the position of Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher “recalls an imagination of the 70s”, regrets the négaWatt association

The Minister of Energy Transition declared in an interview with La Tribune Dimanche that France needs “nuclear power beyond the first six EPRs”.

The position of Agnès Pannier-Runacher “refers to an imagination which is much more that of the 70s than that of the 21st century”, regretted Sunday January 7 on France Inter Yves Marignac, spokesperson and head of analyzes and foresight at négaWatt, an association which promotes energy sobriety and the use of renewable energies. He was reacting to the interview with the Minister of Energy Transition in La Tribune Dimanche. “We need nuclear power beyond the first six EPRs”declared Agnès Pannier-Runacher, a few weeks before the presentation of the bill on energy sovereignty.

“The fact that the government has chosen to put nuclear power back at the center of its strategy is not a surprise”continues Yves Marignac, since the Head of State Emmanuel Macron had displayed this desire during the Belfort speech in February 2022. The President of the Republic then specified the timetable for the relaunch of nuclear power: six second-generation EPRs built by 2050, with an option for eight more.

A step back from the last sobriety plan

In this context, the spokesperson for négaWatt “feared” that the bill on energy sovereignty “marks a step backwards in relation to the real priorities on which the government, however, seemed to be moving forward in recent years, particularly with the sobriety plan”. All the more, Yves Marignac would like to emphasize that “France is the first country to have adopted a plan of this type”.

The text “breaks with the previous programming law, which reduced the share of nuclear power in the electricity mix to 50% by 2025”, specified Agnès Pannier-Runacher in her interview. Yves Marignac believes that “the government is doing the opposite of what it promotes, it is refocusing on nuclear power while today increasingly forgetting the rest”namely renewable energies. “The risk today is that, carried away by its momentum, a hubris on nuclear power, the government forgets the fundamental pillars of the energy transition, even though the reactors that the minister is talking about for the first six EPRs will not see the day before 2035/2040”notes the spokesperson for négaWatt.