A graduate in physical sciences and chief engineer of Mines, she founded Areva and made it the world leader in nuclear power. Today, as head of ALP, she advises companies, governments and entrepreneurs on their strategies.
The author, a privileged witness of the French nuclear industry, offers her reading on the “Saga” of nuclear power in France, delivers her diagnosis on the existing situation and finally proposes avenues for reflection for the future.
Energy has been the determining factor in the evolution of humanity. It was so with the domestication of fire about 400,000 years ago, wind and solar in the Bronze Age, and then in the late 18th century with coal and hydraulics, joined by oil and gas at the beginning of the modern era. Profound social, political and economic changes accompany each energy transformation.
From the end of the 19th century, France, a major consumer of fossil fuels, developed the desire to reduce its dependency by moving towards an energy mix and diversifying its supplies. The wars in the Middle East and the loss of gas and oil fields in Algeria reinforced this orientation, which, from 1974, included a nuclear energy component.
The official announcement, in 1974, of a vast nuclear program, subject of a political and trade union consensus, was based on the mastery of a good technology. The announcement allowed the sector to accelerate and, above all, be financed. In the late 1990s, France had five global giants (Total, GDF Suez, Alstom Power, Areva, EDF), in a context of security and global recognition.
From the 2000s, this building was challenged by environementalist movements, suffered the European doxa, was deconstructed by a national policy largely influenced by the choices of personalities from most anti-nuclear movements, by the virtual abandonment of hydroelectric energy, by environmental activism, by the growing weight of Germany, a coal subscriber, in European decision-making process. These factors added together explain the downgrading of France in the ranking of the level of payload (Ratio of actual production/theoretical capacity), from over 90% to less than 70%, which relegated it from the top to the last of the 32 countries that have developed nuclear energy. As a result, French electricity, once the cheapest in Europe, has become more expensive with its industrial consequences and the impoverishment of the country, Europe having indexed the KWh on the marginal price of the last KWH produced by natural gas plant ie in Germany…
In addition to this observation, there are many French specificities: voluntary limitation of the nuclear energy production from 20 to 80% depending on the efficiency of renewable energies, which would partly explain the erosion of the circuits; a pause time of 100 days every 12 months in France compared to 38 days every 18 months in the United States. This difference is all the more remarkable since the fuel loading in the United States is provided by Framatome. It is necessary to underline the absence of a universal parameter, the payload, referring instead to the TWh taken as a ceiling, corresponding to a maximum payload of 70% whereas elsewhere, the latter is between 93 and 88%! Finally, is the current structure (EDF, RTE, and Enedis) a guarantee of transparency, efficiency, and economy?
In conclusion, the author highlights the shortcomings of our industry and the means, without colossal investments, to remedy them by giving back to nuclear and hydraulic energy their preeminence, the urgent need for a policy based on ambitious objectives to halt the decline of our industries and give purchasing power to consumers, communicate to make our decisions understandable, avoid about-turns without impact studies, and finally introduce more professionalism to avoid amateurism in conflicts of national and European interests.
A very dense work, documented with a widely developed European part (ECSC, Brussels) which allows us to better understand the underside of Franco-European decisions and the state of France.
Anne LAUVERGEON, to whom we owe “The Promise” (Grasset)
Note by Hubert ALCARAZ
