Euratom protest in Germany, 2015 (photo Uwe Hiksch)
All EU Member States are automatically obliged to be part of the EURATOM treaty, which promotes the development of nuclear power throughout the EU. It is high time to put an end to this situation, Â writes Hans-Josef Fell, president of the Energy Watch Group and a former member of the German parliament for the Greens. According to Fell, Brexit will offer a unique chance to dissolve EURATOM: since the UK will have to leave EURATOM as a result of Brexit, it will finally become clear that it is possible for countries like Germany to unilaterally leave the Treaty.
The British vote to leave the European Union deeply shocked both sides of the English Channel. Crashing financial markets, prospects of economic depression and calls from right-wing anti-Europeans to further split the EU, the biggest peace project on the continent since the World War II, are making headlines.
It is beyond doubt that Brexit will have disastrous consequences for the European community and especially the UK itself. The country might be facing a break-up, as a largely pro-European Northern Ireland considers joining the Republic of Ireland and Scotland is calling for a new independence referendum. All too long London has been blocking Scotlandâs political ambitions, among others the countryâs effort to switch to a 100% renewable energy supply.
Every new EU member state becomes a EURATOM member by default. Brexit means the reverse case must apply â the UK would have to withdraw from the EURATOM Treaty too
Yet, in the media outcry one good piece of news went unnoticed. If implemented, Brexit would de facto mean the UKâs withdrawal from all European treaties, including the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) treaty. Signed in 1957, EURATOM together with the European Economic Community and the already expired European Coal and Steel Community was one of the treaties establishing the EU.
Nuclear phase-out
EURATOM became the foundation of the nuclear industry in the European Union and due to numerous association agreements affects regions far beyond its borders. Just recently, on 28 June, Ukraine joined the EURATOM Research and Training Programme.
EURATOM is valid indefinitely and unlike the Lisbon Treaty does not include a withdrawal clause. For this reason, to this day the German Federal Government has rejected continuous calls to leave the treaty and in this way has officially been supporting nuclear energy despite its own nuclear phase-out by 2022.
Every new EU member state becomes a EURATOM member by default. Brexit means the reverse case must apply â the UK would have to withdraw from the EURATOM Treaty too.
It is high time for a EURATOM Conference, which hasnât taken place for decades
This means the British government would not be able to count on EURATOM financial and research support anymore. Thatâs the first bit of good news: it implies that Brexit might be the final nail in the coffin of the UKâs Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant project. Although EURATOM did not officially provide for a feed-in compensation for Hinkley Point C, DG Competition of the European Commission in 2014 did approve the UK governmentâs state aid for the project, based in part on DG Energyâs approval of the project in 2012 under the Euratom treaty.
Most importantly, as a result of Brexit the UK government will not be able to count on favourable EURATOM loans anymore, nor on the research programmes and disposal documents that EURATOM member states profit significantly from.
Note that other nuclear power projects in the UK are also affected. Thus, for example, the future of the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor, operated on behalf of Euratom by the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy near Oxford, is now in doubt.
Excuse for Germany
But that is not all. The British unilateral exit also proves wrong the German governmentâs claim that a unilateral withdrawal from EURATOM is impossible.
As a member of the German Parliament with the Green parliamentary group I have repeatedly called for Germany to leave the treaty, to no avail. So the other good news is that Brexit removes any excuse for Germany and other EU member states not to withdraw from the EURATOM treaty.
The signatory nations need to discuss the Brexit consequences. It is a high time for a EURATOM Conference, which hasnât taken place for decades. It is also a high time for Germany — the energy transition pioneer worldwide — to terminate financial support for EURATOM and to integrate the essential clauses on safety standards, nuclear waste disposal and population protection into an improved EU directive.
As the unity of the European Union is put under test, its foundations cannot be based on the EURATOM Treaty anymore
Needless to say the huge damage done by Brexit to European integration cannot be compensated. Yet, Brexit does offer a unique opportunity for the European community to put an end to the support of nuclear power. Therefore, the termination of the EURATOM Treaty needs to be put on the EU agenda now.
As the unity of the European Union is put under test, its foundations cannot be based on the EURATOM Treaty anymore. A core task of EURATOM was support of the nuclear industry. The treaty says it aims at creating âthe conditions necessary for the development of a powerful nuclear industryâ. It is long overdue to put an end to this support following the Chernobyl and the Fukushima disasters and a skyrocketing development of renewable energy worldwide.
Editor’s Note
Hans-Josef Fell was member of the German parliament from 1998 to 2013 in the Alliance 90/the Greens group. He is the co-author of the German Renewable Energy Sources Act 2000, and president of the Energy Watch Group.
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The Euratom Treaty has a sinister background. The idea in 1957 was an atomic bomb program common for at least Germany, Italy, and France. In Germany the, program, first under atomic minister Franz-Joseph Strauss and then under defense minister Franz-Joseph Strauss, was very controversial. 18 top nuclear physicists, including Werner Heisenberg wanted no part of it, but enough scientists, politicians and bureaucrats wanted to keep the nuclear option open, so Germany did not ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty until 1975. Neither did Italy.
The idea of a common bomb was killed soon, because when general de Gaulle came to power in 1958, he wanted an exclusively French bomb (which he got in 1960), not a European one.
Nevertheless the whole project was stained from the start. The preposterous notion of Euratom ownership of all member states uranium and plutonium stems from this ( Treaty, §57). This is not operative, but it is absolutely sick.
Euratom also colluded in the Israeli diversion of 200 tons of uranium in 1968.
The EU may have started as a peace project, but not exclusively.
Euratom is now a driving force behind the extremely silly nuclear fusion program, which has been running for 58 years and will not produce a single kWh until the 2040s, at the earliest.
