REVIEW - Renewable Craze Pushes France To Shut Oldest NPP As EU Asks Tips From Teen Eco-Activist

BRUSSELS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th March, 2020) This week has seen Europe's climate policy facing criticism on all fronts: as young eco-activists scolded it for not doing enough, a court in France questioned the wisdom of the "costly" nationwide nuclear phaseout.

On Wednesday, the European Commission unveiled a draft of the first climate law on path toward the continent's carbon neutrality by mid-century. Teen Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who spoke at the EU headquarters that day, dismissed the law as "empty words" in a major slap in the face for commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and her European Green Deal.

The 17-year-old, along with 33 other youth climate activists, called for bolder steps, rather than reduction of emissions over the next three decades. She, in particular, criticized the EU for delaying the review of its 2030 emissions targets until September and insisted that the bloc needed specific goals not just for 2030 or 2050, but "for 2020 and every following month and year to come."

In a parallel development the same day, France's Court of Auditors questioned the move to shut down the country's oldest nuclear power plant (NPP) as part of the nationwide atomic phaseout, calling it a result of a "chaotic decision process." The reactor No. 1 of the Fessenheim power plant in the northeastern region of Alsace was disconnected permanently from the national power grid on February 22, with the second reactor set to go offline on June 30.

WHY CLOSE LOW-CARBON NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS?

France started generating nuclear power under President Charles de Gaulle. The program was a great success, with France still retaining the leadership in Europe in terms of nuclear electricity production. With more than 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear sources, French industries and consumers enjoy relatively low prices.

The view of a good part of the scientific community that CO2 is the main culprit in global warming and climate change makes nuclear energy a perfect source of electricity as nuclear power plants practically do not emit CO2.

Still, many Green parties have inbred hatred for all things nuclear.

"It is mainly due to their pacifist origins and anti-atomic arms sentiment. They stress the inherent 'dangers' of nuclear energy, but have nothing serious to propose to replace nuclear energy. So-called 'renewable' sources are a joke: they are intermittent and cannot be trusted for a regular production level," Jean-Louis Butre, a business owner and the president of France's Federation for Sustainable Environment, told Sputnik.

Main political parties in Europe, such as the Social Democratic Party or the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, as well as the Socialists in France, Belgium and other countries, needed the Greens, to get a majority in parliament, so they promised to abandon nuclear energy. In France in 2012, then-socialist presidential candidate Francois Hollande needed the green vote and vowed to launch atomic phaseout.

Yet, eight years on, his decision is being questioned in a report by the French Court of Auditors, which blames it on a "chaotic decision process" and warns about "costly risks for the French state."

The protocol signed between the French government and nuclear plant operator EDF includes the payment to the company for expenses linked to the closure (between 370 and 443 million Euros depending on the payment dates), but also compensation for profits lost as a result of the closure.

The court's report says the potential loss of profit for EDF is "very uncertain, because it is in a distant future and dependent upon fluctuating electricity prices. The state should guard itself against future risks of compensation for all the nuclear power plants that the government has decided to close."

The uncontrolled slippage could lead to a loss by the French taxpayers of several tens of millions of euros, according to the court. The report proposes that the government avoid it by paying in 2020 the full amount of the initial compensation negotiated with EDF or at least put a ceiling to the compensation.

ANGRY REACTION FROM THE WHOLE REGION OF ALSACE

The Court of Auditors was not the only one to question the NPP closure, with the decision also coming as a blow to residents of Fessenheim.

The NPP, which became operational in 1978, produces 90 percent of Alsatian electricity and employs 800 EDF agents, generating a total of 2,000 direct and indirect jobs. EDF pledges that its 800 agents will be reclassified, all over France.

Local businesses will be the first to be impacted by the closure. The city's supermarket, the second largest employer, will lose 30 percent of its customers, but also its employees, whose spouses work at the power plant. Small subcontractors to the plant will have to close and lay off their workers.

