Abstract
What to do with Temelin, the unfinished nuclear power plant in the southern Czech Republic? That's the $2 billion question facing the Czech government.
A succession of governments dating back to the communist days have spent nearly that amount to build a Soviet-designed nuclear power plant in an otherwise pastoral setting in southern Bohemia. To date, not one watt of energy has come out of Temelin, only controversy.
The plant's groundbreaking came amid controversy. The plant was begun in 1986, the same year as the catastrophe at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Prompted by fears of deficiencies in Soviet-designed reactors, officials halted construction three years later.
But in 1993 the Czechs gave the nuclear power plant a new lease on life, announcing that they would finish construction. To overcome its engineering deficiencies, Temelin was to get a world-class graft of Western technology, supplied by Westinghouse. Today most of the heavy construction has been completed, but the trickier digital control and safety systems remain to be finished.
The latest chapter in the Temelin tale came in early March when an international panel of energy experts concluded that the Czech Republic did not need the additional energy-generating capacity that Temelin's two 1,000-megawatt reactors would provide. In fact, the report predicted that the Czech Republic would probably not need new sources of energy until at least 2010.
The international team had been commissioned by the government to add an “independent voice” on Temelin in a bid to end the drawn-out nuclear dilemma.
The findings of the panel's report have been welcomed by environmentalists and others who have argued that the government should pull the plug–simply cut its losses and halt financing for the plant.
“The results of the independent team are damning for the Temelin project,” said Jan Beranek, a leading Czech anti-nuclear campaigner. “It proves that CEZ [the Czech state electric utility] has mystified for years every government, including the present Zeman cabinet, with its assertions that it would be better to finish Temelin.”
April 1996: Austrian environmentalists protest the Czech Republic's Temelin nuclear power plant, seen behind them. The controversial plant is near the Austrian border.
President Vaclav Havel also weighed in, saying the expert team's report has prompted him to stop believing any information from the project's backers.
In contrast, the Social Democratic government of Milos Zeman has been more cautious in its public pronouncements. It now faces the tough choice of spending a projected billion dollars more (according to the report) to finish Temelin. Or, it can swallow hard, abandon the project, and ignore the money already spent.
After discussing the report at a cabinet meeting on March 22, the Zeman government again put off making a decision. The cabinet did decide, however, to cobble together two further studies designed to examine the repercussions if Temelin is finished–or scrapped.
In the past, the heavy investment Prague had to make to finish Temelin's vver-1000 reactors and upgrade them to Western standards was the best way to keep the spending flowing. A number of cost overruns stemmed from underestimating the costs of fusing Soviet technology with Western control systems.
It is no secret that CEZ was eager to finish the project so that it might more easily win contracts to modernize similar Soviet-designed reactors throughout Eastern Europe. The fact that the government owns a stake in CEZ as well as the main supplier, Skoda Praha, made the government less than eager to halt construction on what would be the republic's second nuclear power plant.
Ivan Hoffman, a well-known Czech commentator, says that every additional crown put into Temelin borders on the criminal. He suggests that the Social Democrats are eager to finish the project in order to win political contributions from CEZ.
Possibly the biggest booster of Temelin in the Zeman cabinet is Miroslav Gregr, minister of industry and trade. An old-school technocrat, Gregr is bullish on nuclear energy, envisioning it as the source of up to 50 percent of the country's energy needs in the next century. Not only does Gregr want to build new nuclear plants, he wants to reopen the country's uranium mines, where the communists' political prisoners once toiled.
Gregr argues that the country's inevitable economic growth makes Temelin an energy must-have. He also says the country's reserves of brown coal in the north will be exhausted by about 2020.
Others in favor of Temelin say that it would be more environmentally sound to generate nuclear energy than continuing to burn coal for electricity. The pollution spewed from coal-fired plants in the northern Czech Republic, southern Poland, and eastern Germany has caused massive deforestation. The area is called the “black triangle.”
But in March Environmental Minister Milos Kuzvart told the Czech daily Mlada Fronta that CEZ had already spent nearly $1.5 billion dollars to reduce the emission of pollutants at its coal-generating plants. He also argued that starting up Temelin would lead to massive unemployment in North Bohemia, where most of the country's coal pits are located.
Kuzvart's solution: turn Temelin into an industrial park. “Temelin already has the infrastructure, the technical systems needed for an industrial zone,” he told the Czech daily.
Meanwhile, others have suggested completing the reactors and then mothballing them until the country needs them. Austria has offered to help turn Temelin into an amusement park like the one at Germany's unfinished Kalkar nuclear power plant.
The environmental minister also said that the gradual liberalization of energy markets in Europe means that Temelin could be priced out of the market amid fierce competition from energy suppliers such as Electricité de France. That point was underlined by the report of the independent team.
In March, when I interviewed him for Radio Free Europe, Scott Foster, an energy analyst at the U.S.-based Cambridge Energy Research Associates, told me that energy markets will radically change in the coming years. He said national borders will soon play no role in generating, supplying, and distributing electricity. Instead, regional energy clusters will take over.
Where the Czech Republic figures into that is hard to predict. But, Foster notes, the republic's electric grid is already well connected to its neighbors to the West.
Foster adds that the Central European countries–Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia–“have migrated out of the eastern interconnected network and into what is called the ucpte, the Union for the Coordination of Production and Transport of Electricity, which is the Western interconnected grid.”
And so, the $2 billion question. The Czech government, which is focused on becoming integrated with Western Europe in every possible way, must now decide whether Temelin fits into Europe's evolving energy equation.