After tortuous negotiations, France's Greens have finally ratified an electoral pact drawn up with the Socialist Party which centres on a steep reduction in nuclear power production and the development of renewable energy sources. The agreement, which has triggered alarm bells in the French nuclear industry, seals an alliance between both parties for the legislative elections that will immediately follow next year's presidential poll. Jade Lindgaard examines the facts and figures behind the programme to reduce nuclear energy production, and reports on the last-minute political high drama that came close to leaving it stillborn.
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It was a long and turbulent process, complete with final-hour brinkmanship, that ended on Sunday when the federal council of the French Green party, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, formally announced it had ratified an electoral pact with the Socialist Party (PS), France's principal opposition party.
The deal, voted by national delegates on Saturday and already approved by the PS, has sent panic throughout the French nuclear industry, one of the biggest in the world, with its plan to decommission 24 of France's 58 nuclear reactors by the year 2025, and to halt production of MOX, a recycled nuclear fuel.
In electoral terms, it essentially means that the two parties will not enter into a fratricidal battle for political constituencies which the left is in a position to win in the legislative elections that will follow, next June, the election of a new French president. The Socialist Party has agreed to leave 60 constituencies, out of 577, to candidates of the Green party, which currently has just four Members of Parliament. In the case of a socialist majority being returned next June, the pact foresees a parliamentary and government coalition.
The nuclear lobby is particularly rattled by the prospect with opinion polls currently forecasting a victory of the left in both the presidential and legislative elections. France currently produces 75% of its electricity from nuclear power, and the parties' agreement binds them to reduce this to 50% by 2025 while developing renewable forms of energy.
It comes after months of negotiation and notably a running dispute over the construction of a new generation nuclear plant, a European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), at Flamanville, on the Normandy coast, facing the English Channel. The Greens want the project stopped, while the Socialists want it to go ahead. The two parties finally agreed to leave their opposing positions on one side.
However, that climbdown has reportedly incensed the Green's presidential candidate, former examining magistrate Eva Joly, who was conspicuous by her absence during the voting on Saturday, which ratified the deal by a 74% majority.
Reaching the agreement has been fraught with difficulties; signed by party leaders last week, it came close to collapse in the final days. The text approved by the Socialist Party's national bureau on November 15th was missing a paragraph from the original agreement. This concerned those plants that currently make MOX, a nuclear fuel produced from mixed oxides of uranium and plutonium. The original paragraph called for these sites to be converted, with no loss of jobs, into centres of excellence responsible for dismantling nuclear facilities and storing nuclear waste.
As Mediapart exclusively reported, it emerged that the paragraph was withdrawn under orders from Socialist Party presidential candidate François Hollande, following intense lobbying from Areva, the French nuclear company that manufactures MOX, causing fury among the Greens. The paragraph was reinstated two days later with an explanatory note claiming the episode was simply due to divergences over interpretation.
Overall, the agreement falls far short of the ecological revolution the Greens had hoped for, even if there are some advances on environmental issues. In particular, the plan to cut nuclear-powered production of electricity to 50% does no more than repeat Hollande's long-stated position.
The agreement sets out that this reduction would be achieved by closing 24 reactors which would be chosen for their vulnerability to seismic or flooding risks, or on grounds of age or needing costly maintenance work. No new reactors would be built and the plan for an EPR at Penly, also on the Normandy coast, would be abandoned. France's oldest nuclear plant, at Fessenheim in Alsace, near the German border, would be closed.
The plan also allows for a detailed review of investment decisions concerning 80% of France's nuclear power installations that will have been in service for 40 years or more by 2027.
The two parties agreed on a climate and energy tax to replace the aborted carbon tax proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy. This would initially be set at 36 euros per tonne of CO2 in 2012, significantly more than the 14 euros suggested by Sarkozy in 2009, and would rise to 56 euros in 2020.
