French Lessons: Learning From a Different Approach To Nuclear Energy

A fire has ignited under nuclear energy, fueled by rapidly growing electricity demand from data centers, broader electrification, and the administration’s hostility to renewables. A stream of executive orders seeks to accelerate nuclear deployment, the Secretary of Energy is profoundly pro-nuclear, and small modular reactors (SMRs) from TerraPower, BTX, and others are nearing commercial deployment. So far so good. But before the United States dives in, it should heed the hard lessons from France. Once the model for nuclear success, France learned the cost of dysfunction the hard way with its first major project running 17 years late and more than €20 billion over budget. In response, France rebuilt its system from the ground up. America should be just as deliberate—because if it doesn’t solve nuclear’s core challenges, it risks turning a promising revival into an expensive mistake.

In the United States, recent large reactor projects have been badly delayed and extraordinarily expensive. U.S. markets do not effectively monetize nuclear’s reliability and high-capacity utilization. Utilities are also notably risk-averse, and long-term markets for electricity are also unpredictable. We also don’t yet know what the price of nuclear energy will be—can enough large reactors be built to reach scale? What kind of reactors will power the future? Who funds construction and operation? How should risk be managed?

France offers important insights. It is the most nuclear country in the West, drawing 70 percent of its energy from nuclear power. And France has already committed to a nuclear renaissance, after learning some very painful lessons.

In 2004, design started on a new reactor at Flamanville. It was expected to take 54 months and cost €3.2 billion to build. To date, it has cost more than €23 billion, has taken 17 years, and is still not operating at full power. It was, in short, a catastrophic stew of poor choices and worse management.

The French found nine main lessons from this debacle:

• Design for buildability, not innovation and unnecessary safety features. Reduce the number and complexity of components, and make components buildable in factories where possible, not on site.
• Strengthen the national champion. Électricité de France now dominates the nuclear sector. Either directly or via majority stakes in partner companies where it controls the supply and demand for nuclear energy.
• Streamline government. President Macron now chairs the National Policy Council, which sets nuclear strategy. An interministerial committee manages tactical decision-making and implementation. A supercharged GAO-equivalent provides oversight. Safety organizations have been merged.
• Build wide support across the political spectrum, sufficient to carry nuclear strategy for the decades needed to build out a nuclear program.
• Focus on building an order book. Standardization is critical for driving down costs. So, France has now committed fully to the new EPR2 design, for six new reactors on order now and possibly eight more later.
• Workforce really matters. A skilled workforce must handle both construction and operations. But without a strong order book, labor training starts from scratch each time, so learning effects are lost.
• Fix the financing. Loans near government cost will cover 50 percent of EPR2 construction costs. Revenues will be guaranteed through a Contract for Difference (CfD); the government covers any gap between the wholesale price of electricity and €100\MWh, using taxes on the additional new electricity to pay for it.
• Manage the entire nuclear product cycle, from mining to waste disposal. France is finding more diverse (and non-Russian) source of supply, bringing fuel processing in-house, developing fast breeder reactors that can reprocess spent fuel for new use, and building a comprehensive waste disposal program.
• Faster and more effective regulation is important, but no-one in France believes that only regulation is preventing the nuclear sector from blossoming.

These lessons may not be fully applied in in France. They also carry significant risks; fixing the design of many reactors before the first ERP2 has even been built could be costly. More broadly, past national champions have been insular and slow to adapt, and a tight government focus is great in theory, ignoring small modular reactors could be a serious mistake. France also needs nuclear, as it has few alternatives. And France also has a different culture: centralization pre-dates Napoleon. Electricite cde France (EDF) is simultaneously the designer and build manager for nuclear, and it is also the dominant buyer of energy as the main utility.

Markets will in the end define the nuclear sector in the United States, but high costs and extended timelines mean nuclear will require sustained government support. France learned this central lesson and has restructured both the government and private sector in service of a clear long-term strategy based on broad consensus. It’s structure is highly centralized, but it includes clear direction, accountability, external review, and flexible funding mechanisms, while integrating supply chain, waste management, and workforce development into the model.

Today, the United States has none of these capabilities. It has no high-level entity responsible for and capable of forming strategy, while engagement at the very top is sporadic at best. There is no clear model for deploying nuclear at the scale needed to drive down costs. A bipartisan consensus is only nascent. It has a fragmented and secretive DOE that is badly siloed, while major responsibilities lie elsewhere (e.g. safety at the NRC). It has no culture of ongoing monitoring and accountability, no red teams. Instructions flow downwards in waterfall mode, while implementation is left to managers (who rotate regularly). At the sharp end, nuclear will be bought by individual utilities to meet their specific energy needs; there is no program to develop a coherent order book and it is difficult to see how that could be done in the fragmented energy markets of the United States, or who could possibly take such a decision.

The point is not that the DOE is especially dysfunctional. The lesson from France is that in the nuclear sector, being dysfunctional is disastrous. The United States cannot (and should not) solve the key questions the same way, but if those questions are not solved, nuclear will become an expensive mistake, not an important driver of cheap and abundant energy.