living between fear and profit

Baba hou! Baba hou! A blazing sun beats down the fifty or so guests gathered under the marquee of the Belleville-sur-Loire (Cher) festival committee. The announcing notes of the famous Madison choreography persuade a good number of them to get up and shake their hips. Not far from this improvised dance floor, teenagers challenge each other on a brand new basketball court and children skip hopscotch under a row of beech trees. The village’s seniors’ club on one side, young people from the after-school association on the other, all generations are gathered to share the barbecue organized by the municipality. The scene is rural, the sausages are grilling, the faces are cheerful, and no one seems to worry about the industrial behemoth that sits on the horizon. A kilometer away, however, huge concrete towers culminating at 165 meters are escaping thick clouds of water vapor. This is the Belleville-sur-Loire nuclear power plant.

The Belleville-sur-Loire power station: a source of life for the village

Built near the ocean or rivers to cool them, nuclear reactors provide 65% of the electricity produced in France. Here, anchored on the west bank of the longest river in France – the Loire – the building impresses passers-by. For local residents, however, as for more than two million French people living less than 20 km from a nuclear site, these chimneys are simply part of the landscape. In Belleville-sur-Loire, no one is unaware that in the event of a major industrial accident, a radioactive leak would contaminate their environment and endanger their health. However, among the residents leaning on the table to start an aperitif, the hypotheses of catastrophic scenarios such as those of Fukushima in 2011 or Chernobyl in 1986 are brushed aside.

“Has the power plant ever scared me? No, never. All I know is that it gave me life, yes!” says Ninette, a former municipal employee and parish volunteer. She and her husband saw these towers and reactors rise from the ground at the same time as their village of 1,100 inhabitants, in the mid-1980s. “When we arrived here, there were barely 200 inhabitants, a few farms, a church and that’s it,” recalls Philippe, her husband, wearing a straw hat and a glass of punch in his hand. The affable 72-year-old recounts: “The EDF houses were built as workers flocked to the site from all four corners of France. The painters came from the North, the boilermakers from the Alps, and I, a welder, came from Gironde, from the Blayais power plant, to finish the metal frame.”

Industrial adventure

In France, the industrial epic of the atom described by Philippe was initiated in 1974 with the “Messmer plan”. At the time, to respond to the consequences of the oil shock, Pierre Messmer, Prime Minister of Georges Pompidou, authorized the construction of thirteen nuclear power plants. Today, the sector, the third largest in the country, has 220,000 jobs. In 2022, Emmanuel Macron confirmed its revival by validating the construction of fourteen new reactors. While the first six are planned for Penly (Seine-Maritime), Bugey (Ain) and Gravelines (Nord), the location of the other eight, still under study, is attracting the covetousness of many municipalities. Bruno Van der Putten, the mayor of Belleville-sur-Loire, intends to glean two new ones for his village. Because a power plant is synonymous with attractiveness. “It employs 1,200 people a year, which is more than the entire population of the village,” says the elected official. In this campaign, with the exception of the two current water reactors, only the Sancerre vineyard is a real provider of jobs. “Expanding the current site would allow the development of local businesses, restaurants and hotels,” continues the elected official.

Forty kilometres north of the village, the river bed widens and its waters are used to cool four other reactors, those of the Dampierre-en-Burly power plant (Loiret). Deep ditches topped with barbed wire, large fences, “Do not enter” signs every twenty metres as you approach the site, its dangerousness is becoming clear. Caroline, met near the pond bordering this town of 1,400 souls, admits that having a 44-year-old nuclear installation as a neighbour can be “a source of worry”. But this mother has become accustomed to the sirens of safety drills every first Wednesday of the month and carefully keeps iodine tablets in her first aid kit¹.

However, there is no question of her complaining. The positive economic impact of the power plant on her living environment is undeniable. “Dampierre-en-Burly is a wealthy town,” she admits, with a wry smile. The windfall of a nuclear power plant is also fiscal. To produce electricity, EDF pays a considerable property tax to the municipality and is subject to the flat-rate tax on network companies (IFER), a tax that fills the coffers of neighboring local authorities. These sums are counted in millions of euros and radically change the face of the towns. Around her, Caroline counts a pharmacy, a gas station, a supermarket, a bistro, a massage parlor, an aquatic center and even a cinema. “Do you know many small villages with all these services and local shops?”

New York, Rome and Belleville

In Belleville-sur-Loire, this wealth still permeates memories of youth. “As a teenager, my summer camps were in New York, Rome or London,” recalls Romain, 26, the son of a school employee. The town, covered by nuclear money, could afford to organize these trips at low prices. “200 euros for New York, now I’m well aware of our luck,” concedes the young man. A windfall well taken in by the locals. “Without the power plant, it’s an exodus, all that no longer exists,” Caroline says before going to pick up her granddaughter after school.

