“Do we need a new nuclear reactor program?”: some 240 people discussed this topic in Paris at a meeting organized by the very official National Commission for Public Debate (CNDP), a debate which, however, often left them wanting more.
“The public debate on nuclear power has been biased since the beginning. It is just a formality of the State, it will have no impact”, deplores Tom Dury, 28 years old, even before the discussion starts in the premises of the House of solidarity associations of the 13th district.
This young unemployed man and other activists, dressed in white suits to symbolize their opposition to nuclear power, traveled from the Meuse to denounce the project to bury highly radioactive waste in Bure, a town in this rural department.
In their hands, funeral wreaths flocked “Chernobyl 1986”, “Fukushima 2011” or “Penly 2035”.
EDF plans to build three pairs of new generation EPR2 nuclear reactors, the first of which is scheduled to be commissioned at the Penly site in 2035.
Announcing this vast project to revive nuclear power in Belfort in February, Emmanuel Macron had specified that eight additional reactors were under study.
Ten public meetings will be organized between now and February 27 throughout France by the CNDP, an independent authority that must summarize the results to “enlighten” parliamentarians. The first was held on October 27 in Dieppe, not far from the Penly site.
A few meters away from the Bure activists, members of the “Piscine Nucléaire Stop” collective are protesting against a new spent nuclear fuel storage project to be built near the La Hague waste reprocessing plant (Manche).
“So how are we going to debate? Will we listen to the complicit representatives of EDF and RTE (the French high voltage network manager, editor’s note) present their big projects in a delicate language of wood, discuss small details that they have omitted to refine?”, Théo Le Bruman thunders behind his megaphone.
Few citizens
In the room, the atmosphere is studious and very masculine, each participant being assigned in no particular order to one of the 24 tables.
Among them, a handful of local elected officials and curious citizens but mostly anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear. Another 600 have connected remotely.
At table number 15, seven men and one woman listened to the keynote speech by Michel Badré, president of the public debate, on the framework of this consultation. Then the clock starts: forty minutes to take turns on the question of the day.
But when the debate starts, it quickly turns into a short one at table 15. The seven men and one woman who sat around were all largely in favor of building new nuclear reactors. “We are the consensus table,” one of them even squeaks.
Martin Boissavit, 34, a nuclear engineer, said he was “a little disappointed” by this express debate, which in the end was not a debate at all, confining itself to “very technical” questions that nipped the “real societal debate” in the bud.
Like the other debaters of the evening, he will have spent more time listening to the interventions of the representatives of EDF and other organizations on the different energy scenarios than exchanging views.
A debate for nothing? “In any case, the consensus in favor of the nuclear park has already passed in Parliament,” he says.
The next public debate will take place on November 22 in Saclay (Essonne), a leading centre for nuclear research, on a no less technical theme: “What is the EPR2, and can we do nuclear power differently?
