The achievement of the French nuclear fleet gives the opportunity to develop a com­plete nuclear industry for design of nuclear plants, exploitation and services, nuclear fuel cycle management, logistics, etc. AREVA, created in 2001, is the industrial heir of 50 years of research, technological innovations and industrial realisations in nuclear equipments and services. Through its […]

Even if, globally, the French nuclear fleet is quite young, EDF has begun to prepare the conditions of the renewal of his PWR fleet. The EPR nuclear plant has been designed for this renewal. This design takes into account all the previous experience, not only of the French nuclear programme but also of the German […]

Other countries have progressively adopted the French approach of building, step by step, series of standardized plants. But what makes the French approach rather unique in the western economies is its comprehensiveness. It was really a systemic (some would say “holistic”) approach, developing the whole fuel cycle in parallel to and in cohesion with the […]

Launched in 1974, the second generation of nuclear power plants owned and oper­ated by EDF was unique in its scope and degree of standardization. It comprised 6 series of PWR units: • 6 “CP0” 900 MWe Plants (including the first 3 ordered before 1974) • 18 “CP1” 900 MWe Plants • 20 “CP2” 900 MWe […]

Even though the first oil shock – multiplication by a factor of 4 of the oil prices decided by OPEC in the wake of the 1973 Kippur War – was severely resented in most western countries, it was especially problematic in France for two reasons. On the one hand, oil was supplying more then two […]

As early as 1946, some uranium was discovered in France by the CEA, but France did not master the technology of isotopic enrichment, still a US monopoly at the time. Consequently, the French designed, developed and deployed a first generation of nuclear power plants which did not require enriched uranium as a fuel: the so […]

During the 50s, a period of vigorous post war reconstruction (helped by the Marshall Plan), France relied mostly on its domestic coal resources which supplied more than two thirds of its energy consumption. But during this period, the newly integrated national utility Electricite de France, EDF, was engaged in a grand endeavour, the equipment of […]

By the turn of the XIXth century, radioactivity was discovered by Henri Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery. Then in 1934, Frederic Joliot-Curie and his wife Irene, Marie Curie’s daughter, were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of artificial radioactivity. In 1939, a few […]