Black, red, gold. The colors of Germany can stand out on this banner. Like two years ago, the German atomic industry still has its own space, its “pavilion”, at the World Civil Nuclear Exhibition. The meeting of professionals in the sector, organized by French industry, is in its fifth edition – from Tuesday 28 to Thursday 30 November, at the Paris-Nord Villepinte exhibition center (Seine-Saint-Denis).
“It’s a way of attracting attention to say that we, the Germans, are still here, still alive, and that we still want to offer our nuclear know-how on the market”argues Georg Schäfer, coordinator of the professional association VBGE, at the initiative of the German-speaking group.
In mid-April, the last three nuclear reactors across the Rhine stopped operating. Permanent closure, by government decision. The end point of a long political process, first launched in the early 2000s, then accelerated in 2011, after the Japanese Fukushima accident.
THE “German pavilion”, certainly, is not the biggest. Eleven exhibitors. Everyone has their own stand, each their own specialties, which therefore do not relate to the operation of power plants: assemblies, rotating machines, waste treatment, control panels, piping, radiation protection, etc.
Export
Documentation awaits visitors. A few trinkets, too. Like these anti-stress reproductions, to knead, of a blue barrel. A miniature Castor, named after the brand marketed by the company GNS, based in Essen, in the Ruhr: a storage and transport container for radioactive material.
For the majority of exhibitors, the atom is not the main activity and even less the only one – unlike GNS. The closure of power plants mainly pushes them towards exports, even if the federal government continues to invest in research into nuclear fusion. “We no longer deliver valves to Germany, but we can deliver them for example to Brazil, Argentina, Finland, France”lists Heiko Bischoff, export director of the Mankenberg company, located in Lübeck (Schleswig-Holstein), in the north of the country.
This year, the World Nuclear Show has seventeen national pavilions. No need, however, to look for Rosatom. Despite the absence of European sanctions targeting nuclear power, the Russian group is largely absent from the aisles, an indirect consequence of the war in Ukraine.