear industry, which is enjoying a renaissance as public fears over nuclear safety have faded along with memories of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States and Ukraine's 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Many countries plan new nuclear power plants, regarding nuclear as a clean alternative to expensive and dwindling oil and gas and saying new technology should allay safety fears. But anti-nuclear campaigners around Europe have seized on the Japanese accident as evidence of the dangers of nuclear power and said governments should rethink plans for new plants. “I think it will make a lot of governments, authorities and other planners think twice about planning power stations in seismic areas,” said Jan Haverkamp, European Union policy campaigner for environmental group Greenpeace, which opposes new nuclear reactors and wants existing ones phased out. French reactor maker Areva and nuclear power producers EDF and GDF Suez are important industry players. France's Alstom and Schneider Electric are also active in the sector, as are Switzerland's ABB and Germany's Siemens. Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose government last year extended the operating lives of Germany's nuclear reactors, said the government was consulting with nuclear experts and watching the situation in Japan closely. The Japanese radiation leak comes at a difficult time for Merkel, whose conservatives face three state elections in March where nuclear safety fears could help her opponents. In Britain, which plans a major nuclear building program to replace ageing plants, Energy Secretary Chris Huhne said Sunday he had asked the chief nuclear inspector to report on the implications of the Japanese crisis. He said that while there may be lessons on operator safety, Britain had different reactors to those in Japan and stressed that Britain is not in an earthquake zone. Italy, one of the few European countries prone to earthquakes, is the only Group of Eight industrialized nation without a nuclear power plant. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi wants a quarter of the country's electricity to be nuclear in future and the leader of Berlusconi's PDL party in the lower house said Italy would not change its plans. France, the second biggest nuclear energy producer after the US, said it would discuss ways of securing its 58 reactors that provide most of the country's electricity. The compelling need to reduce dependence on oil, gas and coal, along with the climate-warming carbon they produce, mean Japan's disaster is unlikely to derail Europe's multi-billion-dollar nuclear new build plans. “In the heat of the moment, this will of course stir calls to end nuclear power generation, but over the longer term governments have to think rationally about rising power needs and CO2 emissions,” said an industry source, asking not to be named. “Nuclear power is an unavoidable element of the energy mix.”
