Austria is the most anti-nuclear power nation in the European Union. In 1978, Austria voted in a referendum to stop a newly constructed nuclear power plant from being turned on. This was a year before the disaster at Three Mile Island alerted the global community to the dangers of nuclear power. Following the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan in March of 2011, the Austrian government announced that they were going to work on a blanket ban on importing electricity generated by nuclear reactors after 2014.
One of the problems that Austria faced was the fact that when electricity is generated and fed into a distribution network from a variety of sources, it is impossible to know what source any particular watt came from. At the time, skeptics said that Austria needed electricity and could not separate electricity from nuclear sources from the electricity that they imported. They pointed out that Austria needed to import at least two terawatt hours of electricity each year. Even if Austria decided to build new non-nuclear power generation plants, public resistance and the government regulatory requirements could prevent construction of a proposed plant for up to ten years.
Now that 2015 has arrived, have the Austrians managed to realize their vision of one hundred percent non-nuclear electricity? Apparently the critics were mistaken in their skepticism because as of January 1, 2015, Austria's electricity is one hundred percent from non-nuclear sources. This includes all imported electricity. The Austrian government demands proof of the origin of any imported electricity. Utility companies in Austria are not bound by law to buy only non-nuclear electricity but are voluntarily complying with the ban. This means that mixed source electricity imported into Austria will not find a market if ANY of the electricity is generated by nuclear power reactors.
Austria has been careful to implement a system that would make it difficult for the European Union to take any legal action against Austria on the grounds that it is denying foreign power generators access to the Austrian market. The Austrians, however, have filed suit with the European Union from prevent Britain from offering special financial incentives for the construction of a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley. Along with Germany, which is turning off all its nuclear power reactors, Austria and several other European nations have been pressuring the Czech utility CEZ AS to abandon plans for spending twenty five billion dollars to build five new nuclear power reactors. The Czechs get about forty five percent of their power from their existing six nuclear reactors and are exporting electricity.
Throughout the European Union, there is wide-spread public rejection of nuclear power. Now there is a growing group of E.U. countries which have totally rejected nuclear power and are exerting political and economic pressure on other E.U. countries to also abandon nuclear power. The nuclear industry in the E.U. is fighting back with political and economic power of their own. As renewable alternative sources of energy such as solar and wind become cheaper and more available, it will be interesting to see who wins this contest.
