Nuclear: France will have to build more than six EPR reactors, announces Agnès Pannier-Runacher

France will have to go “beyond the first six EPRs” in order to revive the civil nuclear industry, Minister of Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher said in an interview with La Tribune Dimanche, a few weeks before the presentation of the project. of law relating to energy sovereignty. Since the Belfort speech of February 2022, in which Emmanuel Macron announced the relaunch of nuclear power, the government has implemented a program for six new EPR reactors and eight as an option. This statement from the minister comes almost a month after the exit of the head of state who had already opened the door to these eight additional reactors “in the coming months”.

These eight reactors will be included in the bill relating to energy sovereignty that Agnès Pannier-Runacher will present in a few weeks to the Council of Ministers. The wording of the text “remains technologically neutral”, assured the minister, according to whom, to increase the share of fossil fuels in the energy mix in France from more than 60% to 40% in 2035, “it is a matter of undertake, after 2026, additional construction representing 13 gigawatts. A power that corresponds to “the power of eight EPRs, without setting this or that technology in stone,” said the minister. The text, however, "breaks with the previous programming law, which reduced the share of nuclear power in the electricity mix to 50% by 2025", indicated the minister who did not close the door to the fact of go even further, qualifying an objective beyond these 14 EPRs as a “good subject for discussion with parliamentarians”.

Among the other measures included in this bill, the minister mentions two sections devoted to “price regulation” and “consumer protection”, which notably provide for the obligation for suppliers to “transmit a monthly schedule and a annual estimate for each contract change”, as well as faster sanctions for “rogue suppliers”. Furthermore, the minister indicated that the question of nuclear fuel recycling infrastructure would be on the menu of the next Nuclear Policy Council (NPC), scheduled for January, not excluding “building new capacities”.