The nuclear breakdown has (also) effects on the climate

The new boss of EDF just named this Thursday, Luc Rémont, already knows it: his first mission, as soon as he is installed in the chair of Jean-Bernard Lévy, will be to restart the broken down nuclear reactors, to spend the winter. There is plenty to do: this week, 27 reactors are shut down out of the 56 in the fleet. At 6 p.m. sharp, the latter produced 25 GW of electricity, 13 less than on the same date last year…

Over the whole of 2022, nuclear production was to peak at 280 TWh, very far from the 400 TWh that France experienced, which allowed it to be a major exporter of electricity for a long time. In this breakdown, individual and collective faults (delays in Flamanville and in maintenance) and “bad luck fault” events (Covid, stress corrosion, war in Ukraine) accumulate.

More generally, France is paying for the probably too rapid slowdown in the availability of its thermal electricity production means and, in comparison, the excessively slow ramp-up of new nuclear and renewable means of production. In the short term, all of these elements coupled with the closing of the Russian gas tap propelled electricity prices to new heights, and more so in France than elsewhere.

But the unavailability of a nuclear fleet does not only have financial consequences and in terms of supply (since it will be necessary to import electricity from Germany, which is produced from its hundred coal-fired power stations) . There is another one, and it concerns our country’s CO2 emissions. The fifteen gas-fired power stations that run 24 hours a day emit greenhouse gases.

This can be read in the first assessment of CO2 emissions in the first half of 2022, published this Thursday by Citepa , the specialized and official body. Emissions have hardly fallen compared to the same period of 2021 (-0.6%), in particular because those linked to energy production have climbed by almost 8%, “in connection with the numerous shutdowns of nuclear power plants in 2022,” writes Citepa.

It is not the only sector that has seen its emissions progress, this is the case for transport, while emissions from buildings have fallen by 12.5% ​​and those from industry by 5.2%. The Ministry of Energy Transition considers that this overall stabilization does not jeopardize France’s compliance with its objectives, if only because the decline is marked compared to 2019. This is not so sure.

France emitted 418 million tonnes COeq₂ in 2021, with the target of 409 million tonnes this year, according to the revised National Low Carbon Strategy (SNBC), i.e. a decrease of 2.1% over the whole year – against, therefore, -0, 6% in the first half, when the gas plants were not running at full capacity. In 2023, it should drop to 395 million tonnes.