If you want to know why the so-called nuclear ‘renaissance’ is never going to happen, you need only look at the news that’s been coming out of France in the last few days.
In short, the supposedly leading world experts in nuclear power are making fools of themselves. French nuclear giants AREVA and EDF stride across the landscape like two great big, stupid Godzillas. Nuclear power has a bad name already yet these two are performing the miracle of making things even worse.
Last week, AREVA posted a massive operating loss of 485 million euros for the first half of 2010. The ‘state of the art’ third generation EPR reactor being built by the company at Olkiluoto in Finland is feasting on the company’s money. Olkiluoto-3 is 2.7 billion euros over budget and four years late. The only reason the company has made a profit this year is because it sold a chunk of its business.
EDF finds itself in a similar predicament. In the first half of 2010, the company saw its profits slashed by almost half. Not only that but the EPR reactor the company is building at Flamanville in France is one billion euros over budget and running two years late.
EDF's business in the US has stalled while the projects wait for government support in the form of loan guarantees. A $9 billion project to build an EPR Calvert Cliffs on the Chesapeake Bay is in deep trouble – the economics of it are a joke:
The fact that Constellation stock goes down every time it looks like the plant will be approved suggests that even the people who own the company don't want it to happen.
To make matters worse, for some time now the two companies have been squabbling like children. The coverage in Time Magazine is damning:
But in this global nuclear summer, France's prospects have cooled. Not only has the French industry suffered an embarrassing setback overseas, but its nuclear grandees can barely stand to look at one another, its new European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) — the only one on offer — is a Rolls-Royce in a Chevy economy, and the first two EPRs are taking longer to build and costing far more than anyone dreamed.
The relationship between the two companies was described by one executive as ‘like the village of the Gauls in the Astérix comics’ and ‘a complete mess — a mix of clannishness, personal ambition and hatred’. We also discover that France doesn’t even need a new nuclear reactor:
"We don't need Flamanville for France's energy consumption, and if we build another EPR at Penly, France will have 100 billion kilowatt-hours too many by 2020," says Dominique Finon, a director of nuclear research at France's prestigious think tank Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
In other words, EDF is building nuclear reactors to show off.
Things have got so bad between AREVA and EDF that the French government has had to step in, bang their heads together and tell everybody to calm down. One possible solution to their hostility? Some kind of merger of the two. Imagine the terrifying creature that would emerge from the laboratory after that experiment. The Hunchback of the Notre Dame will look like an angel in comparison.