HAS At the height of the “thirty glorious years”, France at Pompidou endorsed the choice of a major industrial turning point which would see, in twenty-nine years – ie four presidential terms – the construction of fifty-eight nuclear reactors. But, with 70% of its electricity mix of nuclear origin, our country is today at least a singularity in the energy landscape of the great powers, none of which sees the share of the atom exceeding 20%.
“The exception” is a specialty firmly anchored in our national DNA, but it turns out that, as the engineer and consultant Jean-Marc Jancovici tells us over and over again, physics is hard-headed. We are talking here about a source of energy intended by nature to produce the base heel (base load) of the daily electricity demand.
You don’t need to be a brilliant engineer to understand that when we talk about a “base”, when this is close to 70%, we may have gone a little far. The vast majority of reactors available to France are not controllable and ultimately only allow flexibility of around 10% in one hour, which is perfectly unsuited to the constraints of balancing supply and demand.
Nuclear power not compatible with the climate emergency
This role is therefore devolved to so-called “peak” energy sources, mainly thermal and hydraulic. As a result, France found itself, from the end of the 1980s, with excess electricity production that it had to learn to absorb. Our country has thus developed energy storage – because, yes, electricity cannot be stored – by increasing the capacity of our park of pumped energy transfer stations (STEP) by 84% on equipment hydroelectric.
We invented the “off-peak hours” to guide consumer demand and imposed the use of cumulus – eleven million units have been installed – to store nighttime surpluses in the form of domestic hot water. But those who advocate nuclear power as the only vector likely to offer our planet a carbon-free energy mix are doubly mistaken: this energy is only compatible with a very limited number of countries for technological, infrastructure and security reasons. .
Moreover, the speed of construction of new power plants is not compatible with the climate emergency: even if nuclear surpasses all other energy sources by the density of its production units − a nuclear power plant can accommodate more than 5 GW of power over 1 square kilometer − it is clear that the complexity of the projects makes them increasingly long to come out of the ground.
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