French exceptionalism: a guide through the energy wars

In September last year the London based Economist opined, “geopolitics, technology, economics and the environment are all changing in nuclear’s favour”. The main reason: the bulk of fossil fuel is in the hands of instable or hostile countries, but an abundance of uranium comes from friendly Canada and Australia. Another reason: increasingly costly gas is setting electricity prices and has made existing nuclear plants greatly profitable.

Back to miraculous France. Upon travelling through the beautiful Loire valley during summer you will notice a nuclear power station with an attractive design by the father of Op-art Victor Vasarely. A few hundred meters downstream you may then observe people blithely enjoying a dip in the river.

Contrary to most other rather boring power stations the French boast an almost Cartesian-Palladian design. During the better part of the last century French exceptionalism granted firm support by the political left for nuclear energy. In fact the founder and head for the first decade of the French post-war atomic enterprise was a leading communist: Nobel Prize winner Frederic Joliot-Curie. Everywhere else the left opposed nuclear power with only marginal exceptions such as Britain’s Tony Benn.

It was only when, for a short while, in the late 1980s France tried to “bury” nuclear waste permanently in dumpsites that protest flared up. After officials understood the psychology behind the protests, the desecration of the earth, order and calm was restored with a policy of temporary storage on site until science can deal with the problem.

In the era of knowledge-based economies Australia could learn a lot from France’s exceptionally strong cultural appreciation of scientific progress - famously expressed in very popular projects like the high-speed train TGV, the late supersonic Concorde, Airbus 380 or the fusion reactor ITER. This is an international cutting-edge research project, co-ordinated by France in which scientist hope to generate energy from the fusion of the massive nuclei of trans-uranic elements. Other parties are the European Union, Japan, China, India, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the USA.

France boasts that, since 1973, it has continuously increased nuclear electricity generation so that it is now close to 80 per cent of the country’s needs, thus reversing her role from being a net energy importer to being by now the largest exporter of electricity in the world. Italy, Belgium, UK and Germany are meanwhile major customers of “politically incorrect” nuclear electricity from France - generating revenues of €3 billion a year.

Obviously this did not happen by chance. It was the result of thorough thinking and pure necessity. France has few fossil fuel resources of its own, and therefore the nuclear option was pivotal to post-war reconstruction.

France commenced with a quasi-autonomous institution, called Comissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA), directly linked to the Prime Minister and therefore not subject to budget battles. Nevertheless it was again the exceptional trust in French public service officials, who tend to be trained engineers - rather than lawyers as typical in the US - that helped to maintain public confidence in the nuclear program.

The excellent security record of the French nuclear industry is usually attributed to synergies from central management, reactor standardisation, a better learning curve and better homogenous training facilities for personnel. France has reached a higher degree in standardisation in her nuclear industry than anyone else in the world.

But after the oil shock and the huge extension of the French nuclear power program public trust was also greatly enhanced by multi million dollar television advertising campaigns that explained the necessity of electricity generation: “France does not have oil, but France has ideas.” Public tours to power plants in the past, taken up by 6 million visitors, have also helped to produce a steady acceptance. With her first commercial reactor commissioned in 1963 the average age of French reactors is now 18 years giving them a remaining operating time of about 22 years. Therefore France is well positioned to utilise significant amounts of nuclear energy in the decades to come.

However still 50 per cent of her total energy consumption comes from imported oil, down from 76 per cent in 1973. Of the ₣400 hundred billion (francs) (in 1993 prices) for its nuclear program half has been self-financed by “Electricite de France” (EdF), 8 per cent invested by government, and 42 per cent financed through commercial loans.

France claims that its latest generation N4 reactors (1,450MW) which have operated in Civaux since 1999 are at least as economic as equal sized coal plants and well below costs of gas-fired units. This has made France’s electricity among the cheapest in Western Europe. French and German engineers are presently developing the next generation of nuclear reactors, the European Pressurised Water (EPR) reactor expected to start operation over the next five years. The Italians are jostling to join in as well.