The French government wants to start building a new European Pressurised Water reactor (EPR) soon this year. The reactor type was developed as a binational project in the 90s by SIEMENS and Framatome (now Areva). The two companies have already joined up to market it worldwide.
In France the government and industry have been trying to get people used to the EPR idea through an “energy debate” running since the start of 2003. Critics of atomic power were not brought into the “debate”. The construction of the EPR reactor serves only the interests of the capital groups behind the manufacturers and operators, not those of the population.

The Finnish government also wants an EPR reactor in that country. Loyola de Palacio, vice-president of the European Commission, supports the project. The EPR project is by no means safer that existing plants, although the makers like to claim it is. It has the same potential for operation flaws and, being bigger, produces even more waste than conventional nukes.

The construction of the EPR reactor is no exclusively French matter; for one thing SIEMENS participates in it. The German power utilities RWE, E.ON-Energie, Vattenfall Europe and EnBW were called on by the French EdF to become involved as well. For that reason and because a possible nuclear disaster will ignore borders the anti-nuclear movements all over Europe have to resist this.

The nuclear lobby wants to set the atomic course for the third millennium with the EPR reactor. In 1989 Neckarwestheim II was the last 1300 MW convoy reactor by SIEMENS-KWU to join the German grid. Supported by the Harrisburg and Chernobyl disasters, the anti-atomic movements had stopped the ambitious atomic programme of the electricity industry.

The French atomic programme ended for the time being with the start-up of the last 1382 MW reactor of the N4 series in 1998 in Civaux. The hopes of the national west European reactor industries for significant export orders were not realised.

This is why the west European atomic industry is moving closer together all the time.

In the mid-80s Sweden’s ASEA merged with Switzerland’s BBC to form ABB. SIEMENS and the die French FRAM-ATOME have also realised that in national competition new reactors can no longer be profitably realised. In the 90s these two firms formed Nuclear-Power- International (NPI) to coordinate and market their future reactor programmes.

Since the start of this century the industry has hoped for fresh orders because not only old nukes are being shut down, but from about 2005 many of the conventional power stations will have to be replaced Europe-wide. SIEMENS/FRAMATOME want to sell their 1,500-MW European Pressurised Water Reactor, other west European consortia are ready to come out with "progressive boiling water and high-temperature reactors”. The European atomic industry is also hoping for orders from eastern Europe and worldwide.

Atomic shutdown law no hindrance to building new reactors

In Germany a law was passed in 1999 to get out of atomic energy. But since then not one reactor has been shut down in the country that would not have been shut down without the law, anyway. Nor is this law as irreversible as the governing Social Democrats and Greens like to claim it is in public.

Just a change of government could put paid to the big dream of shutdown by law – the new government would just have to decide different energy policy priorities. That is what the protagonists of the EPR reactor are waiting for.

Only an alert anti-atomic movement can prevent this. Let’s be alert and let’s be solid with the anti-atomic movement in France!





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