Two European Parliament committees have voted against the European Commission’s plan to include nuclear energy and gas in the European Union’s (EU’s) future energy taxonomy. The commission is the EU’s executive body. The two committees concerned are the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee and the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee.
Most of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on both committees voted against the European Commission’s ‘Taxonomy Complementary Climate Delegated Act’, which included nuclear and certain gas energy programmes on the list of sustainable energy options, to help with climate change adaptation and mitigation. The votes of the committees would have no direct impact on the European Commission’s plans, but they indicated the mood of the MEPs serving on them. The total votes from both committees came to 76 against the Act, 62 in favour and four abstentions, while six MEPs did not vote.
This Act was introduced in March and would come into force on January 1 next year, unless a full session of the European Parliament voted against it. The European Parliament has 705 MEPs and they would start voting on the Act on July 4.
The EU has been divided over nuclear energy and whether it should be categorised as sustainable (12 EU States, including France, backed the inclusion of nuclear). As a result, nuclear (along with gas) was left out of the European Commission’s initial Delegated Act, to allow further assessment of its sustainability. The EU Joint Research Centre, in a report that was then reviewed by two other expert groups, concluded that nuclear energy was sustainable. As a result, the European Commission decided to include nuclear as a transitional energy source.