The passion for more and more nuclear reactors is cooling among Czech politicians.


Love in the Time of Nuclear: Jana Sistikova and Antonin Pazdera (is the groom by any chance a relation of the nuclear enthusiast and former deputy minister of industry & trade, Frantisek Pazdera?) are in no doubt that Temelin is in the public interest. They were married there to make their point. Ladka Bauerova of Bloomberg has the story and it’s a scream. Click here.

All Czech political parties (all apart from the Greens that is) have exactly the same position on the subject: “We are in favour –if it makes economic sense.”

Like you, I am in favour of a great many things, including nuclear reactors and even politicians –if they make economic sense. But I am not in favour of politicians that are unable to explain how building two more nuclear reactors with taxpayers' money makes sense.

Do they know?

The passion for nuclear among the Czech political elite has cooled. It was only last year that the government draft of the Czech energy policy plan recommended that, in addition to the planned two new nuclear reactors at Temelin, a further eight 1,000-MW reactors be added to the existing generation fleet by 2060. The industry ministry’s latest version of the plan envisages completing only one of the two planned Temelin reactors by 2025, with the second delayed until 2030.

Politicians may have read the study by A.T. Kearney commissioned by Rosatom which claims that the Czech economy will be 600 billion units of the local currency better off if the Russians win the Temelin contract. But apparently none of them really believes it.

But hang on a minute! Is it not a little late to decide that it might all be a colossal waste of public money? Do not these doubts rather suggest that the tender, in which millions of roubles and dollars have already been invested in order to win, is unwinnable. Surely this has not all been for the benefit of local law firms and PR consultants? (It wouldn’t be the first time. There are millions to be made in feasibility studies and legal opinions –who said you need to build anything!)

Every party will tell you it is competent to run the country but none is willing to tell you that the economics of Temelin are a nonsense and the project is best dropped.

What are they afraid of?

Is the electorate so attached, like the happy couple pictured above, to the idea of more and more nuclear reactors, that politicians are scared to admit to them that the economics suck? Or is it that the politicians still believe in the possibility of a nuclear revival led by Frantisek Pazdera of UJV Rez and CEZ, the author of that energy draft mentioned earlier and perhaps the father of the groom pictured above?

This newly discovered doubt might be a good thing, a sign of intelligent life in the political elite. Have the days gone when the only valid question was not whether but how many? Can we hope that serious consideration is at last being given to the question of where the markets are heading and of the potential of alternative energy sources and energy savings in the next fifty years?

Do not jump to hasty conclusions. The unwillingness of politicians to state clearly that the nuclear sums no longer add up is just as likely to be an indication, not of calculation but of calculated fear -of losing sources of party funding to fight an election.

In his meeting yesterday with the Russian steelmaker Evraz, the president reportedly warned Evraz that the Russian-led MIR 1200 consortium had no chance of being selected to enlarge Temelin unless Evraz stayed in the Czech republic (it is thinking of closing up and going home.) So the president still regards the project as a bargaining chip.

Politicians can always afford to promise. But they cannot afford to abandon the sunk cost fallacy (if we abandon the project now, we shall lose all the money we have already invested) that sustains the Temelin project -at least not until November 2013.