The bill “to guarantee the nuclear contribution” presented by the People’s Party (PP) and defended this Tuesday in Congress lacks a scientific basis and has numerous regulatory shortcomings.
The text defended by Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party ignores reality and Spain’s energy needs. It simply serves to support the energy companies that own Spain’s nuclear power plants, which in recent months have introduced into public debate the idea of extending the plants’ useful life beyond the closure schedule they themselves agreed upon with the government in 2019.
With this bill, the Popular Party (PP) seeks to guarantee nuclear operations by socializing costs. The text aims to update the ENRESA tax—the fee for radioactive waste management that plant owners must pay—without revising costs. They argue that extending the plants’ lifespan by 10 years will raise more revenue.
However, the Court of Auditors has already warned that ENRESA funding “is not sufficient to cover the costs of waste management and future decommissioning.” There is currently a deficit of €10.697 billion that must be covered by the public. In other words, the PP’s proposal is to shift the cost of extending the useful life of Spain’s nuclear fleet onto the public. This is something the PP already advocated in the preamble to Law 15/2012, which ensures that society must pay the costs.
The text of the proposal uses, at the beginning, an explicit reference to the Draghi Report, using the quotation marks: ” The Report argues that the decarbonization of the European energy system implies the massive deployment of clean energy sources with low marginal generation costs.”
The truth is that nuclear energy is not cost-competitive. It is a technology that does not reduce the market price because its operation is submarginal.
So much so that Spanish plants are modulating their capacity downwards to avoid competing in auctions and to avoid participating in a market that sets prices that are uncompetitive with their real operating costs. Its current average price is €65/MWh, well above the price of photovoltaic and wind power.
Nuclear energy, therefore, does not meet the “clean energy with low costs” criterion of the aforementioned Draghi report.
On the other hand, it is important to debunk the false idea that nuclear power plants are compatible with the deployment of renewable energy and with the goals set by Europe for 2030. One example is what happened in Extremadura, where the Almaraz plant has become a bottleneck that has prevented new photovoltaic energy auctions, according to a recent study by the consulting firm Aurora Energy . This document predicts that, with the closure of Almaraz, curtailment (discharges) from renewable energy will be reduced by 30%. Nuclear, due to its manageability, competes with renewables, so the PP’s proposal involves choosing a technology that mortgages us economically and ecologically.
The text defended by the Popular Party also links the extension of the lifespan of nuclear power plants with the need to guarantee security of supply and energy independence. This idea makes no sense considering that Spain imports more than 80% of its uranium concentrates from countries within the Russian orbit, including Russia itself, such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, according to the latest data from ENUSA and Foro Nuclear .
Regarding the extension of the life of the power plants, it’s worth noting that the People’s Party (PP) is proposing to repeal the closure schedule order, which makes no sense from an administrative perspective, since doing so would require a new order that would require starting from scratch in setting fees and guarantees for owners.
