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: “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 favour, thanks to fears about oil supplies, energy security and global warming. France is poised 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 badge of France’s technical prowess 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 edge over blueprints from its two big rivals: Westinghouse, now a unit of Toshiba of Japan, and GE
Hitachi, a recently formed joint venture. Second, French engineers have developed a novel 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 tag of around $6.3 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, and the uncertainty over the cost of nuclear energy relative to other sources, could delay the nuclear renaissance, especially in the midst of a credit crunch. Luckily for vendors, governments are bent on tackling climate change and...
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