For decades, France has been a living laboratory for atomic energy, getting nearly three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear power — a higher proportion by far than in any other country, reports The New York Times.
And France’s nuclear companies have long been seen as leaders in building and safely operating uranium-fueled reactors around the world — including in the United States — and championed by Paris as star exporters and ambassadors of French technological prowess.
But in the last few years, the French dynamo has started to stall. New plants that were meant to showcase the industry’s most advanced technology are years behind schedule and billions of euros over budget. Worse, recently discovered problems at one site have raised new doubts about when, or even if, they will be completed.
This is not France’s problem alone, but a challenge to the entire energy-consuming world. As worries mount about the dangers fossil fuels pose to the global climate, many countries still see atomic power as a path to clean energy, despite the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.
When Paris plays host to United Nations climate talks later this year, French officials are planning to remind anyone who will listen that nuclear reactors are a low-carbon power source. But if the French can no longer demonstrate that modern nuclear power plants can be built on time and on budget, that could add to the stigma that has made many countries think twice, over concerns about safety and radioactive waste. Germany and Switzerland, for example, have dropped nuclear power as an energy option.
Many nations in the developing world, though, see little choice but to adopt nuclear power as the hazards of burning coal become all too evident. If the French industry cedes its global leadership after six decades of building and operating nuclear reactors without major mishap, less seasoned providers from China and Russia would increasingly fill the vacuum.
Alarmed by the French industry’s problems, the Socialist government of President François Hollande is expected soon to announce an industry overhaul. As the majority owner of the country’s two main nuclear companies — the reactor maker Areva and the big utility operator Électricité de France — the government will aim not only to put the companies on a firmer financial footing but to reorganize them in hopes of restoring the French industry’s role-model luster.
On Thursday, Areva took the first of those steps by announcing big cost-cutting plans. The move is likely to trim as many as 6,000 jobs from the company’s global work force of 45,000 — as many of 4,000 of those coming in France.
A helping hand for Areva could come from China, where the French industry has been a player since that country decided in 1983 to build its first nuclear plant under the industrial reforms advocated by Deng Xiaoping.
On Wednesday, China National Nuclear Corporation told reporters in Beijing that it would be interested in making a financial investment in Areva. The French company responded in a statement that same day that “we are happy that CNNC is ready to strengthen its cooperation with Areva.”
CNNC and another company with which Areva and Électricité de France have long worked, China General Nuclear Power Corporation, have previously signed letters of intent to participate in a big project in which the French companies are poised to play a leading role. That project, planned for Hinkley Point, England, has won British government approval as the country’s first new nuclear plant in decades.
But the stumbles elsewhere by Areva and Électricité de France — better known as EDF — have raised troubling questions about the viability and cost of the Hinkley Point plant. And while Prime Minister David Cameron has courted the Chinese, other British officials have raised security questions about involving state-backed Chinese companies.
With the French companies struggling, some nuclear experts see a slippery geopolitical slope.
"The problems with Areva may open the door for Russia and Chinese reactor exports, but Chinese and Russian exporters are plagued by lack of a track record in building and siting their new reactor designs, and little is known about the safety standards of these reactors,” said Antony Froggatt, a nuclear analyst at Chatham House, a London-based research organization.
South Korea, despite rattling the French nuclear industry by winning a $20 billion deal to build reactors in Abu Dhabi in 2009, also suffers from limited international experience, Mr. Froggatt said.
As part of the French government’s overhaul, Areva, the country’s standard-bearer in nuclear reactor design and construction, is expected to cede those parts of the business to its much bigger compatriot company EDF — whose sales last year of nearly 73 billion euros, or $82 billion, dwarfed Areva’s 8.3 billion euros.