There are also ecological consequences. The dismantling of the low-carbon NPP will generate significant greenhouse gas emissions.

French trade unions, CGT, FO and CFDT, are in unison very angry.

"There was no reason to close the power plant. We are producing clean power, it is our job and safety is our duty. President Hollande promised the closure of the Fessenheim plant because it was the sine qua non condition of an agreement with the Greens. We were a year after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that caused the closure of Fukushima. So the Greens from neighbouring Germany and from all over France came to demonstrate," Alain Besserer of the General Confederation of Labor - Workers' Force (FO) told Sputnik.

He denounced it as a "stupid electoral decision" since "reactors don't emit CO2." Besserer noted that since 2012, everyone had hoped that the closure would not happen, and Hollande's successor would change the decision.

"But then, in April 2017, [President Emmanuel] Macron said in his campaign that he would not cancel the closure, again to please the green voters. We have moved from uncertainty to sadness. Come to see our engine rooms. They are clean, you can eat on the floor. There was never any leak!" he argued.

WHY HAS MACRON NOT DEFENDED NPP?

There have been multiple indications that Macron understands the fundamental error of destroying de Gaulle's legacy that took decades to build.

Back in 2017, the president said in an interview that "renewables are intermittent and cannot fully replace existing sources of electricity." In January 2020, Macron recognized that "the consensus on wind power is clearly weakening in our country," showing his understanding of related grievances.

"The intermittence of wind power production due to the variability of wind speed will not allow a deployment sufficient to replace the production of nuclear power or thermal electricity. When the wind is not blowing, gas or coal plants must be available to compensate for this lack of production - the same can be said of photovoltaic solar energy," Samuele Furfari, a former European Commission official in charge of energy issues and now a professor in Free University of Brussels, told Sputnik, summing up weak points of the alternative sources of power.

All this, he went on, makes the "new" sources of energy "ineffective and terribly expensive."

According to Butre of France's Federation for Sustainable Environment, the government went ahead with installing wind turbines across the country and dismantling CO2-neutral NPPs due to lobby pressure.

"The problem is much wider than the coming municipal elections. The problem resides in the Ministry of the Environment, where the industrial wind energy lobby is in power. The ministry organizes pseudo-consultations and its 'pluri-annual plan for the Environment in France" is simply a plan to build as many wind turbines as possible. Some regions are incredibly saturated, so they open other regions to the installation and penalize the municipalities that refuse wind turbines with a bonus malus system," Butre said.

He argued that the energy policies, favored by the European Commission, only generated "astronomical" expenses and led the whole continent to nowhere.

EU MUST KEEP NUCLEAR ENERGY FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE

Damien Ernst, a professor electromechanical engineering at the University of Liege and Blondel prize winner, agrees that the way the EU and some of national governments manage the "energy transition" is naive, unproductive and a waste of energy in all senses.

"It takes many decades to create an integrated electricity production system for a large country. Look at France and its remarkable nuclear network, with their latest EPR technology nuclear power plants and the future next generation. But the way politics has destroyed the potential that we have of decarbonating efficiently and rapidly our economies, our society, is astounding," Ernst told Sputnik.

Germany, with all its money and technological capabilities, completely fails to decarbonate even its energy production, according to the expert. They bet on solar and above all wind energies, but had to build coal and gas plans to compensate, increasing their emissions of CO2, he recalled.

"France is destroying its heritage, starting with Fessenheim, for nothing. If president Macron hopes the hard-line ecologists will love him because he suppresses some nuclear power plants, he is wrong. They want all atomic energy to disappear, so he will never be right!" he stated.

What should be done is keeping the nuclear power plants and use them to decarbonate the rest of the energy, Ernst insisted.

"The European Commission is totally wrong. It is the wrong message to receive Greta Thunberg with pump and circumstances! What they need is an army of experts to work with a cool head, not 'emotional kids,'" he concluded.