They propose to hold a public debate before summer 2013 leading to a law setting out the framework for an energy transition. This idea follows a proposal from France's sole independent energy think-tank, Negawatt, for prioritising reductions in energy demand and improvements in buildings' energy performance. Other measures include a national energy efficiency plan across all economic sectors and the renovation to improve energy efficiency of a million homes per year.
They also promise to create 600,000 ‘green' jobs in thermal insulation, renewable energy, rail infrastructure and equipment, public transport and organic farming. But without costing or a time scale, this promise remains vague. The parties also want to outlaw shale gas and oil exploration and extraction.
Another proposal is to separate production and sale of electricity from transport and distribution, which would herald a change in statute for utility giant EDF, which has a monopoly on electricity distribution and acts as a major brake on developing renewables in France.
The remaining differences
Nevertheless, significant differences remain between the Greens and socialists over their approaches to nuclear power and energy planning, which were conveniently put to one side during the negotiations but which are bound to cause controversy and lively debate ahead. Here, Mediapart examines the key issues that divide the two parties:
- How credible is the plan to cut nuclear-generated electricity to 50% by 2025?
The Greens dispute the Socialist Party compromise proposition to cut nuclear-generated electricity to 50% of the total by 2025. Doing so would reduce by a third the share of electricity generated from nuclear power, a change comparable to Germany's policy of abandoning atomic energy. Nuclear power provided 23% of Germany's electricity in 2010, but that has come down to around 16% since eight reactors were closed following the accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March.
The plan may appear credible as its target date is not too far in the future. However, this is not the case, according to nuclear expert Yves Marignac of Negawatt. "This is an illusion because the real decisions fall over the next five years," he said.
By 2027, a mere two years after the target date for implementing the plan, 80% of France's nuclear reactors will have been in service for over 40 years, bringing them close to the end of their lifespan.
The longest any nuclear reactor has operated before being decommissioned is 46.5 years, at Sellafield in Great Britain. Out of 560 working nuclear reactors worldwide, only around 20 have been in service for over 40 years.
Safety concerns dictate that after 40 years, either these reactors would have to be shut or would need huge investment to upgrade them. "It is a dangerous illusion to believe that it is enough to just gradually reduce to 50% in 2025," Marignac said.
Since 80% of nuclear plants would be concerned, even if electricity consumption were to remain stable up to 2025, 10 new EPR reactors would be needed if France were to obtain 50% of its electricity from atomic energy at that date, Marignac said. This dilemma explains the sharp discord surrounding the Flamanville EPR.
The other difficulty is that if aging reactors are to be replaced by renewables by 2027, work needs to start now on developing such replacements. It takes time to set up terrestrial or sea-based wind power plants, to install solar panels or to get working on deriving energy from biomass.
The same is true for reducing energy consumption through equipping industries and households to become more energy efficient. If such measures were not given time to take their place in the energy mix, there would be a risk of drastic power cuts or a need to extend the lifespan of existing nuclear installations.
"François Hollande's position has a major drawback. It legitimises the nuclear industry's strategy of presenting a fait accompli," commented Yves Marignac.
The cost and viability of nuclear withdrawal
- How much would it cost to reduce nuclear production to 50%?
Estimates vary as to just how much it would cost to bring nuclear power's share of electricity production down to 50%.
According to a report by the French electricity federation, L'Union Française de l'Électricité published on November 8th, bringing nuclear power down to supplying 50% of France's electricity in 2030 would require investment of 382 billion euros. This is 60 billion euros more than the investment needed if nuclear's share remains close to its current level at 70% at that date.
This is far less than EDF chief executive officer Henri Proglio's estimate for investment needed to withdraw altogether from nuclear power. Speaking at a debate organised by daily newspaper Le Parisien with its readers and published on November 7th, Proglio said a full withdrawal would cost 400 billion euros and would bring about a doubling in electricity bills.
However, according to Europe Ecologie-Les Verts' energy commission, "all forward-looking studies, including those from the nuclear lobby, show that it would be necessary to invest roughly the same amount to stay in nuclear as to withdraw from it."
