Mon, Dec 08, 2003 page9

• France's profitable nuclear power faces green opposition

  • THE OBSERVER
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  ENERGY is a hot topic in France, which derives 75 percent of its electricity -- it is the world's largest exporter -- from nuclear power.

  But many of the 58 nuclear reactors, set up around the country to guarantee security of supply in the wake of the 1970s oil crisis, are aging. About a third will reach their fortieth birthday between now and 2025. Decisions must be taken and a parliamentary debate is due in the coming months on an `energy orientation law'.

  Industry Minister Nicole Fontaine has begun to lobby for investment in `third generation' nuclear reactors, but it is a lobby facing growing opposition from environmentalists. Nicolas Hulot, a widely admired ecologist and television personality, has criticized the `rushed contempt for public opinion and ecological stupidity `of any new nuclear commitment.

  With its flair for the dramatic, Greenpeace has described the lorryloads and trainloads of radioactive products moving unheralded through France's green and peaceful countryside as a `rolling Hiroshima'.

  A recent report in a regional newspaper, La Depeche du Midi, on the transport of dangerous products, including chemicals and hydrocarbons, was provocatively headed: `These rolling bombs that the state seeks to hide'.

  But throughout its long experience with nuclear energy, the French network has not experienced even the hint of an accident. Nor has the closely-regulated transport of plutonium and uranium aroused significant attention except from vociferous environmentalist groups.

  Yet the subject of nuclear energy is not one the French government is currently choosing to discuss.

  Official classification on Aug. 9 as `top secret' of all matters nuclear, at the insistence of Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive of the state-owned nuclear energy company, Areva, tightened up already existing controls and regulations.

  When industry minister Fontaine spoke recently of renewing the nuclear grid with a new generation of pressurized water reactors (EPR), enthusing that it was 10 times safer and more economical in terms of the waste produced, the response was mixed: support from some politicians, condemnation from the opposition Socialist Party and from ecologists and a hasty declaration from Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin that nothing had been decided.

  France is not only heavily reliant on its nuclear industry for its own electricity -- almost the cheapest in Europe -- but, through the Electricite de France (EdF) group, has profitable links with more than 22 countries across the globe. Its energy exporting relationship with Italy, for instance, which is only 18 percent energy self-sufficient compared with France's 50 percent, dates back to 1964. (The recent blackout in Italy was not blamed on France.)

  For years Spain, too, has been dependent on France for its electricity, although this summer the ferocious heat wave temporarily reversed their roles. When the water that normally cools the reactors overheated, some of France's power stations had to be shut down -- leading to questions on safety being posed by the anti-nuclear faction.

  In the UK the burgeoning supply of energy from across the Channel is seen as a handy backup in times of shortage.

  EdF, functioning in France with Gaz de France (GdF), is still a state monopoly, with privatization beginning next year. The EdF group, a potent producer and muscular energy trader, manages a generated mix with a global capacity of 121 GW. It is the word `mix,' a diversification that combines smart trading and skillful public relations, that causes controversy.

  EdF boasts of its sales of `green electricity' in Europe, of hydroelectric dams and low environmental impact, and of producing 95 percent of its electricity with energy that does not emit greenhouse gases.

  Environmentalists protest that this desirable clean air is largely the result of nuclear production and excludes the hazards latent in a nuclear industry.

  Under the terms of a EU directive, France is obliged to expand its renewable energy supply (solar, wind farms, and so on) from the current 15 percent to 21 percent by 2010. Wind farms receive a generous subsidy, although there is some local opposition to the presence of the giant turbines and the noise they make. Small communities, all the same, benefit from taxes paid by wind farm operators. Their installation was encouraged by the former socialist administration of Lionel Jospin, and the Chirac-Raffarin government has reaffirmed that policy.

  The official target before 2007 (when EdF is due to be fully privatized) is between 2,000 and 6,000 MW of installed wind power, of which 500 to 1500 MW will be offshore (no wind farms are yet offshore). France currently generates 231 MW from wind power, nearly half of it in the southern Aude department (administrative region).

  The French are used to the nuclear presence. In Provence, a popular attraction, La Ferme aux Crocodiles, a crocodile farm that displays more than 300 Nile crocodiles, operates near the high curved towers of the Tricastin reactor.

  Visitors are untroubled. The crocodiles bask in Tricastin's warm, treated waters.

  Yet environmental concerns are increasing and the public debate growing. Raffarin may have calmed the polemic for the present. But maintaining France's independent energy policy, and profits, while satisfying the environmental lobby will involve a walk along a tightrope.
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