Business: Where the Atom Is Admired

France presses nuclear power and a waste-treatment idea

In most ways, Malville is a tunelessly idyllic French village. Chickens wander the lanes that link the stone farmhouses, while cows graze alongside the clear Rhone River. Yet the hamlet (pop. 50), located about 30 miles east of Lyon, has a strikingly modern feature. Within a large fenced-off area, tall construction cranes hover over a huge concrete cylinder that will contain the world's most advanced nuclear power plant, a fast-breeder reactor christened Super Phenix.

When it begins operating in late 1983, the plant will become the flagship of a program that by the mid-1980s will make France the second largest producer of nuclear power, behind only the U.S. and ahead of West Germany, Japan and the U.S.S.R. France's progress runs counter to the trend in other Western nations, where opponents of atom power and rising costs have impeded its development just as the need for alternatives to oil has become most acute. Only the Soviet Union is developing nuclear energy as assiduously as France.

France now has 16 nuclear power stations in operation (vs. 72 in the U.S.). Over the next five years it is scheduled to switch on new facilities at a rate of one every two months. By mid-decade, when 52 plants will be running, the country will be getting 55% of its electricity and a fifth of its total energy from the atom; in the U.S., atomic plants now account for 11.5% of electricity production and less than 4% of total energy needs.

Why has France largely been spared the opposition from environmentalists and others that has blocked nuclear programs elsewhere? President Valery Giscard d'Estaing credits "the common sense, the intelligence of Frenchmen who have understood perfectly well that we have no important energy resources of our own and that to work, to have jobs, to heat ourselves and to be productive we had to have energy." No major party, including the Communists, is antinuclear. At the same time, France is a highly centralized state that, for better or worse, lacks the legal and administrative checks that allow small pressure groups to halt billion dollar projects. So confident is Giscard of his ability to press a needed program that the week after the accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island last March, he boldly announced a speedup in nuclear-plant construction.

After the oil crisis began in 1973, the French government decided on a crash nuclear program and signed a licensing agreement to build pressurized water reactors adapted from a Westinghouse design. Already the country's nuclear-generated electricity is proving to be 45% cheaper than power from oil-fired plants. By 1985 France expects to reduce its oil-import bill by 28%; at today's prices that means cutting $7 billion from the $25 billion cost.