Spain Urged to Rethink Nuclear Phase-Out After Blackout
MADRID (Reuters) -Nuclear power is needed to stabilise Spain's electrical system and the country should rethink its planned phase-out following last week's unprecedented blackout, the head of lobby group Foro Nuclear, Ignacio Araluce, said on Tuesday.
The outage that hit the Iberian Peninsula on April 28 has reignited the debate over the plan to decommission all of Spain's reactors by 2035. Some reactors were offline the day of the blackout, whose causes are being investigated.
Araluce said the logical response would be to keep the nuclear energy Spain has.
"Spain's nuclear power plants are essential to provide firmness and stability to the electricity system," he said.
In an interview with TVE broadcaster on Monday, Energy Minister Sara Aagesen said the government was waiting for proposals from nuclear plants before a planned meeting later this month to consider the decommissioning deadline.
The share of renewables as a source of electricity production in Spain has grown to 56% in 2024 from 43% a decade earlier, according to the grid operator, and Spain is targeting 81% by 2030.
Analysts and industry officials have said there was not enough stable power, such as gas and nuclear, available to provide backup for the more intermittent renewables when the outage happened.
Before it, three reactors out of seven were not in operation, two of them because the abundance of renewables has lowered energy prices, making it too expensive to operate the reactors.
Araluce said they had been halted with the agreement of grid operator Red Electrica.
He said all nuclear units were back in operation following safety checks.
The nuclear lobby group, as well as the companies owning the country's nuclear plants, have repeatedly urged policymakers to lower taxes, saying they mean the plants are unable to compete on the market.
"We have an enormous tax burden which is not comparable with other technologies," Araluce said, adding that the nuclear power industry was already paying for nuclear waste management and would finance the cost of decommissioning reactors.
(Reporting by Pietro Lombardi; editing by Barbara Lewis)
