On 12 and 13 October, the European Commission’s DG ENER convened the 19th European Nuclear Energy Forum (ENEF) in Prague, together with the Czech Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Slovak Ministry of Economy. SNETP Secretariat members Elisabeth Guillaut (Orano) and Szabolcs Szávai (AEMI Atomic Energy Engineering Ltd.) were among the participants. Coming right after the release of the Nuclear Illustrative Programme (PINC), the EU’s SMR strategy and the European Radioisotope Valley Initiative (ERVI), the discussions centred on the practical conditions for relaunching nuclear energy across Europe.
How the debate has changed
Speakers broadly shared the view that nuclear is seen very differently in Europe than it was a few years ago. Geopolitical instability, persistently high energy prices and the goal of lessening the EU’s strategic dependencies have placed it firmly in the conversation on industrial competitiveness and energy sovereignty. The motto of the forum was to move from announcements to action: the question is no longer whether Europe needs nuclear, but how to finance, license, staff and build projects on time and on budget.
Conditions for success
Representatives of the Commission, national governments and industry agreed that Europe must build up its industrial base along the whole nuclear value chain. France, Slovakia and Czechia, the Member States with new-build projects, joined nucleareurope in asking the Commission to approve State aid more quickly. Several participants also wanted clearer and more stable regulation, risk-sharing tools to draw in investors (with a bigger part for the European Investment Bank) and equal treatment of all technologies when accessing EU funds.
Skills were another recurring theme, as Europe will need to recruit between 180,000 and 250,000 new workers, most of them welders, electricians and technicians rather than nuclear engineers. The EU taxonomy also came up repeatedly. Many called for nuclear to be classified as an activity that contributes substantially to climate mitigation in its own right, rather than as a transition energy, a change that would also open the door to fuel cycle activities.
A full life-cycle approach
The forum also looked beyond reactors. On September 24, 2026, 23 EU Member States, with DG ENER acting as Secretariat, launched a Forum on Joint Approaches to Radioactive Waste Management. Multinational deep repositories remain politically and legally challenging, but Member States are keen to cooperate on pre-disposal services (treatment, reprocessing, packaging, interim storage), and open to regional options like bilateral waste exchanges or facility specialization.
€241 billion to invest by 2050
Céline Gauer, Director General for Energy (DG ENER), recalled that the PINC puts the investment required for new nuclear capacity in Europe at €241 billion through 2050. The Commission sets out three priorities:
- Improve the financial appeal of projects by limiting cost and budget overruns.
- Step up European cooperation to standardise and replicate projects, SMRs in particular, and to align safety authorities.
- Preserve public confidence through safety and transparency.
