About 250,000 anti-nuclear protesters gathered in four German cities last weekend as Japan fought to prevent a meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactor. At a similar demonstration in Paris, Frederic Geschickt, a French wine grower, was joined by fewer than 300 people.
France has 58 reactors, second only to the US, and relies on atomic power for about 80 per cent of its electricity, the highest in the world. By contrast, Germany has 17 reactors and nuclear energy provides about 23 per cent of the nation’s power.
“Fear about what is happening in Japan should work to mobilise people, but it’s true, we don’t attract big crowds,” said Geschickt, who joined environmentalists and leftist political groups chanting slogans near the French parliament.
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government has strived to keep public opinion firmly behind nuclear power, with the atomic-energy industry, led by Electricite de France, employing about 200,000 people in France. The energy source keeps French electricity prices among the lowest in Europe and gives it lower carbon emissions than other large European Union countries.
“Right now the state is married to the industry,” Corinne Lepage, an environmental lawyer and deputy of the European Parliament, said at the Paris protest. In Germany, voters backed the anti-nuclear Greens party against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition in the March 27 state elections in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate.
Mixed opinions
Opinion polls show the French are more ambiguous. Fifty-one per cent of respondents in an Ifop survey commissioned by the European Green party said the country’s reactors, along with its nuclear energy policy, should be phased out over the next 25 years. Just 19 per cent wanted a more rapid pullout. The opinion poll was taken days after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima reactors.
A TNS Sofres poll organised by Paris-based EDF found that 55 per cent of those surveyed were against abandoning nuclear energy, even as 68 per cent said an accident like Fukushima was possible in France.
“The French feel more worried and vulnerable about nuclear energy,” said Jerome Fourquet, deputy head of opinion polls at Ifop. “They think it poses a threat, but there isn’t a credible alternative. It’s a necessary evil.”
French power prices are the second lowest among 27 European Union countries, after Finland, when adjusted for purchasing power, according to figures published in November by Eurostat. French households paid about 36 per cent below the average.
Reactor age
As the first plumes of smoke rose over the stricken nuclear plant in Japan, French ministers, atomic industry chief executives and regulators worked to reassure the population that a comparable accident couldn’t happen at home.
“Building confidence is now essential for our industry,” Areva Chief Executive Officer Anne Lauvergeon told a hastily arranged parliamentary hearing March 16.
Areva, based in Paris, is the world’s biggest builder of nuclear reactors and the largest supplier to state-controlled EDF, owner of all French reactors. Areva aims to develop more reactors abroad in addition to projects in China and Finland.
The average age of French nuclear reactors is 24 years. Nineteen of the reactors are about 30 years old. The oldest in Fessenheim, located 1.5 kilometres — or less than a mile — from the German border, began operating in 1978. Protesters in Germany and two Swiss cantons are calling on France to shut the plant in the wake of the Fukushima accident even as the French nuclear safety watchdog mulls whether to allow EDF to run it for another decade.
Stress tests
Sarkozy, who faces an election next year, said March 25 that France will stress test all its nuclear reactors and close any that fail. Sarkozy has said the Japanese accident won’t change France’s overall policy on nuclear power, with the government deflecting calls immediately after the Japanese accident for a referendum on the energy in France.
“There’s a major date coming up and that’s the presidential election, which will allow us to do this,” French Industry Minister Eric Besson said in a France 2 television interview on March 17.
Ministers have said the government may organise a nuclear “debate” to enable people to voice their concerns.
“The nuclear industry in France has been considered somewhat arrogant and closed,” Yves Giraud, head of economics and industrial strategy at EDF’s power generation division, told a nuclear conference this month. “This is an opportunity to make it more open.”
Nuclear future
Following the 1986 Chernobyl accident, France’s environmental movement emphasised reversing the country’s dependence on nuclear energy from plants built between 1977 and 1996. That focus faded as the fight against climate change gathered prominence and nuclear energy was viewed as a way to lower carbon emissions.
Pushing ahead with plans to develop more reactors in France and extend the lifetimes of existing installations “could be at stake in the next presidential campaign,” according to Ifop’s Fourquet.
The opposition Socialist Party wants France to move progressively away from nuclear power over the next quarter century with the country’s nuclear industry focusing on dismantling reactors and managing waste.
After the Japanese accident “we can’t continue on as before,” Opposition Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry said in a March 21 Canal Plus television interview. “We must move toward an energy transition.”
