Ribera rejects extending the life of nuclear power plants

The third vice-president and Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, has rejected extending the useful life of nuclear power plants a year after the electricity escalation and the skyrocketing energy prices. The European Commission proposed last Wednesday to increase the share of coal and nuclear power plants in the energy mix as part of the REPower EU package, which seeks to reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels by two thirds this year to eliminate imports from Moscow by the end of the decade.On this issue, the secretary general of UGT Fica (the union's federation of Industry, Construction and Agriculture), Pedro Hojas, has also expressed his opinion this week, calling yesterday for extending the timetable for the closure of nuclear power plants due to the "energy situation that currently exists in Europe" and for the "guarantee of supply offered by this technology".Likewise, there have also been pronouncements by the Popular Party (PP) and Ciudadanos to extend the timetable for the closure of nuclear power plants in Spain.The businessmen have shown themselves to be firmly in favor of continuing to use nuclear power plants and have blamed the rise in electricity prices on "poor planning of the Spanish energy strategy", which has included the closure of nuclear power plants and coal plants, while they are being opened in other European countries. The CEOE employers' association points out that "France is 70 percent nuclear", at the same time that "in Holland a nuclear plant is being built", while "in the United Kingdom they are going from 15 to 25 percent nuclear energy, and in Belgium the nuclear issue is also being managed".