A few weeks before the presentation of the bill relating to energy sovereignty, the Minister of Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher confirms, if it still needed to be proven, that France is indeed banking on atoms in the long term. And that the country will even have to go “beyond the first six EPRs” announced in the relaunch of nuclear power, she indicated in an interview with the Tribune Sunday.
Since the Belfort speech of February 2022, in which Emmanuel Macron announced the relaunch of nuclear power, the government has implemented a program for six new EPR reactors and eight as an option. The Head of State had already opened the door, last December, to an announcement on these eight additional reactors “in the coming months”.
Agnès Pannier-Runacher thus drives the point home. “We need nuclear power beyond the first six EPRs since the historic park will not be eternal,” she clarified to the weekly, according to which the text which will be presented to the Council of Ministers recognizes these eight reactors but does not does not give precise objectives for the development of renewable energies by 2030.
EPR planned in France
© / AFP
Even further ?
The wording of the text “remains technologically neutral”, assured the minister. According to her, to reduce the share of fossil fuels in the energy mix in France from more than 60% to 40% in 2035, “it is necessary to undertake, after 2026, ‘additional constructions representing 13 gigawatts'”. A power which corresponds “to the power of eight EPRs, without setting this or that technology in stone”, she added.
The text, however, “breaks with the previous programming law, which reduced the share of nuclear power in the electricity mix to 50% by 2025”, indicated Agnès Pannier-Runacher, who did not close the door to going even further, qualifying an objective beyond these 14 EPRs as a “good subject for discussion with parliamentarians”.
Among the other measures included in this bill, the minister mentions two sections devoted to “price regulation” and “consumer protection”, which notably provide for the obligation for suppliers to “transmit a monthly schedule and a annual estimate for each contract change”, as well as faster sanctions for “rogue suppliers”.
Furthermore, she indicated that the question of nuclear fuel recycling infrastructure would be on the menu of the next Nuclear Policy Council (NPC), scheduled for January, not excluding “building new capacities”.