Political uncertainty and technological difficulties have contributed to the industrial debacle experienced by the French energy company. Luc Rémont, who will soon succeed Jean-Bernard Lévy at the head of the historic operator, is warned.
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The awakening is brutal. French households lived in the sweet illusion that the cheap electricity produced by EDF nuclear power plants would protect them from the turbulence caused by the war in Ukraine on the energy supply. It was even an opportunity to show the superiority of the French model, based on national sovereignty, as opposed to our German neighbors, who had bet everything on Russian gas. But nothing happened as planned.
The judgment of 26 nuclear reactors out of 56 in EDF park makes France vulnerable to current shortages and places the operator at the heart of criticism. One of the first missions of the future boss of the operator, Luc Rémont, chosen by the Elysée Thursday, September 29, will be to relaunch production. In 2005, the year of its fellowship, EDF produced approximately 430 electricity terawatt hours (TWH) of nuclear origin; In 2022, he tabled 280 to 300 TWh. This industrial camouflet is added to the setbacks wiped by the French nuclear sector to build new third generation power plants (EPR).
Who blame? The leaders of EDF or those of Areva – the failing enemy brother -, the executive, the environmentalists, or Brussels and its disheveled liberalism? Communists and Republicans claim the opening of a nuclear parliamentary commission of inquiry to shed light on this disaster. While it is enough to have read Agatha Christie: “EDF, it is the crime of the East-Express. Everyone is guilty”, decides an elder from Bercy who wished to remain anonymous, like most Witnesses requested.
The monnays of environmentalists
For Olivier Marleix, President of the Les Républicains group in the National Assembly, the Grand Cuil, it was François Hollande, who promised, with a view to his election to the Presidency of the Republic, in 2012, to reduce the Share of nuclear power in electricity production from 75 % to 50 % by 2025. “We have gold technology, which assured us a clean and cheap energy, we sacrificed it in the name of an agreement Electoral Socialist Party [PS] -The green in 2011: the exchange of fifteen legislative constituencies for the closure of twenty-four nuclear reactors, “attacked Mr. Marleix, in an interview with the daily Le Figaro, published on September 5.
Throughout Europe, since the end of the 20th e century, environmentalists have mined their participation in coalitions in exchange for a nuclear power: this was the case in Germany in 1998, or In Belgium in 2003. In 1997, already, Prime Minister (PS), Lionel Jospin, had sacrificed the superphenix superenerator on the altar of a PS-Green agreement. In France, the Greens have slowed down the development of the “new nuclear” with all the more efficiency as the energy policy was long entrusted to the Ministry of the Environment.
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