This is based on an estimate from anti-nuclear expert Benjamin Dessus, who says pulling out of nuclear power would cost 10% to 15% less than maintaining it. In a book he co-wrote with Bernard Laponche - both are co-founders of the association Global Chance - he explains that French nuclear power suffers from escalating costs: "Neither experience, nor economies of scale, nor mass production have shown themselves capable of reining in the continual rise in costs."
This argument is supported by a detailed study of the French Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) programme by Arnulf Grübler, researcher at Yale University and the Austria-based International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), in September 2010. Drawing on largely unknown public records, he concluded the programme showed "negative learning" in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.
As for the EPR, originally it was to cost 3.4 billion euros, but this figure is being reviewed by EDF and could be revised up to 6 billion euros.
This cost escalation would feed into French electricity prices, currently among the cheapest in Europe at 12-13 euro cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), adding at least 6-7 cents per kWh - before taking into account the cost of reinforcing safety measures following the Fukushima accident.
- Is it possible to withdraw totally from nuclear power?
In whichever scenario, it is not possible to pull out of nuclear power completely, which the Greens call for. This is because some of the main isotopes in the waste produced by atomic energy remain highly radioactive for extremely long periods of time.
It takes 24,000 years for half a given quantity of plutonium 239 to lose its radioactivity, while for iodine 129 this happens over 15.7 million years and for uranium 239 over 4.5 billion years. In addition, decommissioning existing nuclear power plants would have to be carried out over a number of years. So the fall-out from nuclear power is far from over.
On the other hand, it is possible to stop producing atomic energy, as Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium have all committed to do. Italy has also voted to follow this route. However, in France there was only a limited turnout for a day of action around the slogan calling for an "immediate halt" to nuclear power on October 15th.
What effect on employment?
- Would withdrawing from nuclear power threaten up to a million jobs?
EDF's CEO Henri Proglio made headlines when he told French daily Le Parisien that pulling out of atomic energy would threaten up to a million jobs altogether. This was broken down as being 400,000 jobs in the nuclear industry itself and at its subcontractors, 500,000 jobs in energy-hungry sectors that could be relocated outside France, and 100,000 future jobs "that would come from nuclear development worldwide emanating from France".
How credible are these figures? Management consultant Pricewaterhouse Coopers carried out a study (available in French here) for Areva in May 2011 which put employment in France's nuclear industry at 410,000 by adding together 125,000 direct jobs and 171,000 in "inferred employment", which it defines as "fed by the spending of direct and indirect employees".
However, "that definition artificially exaggerates the total estimate and does not correspond to the usual way the term 'inferred employment' is usually used, nor does it allow comparisons to be made with other studies," says Philippe Quirion, economist at CIRED, France's International Environment and Development Research Centre.
Quirion says the most credible figure is therefore the 125,000 people directly employed in nuclear power, which can be compared with direct employment in 2009 in renewables in France of 88,000, which is 70% of direct employment in the electro-nuclear sector.
And according to Ademe, the French government's energy and environment management agency, direct employment in renewables should rise to 110,000 in 2012, which would make it practically equivalent to direct employment in nuclear power.
Quirion also calculates that in Germany there are 2.5 direct jobs for each Terawatt hour (TWh) generated by renewables, eight times the 0.3 direct jobs per TWh generated by nuclear power in France.
Nor is it clear that exiting nuclear power in France would threaten jobs in energy-hungry industries. Employment in these has been falling for decades, and more rapidly in France than in Germany. "The figures do not allow a positive impact of nuclear on employment to be demonstrated in electricity-intensive industries," Quirion said.
"The impact on employment of such a withdrawal would, of course, depend on the way it was done," he added. "If the accent was put on renewable energy and energy saving, which are particularly job-creating, this impact would be more positive.
"If you put figures on the effect of applying the Negawatt scenario, this would result in net creation of over 600,000 jobs in France by 2020 after deducting jobs that would be lost," Quirion said.
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English version: Sue Landau
(Editing by Graham Tearse)