llatest issue of the magazine Business and history (“Civil nuclear energy”, n.Oh 114, 236 pages, 30 euros) sheds light on the setbacks experienced by the French nuclear industry, between the additional costs of the EPR, the abandonment of the Astrid reactor and the reduced availability of the fleet during the winter of 2022. These failures were attributed to the errors of the State, which, after the glorious hours of the “Messmer plan” (1974), became pusillanimous and without vision; A “headless duck”The High Commissioner for Nuclear Energy recently declared. Also at stake are socialist governments, which have allegedly sacrificed the sector in favour of an alliance with environmentalists. These accounts do not stand up to historical scrutiny.
Frédéric Garcías and Stéphanie Tillement show that the current declinist narrative is constructed in contrast to the “Messmer plan,” the supposed golden age of the unity of elites mobilized for a national project. This enchanted story ignores the difficulties that the plan went through, threatened on several occasions by “rigor” budgetary, under the governments of Raymond Barre and then the presidency of François Mitterrand. It also forgets the fierce debates on the pace of construction of the reactors. The authors point out that building fifty in twenty years would necessarily create “a cliff effect” Forty years later, as if “The plan had foreseen everything, except its own end”.
The setbacks of nuclear energy since the 1990s actually reflect its “standardization”. The construction of Europe, the liberalisation of the energy market, pressure from Brussels to eliminate monopolies, the creation of Areva, which competes with EDF in exports: all this contributes to making EDF a company like any other, which the State partially privatised in 2005. full productive overcapacity, the project desired by Nicolas Sarkozy to launch a single EPR, “a seed without a series”This seems absurd to EDF’s management, who foresee additional costs linked to the lack of a long-term perspective and therefore a solid industrial base. EDF had become above all an operator that delivered its profits to the state shareholder and was mainly responsible for maintenance and security.
Weakening
It is precisely this maintenance work that Léna Masson studies in her article “When EDF’s nuclear production department becomes a “contracting hub””. She shows how, from the 1990s and especially after 2000, contractual relations with subcontractors became the focus of the nuclear production department’s work. In 1984, the State set financial targets for EDF, which led to the development of subcontracting, regulated by a decree. In 1991, a “Management Institute” was created with the aim of developing a commercial culture within EDF. In the 2000s, spending cuts cut staff and training. In 2005, on the occasion of its IPO, EDF cut 6,000 jobs.
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