Twenty years after the worst ever nuclear power accident cast a radioactive shadow over Europe, the continent's policy makers are taking another look at atomic energy.
After a hiatus of more than 15 years, nuclear reactors are again being built or planned, and the EU is reconsidering the use of atomic power.
The reasons are varied, and include global warming, the high price of crude oil and energy independence, particularly since the Russian company Gazprom interrupted supplies of natural gas to Europe.
According to Eurostat, the 25 countries of the EU currently import more than half of the natural gas and more than three-quarters of the oil they consume. And this reliance on foreign energy sources will jump to 90 percent by 2030, said Fatih Birol, chief economist of the Paris-based International Energy Agency.
As a result, after years of turning its back on nuclear energy, the European Commission now admits that discussions on the security of EU energy supplies must also cover the pros and cons of nuclear power.
A Europe-wide debate on nuclear power must be part of any new energy mix hammered out by EU governments, the bloc's energy chief Andris Piebalgs said recently.
"We must keep our options open," Piebalgs said.
Some individual countries have already decided in favor of nuclear energy. Last year, Finland became the first country in 15 years to start building a new reactor. The country's fifth reactor is scheduled to go online in 2009.
Supporters say that the reactor will help reduce imports of energy, most of which is currently imported from Russia. Helsinki has also said that nuclear power could help Finland achieve its obligation of limiting greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol.
In addition, France is planning to start construction of its first third-generation nuclear reactor, a European Pressurized Water Reactor (EPR), in the northern French town of Flamanville, which is scheduled to go into operation by 2012.
French President Jacques Chirac has also announced the launching of a program to build a fourth-generation nuclear reactor, which will produce less waste and burn more efficiently, to be ready by the year 2020.
But France has long been a pillar of the use of atomic energy, and leads the world in percentage of domestic electricity derived from nuclear power plants, with 78 percent. It is in countries which rejected the use of nuclear energy after the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster that the most significant changes are occurring.
Nowhere is the debate likelier to be more strident and politically divisive than in Germany, which under former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's SPD-Greens government in 2000 ordered closure of all 18 German nuclear plants by 2020. The first nuclear station was shut down last May.
However, German Economics Minister Michael Glos recently warned that the Russian gas cut-offs were a stark warning that Germany needs to ponder other energy supplies.
Surprisingly, most recent polls show a majority of Germans now opposing the closure of nuclear power plants, whereas two-thirds were against nuclear power after Chernobyl.
A similar sea change appears to be taking place in Italy, which banished nuclear energy in a 1987 referendum that received the support of more than 80 percent of voters. The last of Italy's existing nuclear power plants was finally shut in 1990.
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