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More than a year has passed since the Belfort speech, during which the President of the Republic announced his desire to build six new generation European pressurized reactors (EPR) and to launch studies to build eight others.
For several local elected officials, the Blayais nuclear power plant, in the Gironde estuary, would be an ideal candidate to accommodate these future EPR2s.
Ecologists do not see things the same way.
If there is one thing on which the representatives of the presidential majority and the National Rally agree in Gironde, it is the development of nuclear power on the Blayais site.
"
I will fight alongside local elected officials so that [the Blayais nuclear power plant] can accommodate two EPR-type reactors
", explained Edwige Diaz, RN deputy for Gironde, last October.
A month later, a dozen Girondin deputies and senators wrote to Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, asking that the Blayais site accommodate two new generation EPRs.
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These elected officials and parliamentarians, members of Renaissance, the MoDem but also Republicans and the Radical Party, considered that "
the industrial site of Braud-et-Saint-Louis has all the assets to accommodate new nuclear power facilities
", namely "
very low population density within a radius of 5 kilometres, availability of land, heat sink and distribution network
”.
They added that "
28 mayors from the four communities of communes of Haute Gironde support the reception of new EPR2 reactors
".
"The Gironde came close to disaster"
Three months later, Alain Desgranges, former director of the Blayais plant and chairman of the monitoring committee for the plant's application to accommodate new EPRs, welcomes the support of the president of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, Alain Rousset .
Because if the places of construction of the next six reactors have already been recorded, the sites of implantation of the following are not yet.
"
While in September 2022 the candidacy of the Blayais site was not considered possible by EDF due to a lack of interest in the territory for this approach, the emergence of a Collective bringing together elected officials from Haute Gironde and former executives of the Blayais plant had awakened some sleepy consciences with the consequence of a reversal of the situation at the end of the year to the benefit of the Blayais project”
, rejoices Alain Desgranges.
But a green pebble had settled in the shoes of the EPR2 supporters in Braud-et-Saint-Louis.
In January 2023, the environmental senator from Gironde, Monique de Marco, passed an amendment making it impossible to install new EPRs "
in a flood-prone area or one that has suffered flooding or marine submersion
".
The elected official recalled the passage of the Martin storm in 1999, where "
the Gironde came close to disaster
", with two of the four reactors stopped in emergency and the evacuation of the city of Bordeaux, located about sixty kilometers away, envisaged .
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A setback that the parliamentarians of the presidential majority and the National Rally nimbly fought in unison in the National Assembly.
On the evening of March 2, during an examination of the text by the Economic Affairs Committee, the paragraph added by the environmentalist senator under article 6 of the bill was deleted.
While environmental issues and the retreat of the coastline were mentioned, the deputies of the RN justified this decision by explaining that they preferred "to leave to the
Nuclear
Safety Authority
the responsibility of setting specific standards according to the sites
”.
If the Blayais plant, one of the oldest nuclear facilities in France still in operation, now seems to be eligible to accommodate new EPRs, there is still a long way to go.
