Fessenheim is no more. After some 40 years of good and loyal service, the nuclear power plant is nothing more than an unsightly mass of concrete. A racehorse that has been pumped all possible energy from the racetrack, which has become very cumbersome since it no longer has any use. But who decided it was made for the slaughterhouse? And who decided, long before, to bet on this horse?
The genesis (microphone, otherwise we left for the morning). With the creation of the CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique) at the end of the Second World War, French civil nuclear power was a gamble by Charles De Gaulle. Not the aircraft carrier, the man. You know, the man whose career all politicians have to claim for a moment in their careers to make their com. This bet will lead France to a relative energy autonomy, since less than 10% of the electricity consumed in France is imported. And about 75% of the electricity produced by France comes from nuclear power. A virtuous bet from an economic point of view. Indeed, if the hexagon has its Mont Blanc, its Côte d'Azur, its Eiffel Tower or its Dune du Pilat, you have to go elsewhere to see a drop of oil or a bit of coal, the reference energies in our society.
And since. Nuclear power is not in the list of future energies for the EU. Reducing the weight of nuclear power from 75% to 50% in the "energy mix" is even a government priority. This priority includes, officially, the development of so-called "green" or renewable energy sources (it sounds more scientific).
Wind power has the wind in its sails, with the focus on solar power.
But what exactly do we have to reproach nuclear power for? Nuclear power holds a special place in society. For an important reason among others. It is frightening. With the help of the media. For example, ask 5 people around you what Fukushima means to them: I was surprised by the number of "well, a nuclear catastrophe".
Nuclear power is scary during and after. Nuclear waste is considered a major problem. So what about the waste from coal-fired power plants, cars, airplanes.... what waste? CO2. If nuclear waste is active for several hundreds of years and radiates in a radius more or less large depending on the quality of its burial, CO2 remains active for several thousands of years, and in the entire atmosphere...
Without going into a classification of the pros and cons of all possible energy sources (gas, oil, coal, nuclear fission, wind, solar, hydraulic, nuclear fusion), which will be the subject of a dedicated article, it seems that nothing is black or white in energy. But it is a truth. No energy has ever substituted itself for another in the past. Worse, there has been more investment in fossil fuels than in RE in the past decade. That is the problem. The real problem lies not in the hypothetical (or even utopian) discovery of a "clean" energy source, but in our relationship to energy. Energy is transformation. In this, energy serves the egotistical and dopaminergic needs of the human brain. Transforming, always more, always further, always greater.
A responsible turfu is a turfu in which one goes from the conquest of the planet to the conquest of one's own brain. That is to say, to the conscious discovery of one's own needs. If science has allowed the rise of the thermo-industrial society, science has also shown that each of us has everything we need to be happy by consuming less.
The cleanest energy is the one we do not consume. This sentence can make debate, it has the merit to put all the consumable energies in the same basket, and not to put any of them in a hierarchy. A galloping horse anyway, that's a graceful energy.