"We thought there was a future in nuclear power when no one else believed in it," says Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive of Areva. The French, government-owned company is building the first nuclear reactors to be constructed in Western Europe for nearly 20 years. With" no oil, no gas, no coal and no choice", France decided to go nuclear in 1974, and today about 80% of its electricity is generated by 59 nuclear plants across the country. But even France became pessimistic about nuclear power: it stopped building new reactors at the end of the 1980s and in 2002 a government report called the industry a" monster without a future".
How things have changed. Nuclear power is back in favor, thanks to fears about oil supplies, energy security and global warming. France is ready to develop its expertise into a significant export. Its president, Nicolas Sarkozy, considers the sale of nuclear power to be central to his diplomacy: it is a symbol of France’s technical power and a reaffirmation of its status as a global industrial power. Soon after his election 18 months ago, he toured countries from China to Libya to tout France’s nuclear expertise, signing deals to open the way for French firms to sell reactors.
France has two competitive advantages in the field. First, it has the most recent and extensive experience of any country in building and operating nuclear plants. That has given Areva’s "third generation" reactor design, called the EPR, an advantage over blueprints from its two big : Westinghouse, now a unit of Toshiba of Japan, and GE Hitachi, a recently formed joint venture(合资企业). Second, French engineers have developed a new reprocessing technique, so that nuclear energy produces less waste than in other countries.
Areva’s EPRs are under construction at Flamanville in Normandy, Olkiluoto in Finland and Taishan in China. Areva forecasts that demand for nuclear capacity could bring it orders for 60 reactors, or one-third of the total market, by 2020 -- each with a price of around
5 billion. Westinghouse has orders from China for four of its new AP1000 reactors, and GE Hitachi’s ESBWR design is being considered by several American utilities.
The high cost of building new plants, arid the uncertainty over the cost of nuclear energy relative to other sources, could delay the nuclear renaissance (复兴), especially in the midst of a credit crunch. Luckily for sellers, governments are bent on tackling climate change and securing energy supplies, and are likely to offer big subsidies.
Britain, for one, has given its blessing to France’s nuclear ambitions: in September Electricit6 de France (EDF), a state-owned energy giant which owns and runs France’s plants (and is thus closely intertwined with Areva), bought British Energy, a troubled utility in which the British government held a big share.
What can we learn about French people’s attitudes toward nuclear power