There is a forest of wind turbine in the fields on the east side of the highway. They stopped at the border with Slovakia. Slovakia gets only a small amount of its energy from renewable sources. Nuclear power is what it is betting on.
There is an orange and red building at the center of the nuclear strategy of Slovakia. The Soviet Union moved the village to make room for the power plant. The church is boarded up. Cars are sliding in and out of the security gate, and the cooling chimneys arelching water into the sky. Workers are working on a new reactor that will be ready for launch in early23. Branislav Strek, CEO of Slovenské Elektrrne, said that the 471-megawatt unit is expected to cover 13 percent of the country's electricity needs. As Europe scrambles for energy supplies after cutting ties with Russia, Slovakia is expected to reach that milestone.
Europe has been racing to avoid power cuts. Strek is using this moment to argue that Europe needs nuclear technology to keep the lights on. He said at the World Utilities Congress in June that it provided an immense amount of secure, predictable, stable baseload.
Lukas Bunsen, head of research at Aurora Energy Research, says that the energy crisis is boosting the pro-nuclear side of the argument. Nuclear plants in Belgium would stay running for another 10 years. Poland signed a deal to build its first nuclear power plant. Bunsen says it is a very national debate. Public attitudes can change from side to side. Sixty percent of Slovakians think nuclear power is safe, while 70 percent of their neighbors in Austria think it's not a good idea.
The debate over how Europe should transition away from fossil fuels has become a focal point in the neighbors' lives. The expansion of Unit Three will make Slovakia the second-largest producer of nuclear power in the EU. Austrians can't ignore the drawbacks of building or improving aging facilities, the problems associated with disposing of nuclear waste, and the sector's reliance on Moscow for the fuel which powers the reactor Russia supplied onefifth of the EU's nuclear fuel last year.
Local newspapers in Austria have used maps to show how close the town is to Vienna. Reinhard Uhrig is an antinuclear campaigner with Austrian environmental group GLOBAL 2000. A series of safety systems, including the containment, prevent radioactive material from being released into the environment in the event of an accident. Nuclear power is a dangerous distraction from real solutions to the climate crisis and there have been major issues with the quality control of the works.
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