The Nuclear Option

France ranks 10th in the EPI because of its supply of clean energy.

Being poor in oil and coal might once have been considered a disadvantage, but not for France. Forty years ago necessity led Charles de Gaulle to pursue nuclear power aggressively as a chief source of electricity. For years this strategy put France at odds with environmentalists, but climate change and soaring demand for energy have changed all that. Because of its 59 nuclear reactors, which provide fourth fifths of the country's electricity, France now emits only about half the greenhouse gas per unit of GDP of the United States (about the world average), which propels France to near the top of Yale's and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index (EPI). Nuclear power not only helps insulate France from wild fluctuations in energy prices, but it also suggests a way to reduce its dependence on oil for cars, trucks and buses: if and when plug-in hybrid vehicles and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles are ready to replace today's cars, French drivers will be able to tap clean energy from their electrical grid.

The most striking thing about France's happy situation is the difference between its experience in nuclear energy and those of other nations—particularly the United States, whose industry once led the world but is now moribund. What distinguishes France's nuclear program is coherent long-range planning. The French government has laid out where it sees the country's nuclear program heading over the next 50 years, with provisions for the secure disposal of nuclear waste, advanced reactor development and possible fuel shortages. It is a kind of 50-year-long superhighway with various on- and off-ramps that give it the flexibility to handle changing technologies. Other nations would do well to emulate this approach.

France's current plan was begun in the 1990s on the assumption that nuclear power will remain the mainstay of France's electrical generating system for the long term. French planners are also positioning its nuclear industry to take advantage of an expansion in the world's generation of nuclear power, which would greatly increase the demand for new reactors and reactor fuels.

The first consideration in any nuclear plan is how to manage the fuel cycle, from uranium ore to enriched fuel to waste for disposal. In this respect, the French plan is efficient and flexible. The highway starts with a fleet of light-water reactors (LWR), the current workhorse of the industry, initially fueled with enriched uranium, a processed form of natural uranium. When this fuel is used up in a reactor, the by-product contains a significant amount of plutonium, which can be used to make bombs, and stays radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, making it difficult to dispose of safely. Rather than bury it, the French plan is to extract plutonium from the fuel and mix it with unenriched uranium to make a new fuel called MOX, or mixed oxide. Because MOX yields about one third the energy of the original enriched uranium, this step effectively increases the mileage France gets from the original enriched uranium fuel. The leftovers from this process must still be isolated for hundreds of thousands of years, but they don't pose the proliferation hazard that plutonium does.

The French have prepared a geological repository for safely disposing of radioactive waste. Unlike the U.S. repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, which has been mired in political opposition, the French repository is approved. The site will be used to store fuel temporarily, with the option to retrieve it at a later date.

By about the middle of the century, if current trends are any indication, a worldwide shortage of uranium may arise. To prevent that possibility, France is now doing the R&D on a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors, called breeders, that can produce new fuel for itself or other reactors. Rather than burying its waste permanently and then facing a fuel shortage, France will be in an enviable position of having a virtually unlimited supply of fuel.