Bellona nuclear digest. March 2024
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
News
Publish date: November 30, 2009
Written by: Ilias Vazaios
News
As president of the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA), president of the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC), and a board member of PPC’s own renewable unit, Zervos’s new position is a clear indication that Greece’s newly elected government is taking seriously its campaign commitments for a better environment.
The election campaign featured commitment to boost Greece’s renewable energy credentials toward the goal of attaining a greener, more environmentally friendly economy.
Following Zervos’s appointment to his new position, Greek Minister of Environment, Energy and Climate Change, Tina Birbili, said she expects PPC’s new management to redraft the state corporations investment plan to favour her ministry’s new political direction.
Greece, according to environmental observers, has long been in need of a political shove that would promote green economic growth to boost its ailing economy. The Zervos appointment could signal an important first step toward decarbonising Greece, which currently produces 57 percent of its electricity burning lignite – a process that accounts for 40 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
As one of Greece’s now-most powerful energy decision makers, it is imperative that Zervos follow a policy that examines all potential emissions reduction technologies and methods already on hand with sober objectivity.
Zervos’s appointment affords a unique opportunity – under the new PPC business plant that he will oversee – for Greece to accelerate the replacement of numerous aging and polluting lignite units with more efficient ones that will fully employ carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies in a bid to completely counteract **CO2 emissions.
Environmentalists, including Bellona, urge the Greek government and the new leadership of PPC under Zervos to change their tack toward CCS. Renewable energy and CCS should be used in parallel, which will allow Greece to exploit lignite, its only domestic fuel, and thereby achieve its ambitious emissions reduction goals – which will lead to Greece’s complete disentanglement with a coal based energy economy.
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has told the United Nations atomic energy watchdog that Russia plans to restart Ukraine’s embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, currently occupied by Russian troops and technicians, fueling worries about a serious nuclear accident on the front lines of a grinding military conflict.
Wednesday, April 10, 2024 | Brussels, Belgium – Today, the European Parliament approved the newly revised Construction Products regulation (CPR)...
Recent attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant "mark the beginning of a new and gravely dangerous front of the war," the UN atomic agency's director general said last week.