“The nuclear power's setbacks since the 1990s actually reflect its 'normalization'” | EUROtoday

LThe newest situation of the journal Business and historical past (“Civil nuclear power”, n^o 114, 236 pages, 30 euros) sheds welcome gentle on the setbacks skilled by the French nuclear business, between the extra prices of the EPR, the abandonment of the Astrid reactor and the diminished availability of the fleet in the course of the winter of 2022. These failures have been attributed to the errors of the State, which, after the wonderful hours of the “Messmer plan” (1974), would have develop into pusillanimous and with out imaginative and prescient; a “headless duck”declared a excessive commissioner for atomic power just lately. Also responsible: the socialist governments, that are mentioned to have sacrificed the sector for an alliance with environmentalists. These tales don’t stand as much as historic scrutiny.

Frédéric Garcias and Stéphanie Tillement present that the present declinist narrative is constructed in distinction with the “Messmer plan”, the supposed golden age of a unity of elites mobilized for a nationwide challenge. This enchanted narrative neglects the difficulties that the plan has skilled, threatened on a number of events by “rigor” budgetary, beneath the governments of Raymond Barre after which the presidency of François Mitterrand. He additionally forgets the fierce debates in regards to the tempo of building of reactors. The authors level out that constructing fifty in twenty years would essentially create “a cliff effect” forty years later, as if “The plan had foreseen everything, except its own end”.

The setbacks of nuclear energy because the Nineteen Nineties truly replicate its “normalization”. European building, the liberalization of the power market, strain from Brussels to eradicate monopolies, the creation of Areva, which competes with EDF in exports: all this contributes to creating EDF an organization like some other, which the State partially privatizes in 2005. In the midst of manufacturing overcapacity, the challenge needed by Nicolas Sarkozy to launch a single EPR, “a seed without a series”appears absurd to EDF executives, who anticipate the extra prices linked to the absence of a long-term perspective and subsequently of a strong industrial base. EDF had develop into above all an operator delivering its income to the State shareholder and primarily coping with upkeep and security.

Weakening

It is exactly this upkeep work that Léna Masson research in her article “When EDF's Nuclear Production Department becomes a “contract hub””. She exhibits how, from the Nineteen Nineties and particularly after 2000, contractual relations with subcontractors grew to become the center of the work of the nuclear manufacturing division. In 1984, the State set monetary goals for EDF, which led to the event of subcontracting, regulated by a decree. In 1991, a “Management Institute” was created, geared toward growing the business tradition inside EDF. In the 2000s, spending discount plans minimize into the payroll and coaching. In 2005, when it went public, EDF minimize 6,000 jobs.

You have 28.27% of this text left to learn. The relaxation is reserved for subscribers.