This material reflects the views and independent research of the author and does not necessarily represent the position of CAN EECCA or its member organisations.
Marking the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, Hanna Skryhan (Green Network) has prepared a policy analysis titled “Nuclear Renaissance or Nuclear Mirage? Power, Politics and the Unresolved Contradictions of the Atom’s Return” — an examination of whether the global “nuclear renaissance” is a genuine industrial transformation or a political narrative substituting for one. The paper covers construction and cost data, IPCC scenario analysis, the Rosatom problem, and Europe’s nuclear politics.
Hanna’s comment:
“The real question is whether nuclear power can actually deliver what the climate crisis demands: fast, affordable, and scalable decarbonisation… New Western nuclear plants take 15–20 years to build and cost several times more per kilowatt-hour than wind or solar. The climate window is the 2020s and 2030s. New nuclear delivers capacity in the 2040s. That temporal mismatch is not a technicality — it is the central problem…
97% of new reactor construction starts in 2020–2024 were in China and Russia. The countries declaring a nuclear renaissance are not the countries building one. And what is being built — primarily through Rosatom’s Build-Own-Operate model — creates exactly the kind of long-term geopolitical dependency the energy transition is supposed to overcome.
For the EECCA region, these concerns are not abstract. The Zaporizhzhia occupation added a dimension that no safety standard anticipated: civilian nuclear infrastructure as an instrument of military coercion. For countries in Russia’s neighbourhood, this is not a distant risk — it is the current operating reality of the region’s largest nuclear plant.”
This material reflects the views and independent research of the author and does not necessarily represent the position of CAN EECCA or its member organisations.