Good riddance, if it can be undone.
Good luck, Hans-Josef!
Like other NGOs in Austria, PLAGE, Salzburg, has been working on the EURATOM issue ever since the Austrian government applied for EU (at that time EC) and EURATOM membership at the end of the 1980s. Commenting on Hans Josef Fell’s article, and taking into consideration a number of comments in the no-nukes-network:
1 â So far and for all 28 member states (MSS), parallel membership in the European Union and in EURATOM has been practically automatic. No MS has left either of the two. This may create an impression that an exit from the EU necessarily (i.e. juridically) means exit from EURATOM (& the corresponding treaties), and vice versa.
2 â In the member states actively non-nuclear, like Austria and now Germany, the illusion of such an absolute linkage between the EU and EURATOM treaties has been maintained by governments and the parties backing them – as an argument against the large majority of antinuclear movements and actors, who are unanimous in considering as contradictory to be or become nuclear-free on the one hand, and stay within THE nuclear-power promotion treaty and community, on the other.
3 â The legal reality, however, is clearly stated in three expertises presented over the years by experts in international and European law: The one quoted and commissioned by Hans-Josef Fell, done by Prof. Bernhard WEGENER, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the most elaborated and comprehensive one (70 pages, 2007); and two from Austria, one by Prof. Manfred ROTTER, Linz University (on behalf of the Regional Government of Upper Austria, 21 pp., 2003), the other by Prof. Michael GEISTLINGER, Salzburg University (on behalf of the Danish NGO NOAH, 2005). Independently from one another, all three came to the same conclusion: since the EURATOM Treaty (ET) has always been separate from the Union Treaty (TEU/Lisbon Treaty 1, or its predecessor treaties), it is perfectly possible and rightful for a member state to leave the ET while staying within the EU. And it is feasible, too: although, as H.-J. Fell has said, the ET has no expiry date and does not mention an exit procedure, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU/Lisbon Treaty) provides for such a procedure (which also holds for the ET since the TFEU is the more general treaty). And even before the TFEU came into effect, a EURATOM exit procedure could have been set up following international law principles and guidelines, according to Geistlinger and Rotter.
4 â This means that, whatever unwilling governments or political forces may say, MSS can quit EURATOM, and can do so without quitting the EU. It is a matter of negotiations. Complex negotiations for sure (if only because it has never been done), but certainly much less complicated than what the UK is now up to with the Brexit, i.e. quitting the EU as such.
5 â In the present situation, for Britain, it is logical then that this can also work the other way round: the future UK government might choose to implement the Brexit, i.e. terminate the Union Treaty, AND try to keep its EURATOM membership. And the other pronuclear MSS would quite certainly work for this to come into practice, so they could keep the UK as a EURATOM partner. Also, that might fit in with the UK going on more freely with Hinkley Point C, as the country wouldnât have to stick to EU rules (and a European Court of Justice judgement on Austria’s complaint) on state subsidies any more.* Unless, that is, the negotiations between the EU and the UK end up in a maintenance of subsidy rules!
6 â The fate of Hinkley Point C isnât just a matter of subsidies. Hasnâ t the project come into such turmoil that almost any likely new government might want to seize the opportunity to let it die? The coming government can do so without losing much of its face. Whereas David Cameron just couldnât have given up on HPC without losing his face. All do know that the Hinkley potato has become almost too hot to handle, or to eat. And that for dropping it, itâs NOW OR NEVER.
Furthermore, in the Brexit referendum, Cameron is the loser, Johnson is the winner. Cameron goes, Boris Johnson stays influential behind the scenes. Cameron has been clinging to HPC with all of his might, Johnson has called it âthis absolutely crazy deal with the French, EDF Energy, to produce nuclear energy which shows no sign of working and looks like being unbelievably expensive at approximately ÂŁ93 a kilowatt hourâ (Mayor’s Question Time, 16 Sept 2015). Now, you probably canât rely on Johnson not giving in to pressure. Still, he might maintain his stance.
7 â With or without relating to the Hinkley subsidies issue, a British wish to stay within EURATOM, along with the overall post-Brexit situation of everything moving, might prompt nuclear-critical member states to pose conditions to the UK staying within EURATOM.
8 â Wouldnât it even be logical for Austria, Germany, Luxemburg â with maybe Greece, Denmark, Ireland coming in at long last, too â to demand a revision of a number of articles of the ET as a âreturn giftâ (e.g. such articles as are at the base of the European Commissionâs approval of state subsidies for HPC)? In short, with everything getting stirred up now, once a discussion would be kicked off on revising certain elements of the ET, no one can know where this might finish.
Heinz Stockinger
PLAGE (The Salzburg Platform Against Nuclear Hazards),
http://www.plage.cc (in German only)
* In all events, it will remain interesting to see what will come out of the Austrian complaint filed with the (ECJ) against the state subsidies for HPC. That legal action will of course follow its due course, if only because the defendant is the Commission, not the UK. And the outcome will be of the greatest import independently from how the Brexit and HPC will finally materialise, since, as everybody knows, the ECJ verdict will decide on whether or not other pronuclear governments could push nuclear new build with state subsidies.
Mark Johnston, well-known expert on EU energy issues, has called my attention to the fact that Euratom does contain an exit provision in Article 106a, which refers to exit provisions in the Treaty on European Union (articles 49 and 50).
My guess is that I am still in the pre-Lisbon EURATOM Treaty, when there was merely a para 106 in it, and no 106a yet. I have sort of grown up with that earlier version of the ET…
Many thanks to Mark Johnston.
-Heinz Stockinger, PLAGE, Salzburg