As of today, one of the reactors of the Chinon nuclear power plant, in Indre-et-Loire, is shut down. This will be the case for two other reactors in France, in the coming weeks, because it is a matter of checking that there is no corrosion problem, and therefore, in total, 8 of the 56 French reactors will be shut down, so the government has allowed the last highly polluting coal-fired power stations to produce more.
With Jean Viard*, sociologist, research director at the CNRS, we are talking about today this nuclear issue in our country. Unot a social issue, of course.
franceinfo: A political question also Jean Viard, in this presidential campaign, with this dilemma presented: is nuclear energy a green energy or not? This is a debate that has been raging for a long time in France.
John Viard: Europe has just classified it on the edge of green energies, in the sense that, effectively, it does not contribute to global warming, which indeed must always be repeated. One thing must also be said, which is that the French are mostly in favor of nuclear power today, which was less the case a few years ago.
But afterwards, you have to see that nuclear power is perceived as an ecology in the transition, that is to say that we were in oil and coal economy models, to be caricatural; and then, we built 443 reactors on the planet which produce only 10% of the energy of the world today. Because the world of tomorrow, with electric cars, the abandonment of oil, etc., we are obviously going to have to increase energy production considerably, so that is the backdrop.
It’s a complicated subject because we’re still very afraid of nuclear power and then it’s a very political subject. Brice Lalonde has just released a book entitled: Excuse me for disturbing you. Brice Lalonde, the former Minister of the Environment, has now taken a pro-nuclear position, and he says that basically, the French ecological culture, at the time when we started discussing nuclear power, under de Gaulle , she was for oil, and in fact we were not yet talking about global warming. We had not seen the disadvantages of oil.
According to Brice Lalonde, environmentalists have remained stuck on an anti-nuclear position which dates from a time when they were for oil. Obviously, today, we can no longer be pro-oil. We have to reassess the data, and the idea is that we will need more and more electricity, which will be produced by solar power, wind power, biomass, a set of technical tools . And then, France is a military nuclear power. Let’s not be completely naive. There are links between military nuclear power and civilian nuclear power. However, France is the only nuclear country in the European Union.
We can remember today that 88% of the electricity we produce in France is of nuclear origin, 9% of renewable for consumption, it’s a little different, but the French objective – that’s that perhaps the term transition takes on its full meaning – it is to reduce the share of nuclear power in the energy mix to 50% by 2035.
You spoke to us about nuclear weapons, which is part of French strategy. Nuclear power, overall, is a sector of excellence in France, with many jobs defended, in this respect too?
Several hundred thousand jobs. We had also lost a bit of skills. We can clearly see that the EPR that we are building in Flamanville, the least we can say is that it dragged on, that there are errors, welds, etc. So, we lost skills somewhere, when we no longer manufactured power stations.
And then, the power stations, we sell them abroad, because there is also an issue, it is that the major technological countries remain the masters of the nuclear power stations. If we put them everywhere on the planet, the people who control them would have to have excellent technical levels, otherwise it’s extremely dangerous, it’s very delicate to operate a nuclear power plant. It’s a big French sector, it’s several hundred thousand jobs, and then, it’s a big innovation sector, so nuclear power is a movement, it’s not stopped.
It’s a movement, it’s not stopped, but there really is this debate: transition energy, as many argue today, energy for the future? Perhaps not, with the limits that we can know: sovereignty, on the one hand, uranium imports, and then the whole issue of waste reprocessing, which is also a big limit?
The real problem is waste. It is true that there can be an accident in a power station. As there have been thousands of deaths in the mines, there are still some all the time in certain countries, such as China or India, so underground mining has always been extremely dangerous.
Here, indeed, the big question is reprocessing, that is to say the new innovations that may or may not allow them to be reused. Honestly, we don’t know. It’s true that that’s the big negative side. The big positive side is that it does not contribute to global warming. However, in the hierarchy of fears in the destruction of humanity, the great risk at the moment is global warming. Which was not the case 30 years ago. That’s why, I think we’re going to go back in this direction and moreover, we announced EPRs, that gives a direction.
* former LREM candidate in the legislative elections, in the 5th constituency of Vaucluse in 2017