Belfort, February 10, 2022. In front of a handful of employees, Emmanuel Macron announces that he is "
taking
control" of France's "
energy destiny
".
At the desk, he looks back on decades of choices, leading him today to talk about the future.
This must be geared towards phasing out fossil fuels and strengthening the country's industrial energy independence.
All with a view to “
climate exemplarity
”.
To do this, the Head of State sets a course: six new reactors will be ordered, and the construction of eight others will be studied.
The objectives are ambitious, and far from the promises made by the man who was only a candidate five years earlier.
At the time, he considered that it was “
not good to have 75% of our electrical energy
” dependent on the atom.
But the reality of a sustainable increase in electricity consumption and the delay in renewables have finally caught up with it, to the point of qualifying this same proportion as “
historic luck
”.
It will therefore have taken a five-year term for Emmanuel Macron to change his mind, and drastically review his copy.
The illustration, basically, of years of wandering during which the atom suffered from its instrumentalization by the political class.
The war in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin's decision to reduce gas deliveries to European Union countries have increased the pressure on a particularly fragile sector - 26 of the 56 reactors in the fleet are currently shut down, and fifteen of them are prone to corrosion problems.
From now on, the French must prepare for a difficult winter and take care to limit their electricity consumption.
Here is yet another consequence of forty years of petty arrangements and other political calculations,
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