Germany’s Green party demanded Thursday the government block a controversial planned French-Russian nuclear project in the west of the country, saying it would risk enabling espionage and sabotage by Moscow.
A subsidiary of French company Framatome runs a fuel rod assembly facility in the town of Linge and in March 2022 applied for permission to enter into a joint venture there with Russia’s state-owned nuclear power agency Rosatom to produce rods used in Russian-designed reactors.
Rosatom has been exempted from the successive rounds of EU sanctions imposed against Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Germany’s Greens have long been opposed to nuclear energy on environmental grounds but said that the project in Lingen also brings security risks.
At an event on Thursday to discuss the project, Green MP Konstantin von Notz said: “The fact that we are discussing a Russian company taking part in such a project in Germany in 2025, after we went through such problems to free ourselves from dependence on Russian gas, is a brutal contradiction.”
The state of Lower Saxony, where Lingen is located, has to decide on the application but the Greens say federal authorities should step in to prevent the project.
They say that allowing such projects will enable Russia to create “further strategic dependencies” for other countries and that Russia will receive “information on very sensitive nuclear facilities on German soil”.
Germany has been Ukraine’s second-biggest supplier of aid since 2022 and is on high alert for possible Russian sabotage operations.
Germany itself closed the last of its own nuclear reactors in 2023.
“Germany shouldn’t be financing Russia’s war but should finally complete its own exit from the nuclear industry,” Juliane Dickel from the environmentalist group BUND said at Thursday’s event.
Activists in France have also criticised the government for continuing to import uranium from Russia for its own nuclear industry.
