A coalition of 87 MEPs, mainly from the EPP, ECR, ID and Renew Europe groups, as well as some Social Democrats (S&D) and a member of The Left group, sent a joint letter to the European Commission on Thursday 8 July asking it to include nuclear energy in the EU taxonomy.
“We cannot afford to ignore any energy sources that have the prerequisites to make a positive contribution on the path towards climate neutrality. That nuclear power is such a kind of energy source is, to us, obvious”, say the MEPs, while referring to a report by the Commission’s internal scientific service (the Joint Research Centre or JRC) according to which nuclear energy meets the criteria for inclusion in the EU taxonomy (see EUROPE 12688/5).
Pending assessments of the JRC report by two expert groups, the Commission had decided to leave this sector out of the scope of the first delegated act supplementing the EU Regulation (2020/852) on the taxonomy, promising to examine the possibility of including it in the taxonomy by the end of the year via a subsequent delegated act (see EUROPE 12703/2).
These assessments have just been published. While they are generally positive, they nevertheless point to some shortcomings in the JRC’s conclusions (see EUROPE 12754/16).
When asked by EUROPE about its intentions, the Commission told us that it would now “follow up on the conclusions of the report and the experts’ review”, without giving further details.
See the letter: https://bit.ly/3yEgnqz (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)