Ask the residents of the former Fessenheim power plant (Haut-Rhin). In 2020, its early closure despite its working order caused tension in an entire region. It provided nearly 2,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs. Four years later, a good half were reassigned elsewhere by EDF, 400 to 500 subcontractors lost their jobs and local jobs in commerce and catering also disappeared. These ravages of deindustrialization are reminiscent of others: textile factories in Hauts-de-France, steel industry in Moselle, automobile factories in Belfort-Montbéliard… In total, between 1970 and 2021, the share of industry in employment in France fell from 29% to 11%.

A nuclear reactor, on the other hand, cannot be relocated. “The nuclear professions are rooted in the countryside, river valleys, coastlines, in the population basins of the sub-prefectures,” explains Christophe Neugnot, director of communications for the French Nuclear Energy Industrialists’ Association (GIFEN). In addition to being skilled, well-paid and long-term jobs, they contribute to the country’s energy independence, and the French have understood this in recent years.” The favorable opinion for nuclear power has never been greater: 50% of French people consider that it is necessary to “continue to build power plants”²

Repeated pollution of the landscape near the power plant

However, this is not enough to erode the resistance of the “antis”. Françoise Pouzet is a historic figure of the Sortir du nucléaire network in the region. “I became involved against the plant as soon as I saw its concrete towers emerging from the ground, in 1982,” says the activist, who lives 15 kilometers from Belleville-sur-Loire. Since then, her opposition has remained intact. In her farmhouse with a roof covered in solar panels, the newspapers of the regional daily press pile up. “Radioactive “contamination” of the Loire detected in Saumur”, headlines The Republic of the Center “Belleville power plant affected by legionella bacteria” on the front page, this time, of Berry Republican . “The nuclear risk is not just a potential accident,” she assures, “it is also the daily chemical releases into the air and water. As in the case of tritium, a radioactive element that is frequently found in excessively high proportions, as in the Loire in 2019 (in Saumur, in Maine-et-Loire) or in the Rhône in 2021 (in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, in Drôme).” Chemical releases that, according to her, would have consequences on health. However, to date no study confirms an increased prevalence of cancer among residents near power plants.

To track pollution, members of the Sortir du nucléaire network travel the rivers, take samples and examine the incidents reported by EDF to the Safety Authority. “In Dampierre-en-Burly alone, there were nine between April and May 2024,” emphasizes Hubert Gasnier, the president of the local branch of the association. “These are minor incidents, but when combined, they reveal that safety is declining. Our power plants are aging, they are on average over 37 years old.” Renewing them is the challenge for its manager EDF for the coming decade. But, faced with the difficulties of building the new generation reactor (EPR) in Flamanville (Manche), the company is moving forward in troubled waters. Launched in 2007, the project was supposed to last five years, at a cost of 3.3 billion euros. It will have lasted nearly seventeen, for a bill ultimately estimated at 19.1 billion.

Nuclear power and the dream of full employment

No matter, in the Manche, the historic cradle of the atom in France, “we have happy nuclear power”, proclaims David Margueritte, the vice-president of the Normandy region. The Hague waste reprocessing center, the Flamanville power plant, the Naval Group shipyards where French atomic submarines are built, all these factories make the North Cotentin one of the rare territories in France to achieve full employment, with an unemployment rate of nearly 4.6%.

Boilermaking, public works, electronic components… Companies are springing up like mushrooms around Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, the French champion of industrial job creation3. Dotted with warehouses and short green spaces, its activity zone is home to a school for the construction of future reactors. Within its walls, steel tubes intertwine and the noise of grinders rubs shoulders with the reddish sparks of the welding stations of the students of the Hefaïs welding school – its name refers to Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire and forging. With a welding mask raised on the top of his head, Benjamin Holley examines the pipes that his students have just assembled and encourages them to repeat their gesture tirelessly. A welder in the nuclear industry for sixteen years, this Norman now teaches at this school created in 2021 by a group of industrialists, notably EDF and Naval Group, to address the lack of qualified labor. “For fifteen years, manual trades were not valued and know-how was lost,” he laments. “But now, they are making a comeback.” In welding, as in other trades, the nuclear industry is planning 100,000 recruitments in the next ten years to ensure the titanic projects that await it. Enough to make the elected officials of the 18 municipalities that host power plants in France salivate. Bruno Van der Putten, the mayor of Belleville-sur-Loire, summarizes: “It’s paradoxical, but the closer we are to nuclear power, the less we fear it.”

1) In the event of an accident, iodine saturates the thyroid to protect it from radioactive releases into the air.

2) Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) barometer, 2023.

3) Study by economist Laurent Davezies, published in The Tribune January 31, 2024.