Yanis Darras
modified to
8:57 a.m., September 27, 2022
The Minister for Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher was the guest this morning on Europe 1. At the microphone of Sonia Mabrouk, she announced that she wanted to speed up administrative deadlines to speed up the deployment of new nuclear reactors. Objective, to lay the first stone of the EPR before 2027.
After the closure of Fessenheim in 2020 and the desire for several years to close 12 other nuclear reactors by 2035, the government is changing course. Since the beginning of 2022, the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron has multiplied announcements to revive the sector. Objective for the government: to build six new nuclear reactors as quickly as possible – eight others are still under consideration – to meet the country’s electricity needs.
The public debate launched at the end of the month
Invited from Europe on Tuesday morning, the Minister for Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher announced that she wanted to speed up the administrative deadlines for the construction of new EPRs in France, confirming information from the newspaper Le Figaro. “I will bring a bill which will make it possible to accelerate the installation of new nuclear reactors in sites which are already existing”, she explains at the microphone of Europe 1.
“We have land reserves in our power plants (…) and we are launching the public debate at the end of October because we want to stick to our nuclear schedule,” adds the Minister for Energy Transition.
“A measure of common sense”
“These sites, we already know them from an environmental point of view and from an archaeological point of view. We already know that they are artificialized and therefore we can say to ourselves that we can go faster on the phases of administrative instructions because we are not going to learn specific things.” With the acceleration of the process, the government wishes to lay the first stone of a new EPR before the end of the five-year term in 2027.
“It is basically, there too, a common sense measure to save time and ensure that our country’s energy independence is built”, underlines Agnès Pannier-Runacher. On the other hand, there is no question of being optimistic about the commissioning of the new EPRs. “These are long-term projects, with construction phases that are very complex. So the schedule leads us to announce an EPR that would not be in service before 2035,” she concludes.