For 10 years, Gaetan Geoffray worked as a plasterer and painter, before learning metalwork at a company that made cranes. Arnaud Dupuy was a policeman. A third colleague at their factory in the depths of rural Burgundy used to be a baker.
The factory is owned by Framatome, a subsidiary of state-controlled power utility EDF, and the trio are hoping to qualify for one of the most sought-after jobs in France, as nuclear-grade welders. If all goes well, they’ll one day be allowed to work on the most intricate features of the steel parts assembled in the plant, where the all-important 24-metre-long casings protecting the core of atomic reactors are made.
For now, that goal is at least three to four years off, so exacting are the demands in a field in which imperfect finishes can delay a project by months and cost millions, if not billions, of dollars.
“You have to be minutious with everything in nuclear,” says 34-year-old Dupuy, breaking away from practising on a small conical cylinder in a corner of the factory. The hulking reactor pressure vessels there, produced for a handful of British and French projects, undergo up to five years of checks, ultrasounds and perfecting work before they are ready.
For France, the next intake of hires and welding apprentices can’t come a day too soon. After years of political dithering over whether or not to cut its reliance on nuclear power, a hesitation echoed globally after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, the country has gone all-in with Europe’s most ambitious atomic construction project in decades.
President Emmanuel Macron, who was already doubling down on the low carbon technology even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dialled up concerns across the continent over energy security, is pushing to have the first in a series of six new reactors up and running by 2035.
The plans, which could be extended by at least another eight reactors, are the linchpin in France’s vision to reduce its net emissions to zero over the next three decades, in line with international agreements to limit the rise in average global temperatures.
In order to stand a chance of turning this vision into reality, the government estimates it needs to find another 100,000 nuclear specialists of all guises, from engineers and project supervisors to boilermakers and electricians, over the coming six years.
Looming large, beyond hurdles with design approvals and financing for the €52bn programme, is an even more basic question — whether France, Europe’s main atomic nation, still has the industrial capacity and people to make the projects happen on a scale it has not contemplated since the 1970s.
“The biggest challenge is whether we know how to orchestrate a very large industrial project. No one really does these in Europe any more. It’s China, India,” says Antoine Armand, a lawmaker in Macron’s Renaissance party who steered a recent parliamentary probe into the state of France’s energy sector.
For others, doubts over when France will be able to deliver are a reason to pursue the rollout of renewable energy in a much greater way in the short term.
“We’re going into this with a sort of forceful optimism saying everything is going to be fine. However, today, there is nothing to guarantee that,” says lawmaker Barbara Pompili, a minister under Macron in his first term, but who has just left his party.
Hurdles to clear
Even for many of the most optimistic pro-nuclear advocates in France, the country’s new goals are something of a stretch, at least timewise. Reflecting this, state-owned energy company EDF has already outlined a softer 2035 to 2037 target for the first new reactor. In a sector with huge lead times and painstaking safety standards, the government is trying to shave off constraints that could hold the plans up, including cutting some of the permitting red tape in a new bill passed by parliament in March.
“Without that law, forget about everything else, 2035 was a non-starter for sure,” says one French government official.
By the end of 2027, the aim is to start construction of the first new reactor pair at Penly on France’s northern coast. The facility will be next to an existing plant and will utilise a simplified, if yet untested, iteration of the European Pressurised Reactor design.
Forecasts for reactors coming on line
Read More: France’s struggle to deliver a second nuclear era