To decarbonize our electricity, “we will have to one way or another” build new EPR nuclear reactors, analysis Wednesday 10 November on franceinfo Thierry Bros, energy expert and professor at Sciences Po Paris. He believes that choosing between nuclear energy and renewables (wind, solar) amounts to choosing between “electricity on demand”, accessible and consumable 24 hours a day, and a “intermittent electricity” for renewables, because France does not currently have the technologies and batteries to store the energy produced by wind turbines and solar and photovoltaic panels.
During his speech on Tuesday, November 9, Emmanuel Macron announced the construction of new nuclear reactors, without explicitly specifying that it will be EPR, new generation reactors. The RTE electricity network operator recommended the construction of EPR type reactors in its report presenting six scenarios on the future of the French network by 2050.
franceinfo: Is nuclear the only solution today, the only operational model for decarbonizing electricity?
Thierry Bros: To decarbonize, you need either nuclear or renewable. Except that for renewable, it is necessary with storage bricks, seasonal storage. And these big batteries, we do not know how. We don’t have this technology. To put it simply, you compare electricity on demand, carbon-free nuclear, with intermittent electricity, also carbon-free, and coming from renewable sources. You will only have solar and wind power when the sun or the wind is present.
Wednesday morning, on franceinfo, environmental MEP David Cormand affirmed that nuclear power is a technology that France has never mastered, and which is obsolete. Is he right ?
Never mastered, it’s a bit surprising in the land of Marie Curie. We can imagine that France is a great nuclear country. We have nevertheless built a hundred reactors, and we have been able to harness this energy. There were no accidents in France. Indeed, we can regret the decline or loss of skills on the construction of the last EPR [à Flamanville, le premier réacteur EPR n’est toujours pas opérationnel, quatorze ans après le début du chantier]. This is indeed the case. But we can also remember that the Chinese are able to do it. And then, we will have to rebuild this nuclear industry. But one can imagine that the engineers of 2020 are as competent as those of 1970. In energy, there have not been many quantum leaps. We use more or less the same technologies as in 1970.
Does it seem feasible to build six new EPRs on the territory?
We will have to do it one way or another. Either we do it, and we arrive at carbon-free energy. Either we don’t and we won’t have carbon-free energy. The next option, which is energy sobriety [la réduction de la consommation d’électricité] is kind of like lowering taxes. Everyone talks about it very often, but I rarely see it. Conducting an energy policy solely on sobriety is leading to the crisis we are seeing today. We closed the Fessenheim plant and decided that we should invest less in oil and gas, because we believed in energy sobriety. But since this demand is not going down, and if it is not going down in the future, how do we do it?