ABSTRACT
Western Europe is the second-largest energy-consuming region in the world after the USA, but its heavy dependence on imported energy, mainly oil but also natural gas and coal, is comparatively recent. In the post-war years the abundance of cheap oil from the Middle East oilfields resulted in the conversion to an oil-based economy. During the 1980s oil and oil prices underpinned most discussions of West European energy issues, but the heavy ordering of nuclear power plants that had occurred in the 1960s and 1970s slowed dramatically. The European Community (EC) set up Euratom in 1958 but that organization's economic raison d'être soon vanished with a coal surplus in the early 1960s and the increasing flow of cheap oil. In May 1974 the first thoughts of the European Commission on the rate at which Western Europe could switch from oil to nuclear were that the Nine would need to have installed 200 reactors of 1,000 MWe each by 1985.
