Rebecca Harms, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – (DE) Mr President, Commissioner, may I say to Mr Reul that, since it has been more or less announced that the Greens do not approve of this report, I intend to focus on the points that I found most disturbing. These are also reflected in the amendments we have tabled.

During the drafting of this report it was impossible to engage in any critical reflection on nuclear energy. All the problems in Europe associated with the demise of the safety culture in our nuclear plants were off-limits, even though the incidents in Germany involving reactors operated by the Vattenfall company had just provided a glaring cautionary example. Discussion of the difficulty of funding waste disposal was likewise off-limits, as was the increasing threat of nuclear material being misused to build bombs or possibly for terrorist purposes.

I must tell you, Mr Reul, that there is one thing which has truly driven me to distraction, and I shall say this before we meet in Bratislava. It is the fact that in Slovakia now, in 2007, the Italian ENEL company is planning to complete a nuclear plant that was developed in the Soviet Union before Chernobyl. Construction began in Czechoslovakia in the early eighties, and two thirds of the construction work was completed. Now ENEL intends to finish building the plant without new planning permission and without having the plans checked for compliance with European standards. It is a disgrace.

People who sing the praises of nuclear energy have no right to go on disregarding that disgrace.