Ahead of the Midterms: Energy and Climate Focus 

Being so dependent on Russian gas in recent years, especially for some countries, played a role in anesthetizing our energy system. 

If we take the specific example of France, and of the situation beyond this, I would say in general that within the European crisis there is a Franco-French crisis, with our electricity system crisis triggered by the insufficient availability of our nuclear power plants, this being the result of a very short-term energy policy and ideological policy in recent decades, not mentionning under-investment in both nuclear and renewables. This is a crisis that will also last for the next three or four years.

The triptych of climate, energy, and security represents the levers of a key debate moving forward within the EU. What does security or sovereignty mean today - does it mean you strengthen your relations with others or you protect yourself more? 

What is the place of nuclear power in American energy today? 

The US situation is somewhat different. The US has really been pulling away from nuclear energy for a very long time, more so than France. One thing this Inflation Reduction Act does is to keep plants operating that otherwise would have been retired. But this is what we keep doing - we're actually doing this in other parts of the world as well. It's very hard to build a new nuclear power plant, but keeping an old one going, we're somehow able to do. And actually, if you're concerned with issues like safety, the technology has improved, and it is a strange situation where we keep extending the life of old nuclear power plants and not investing in a new future for nuclear power. 

We're not there yet but it's something that is going to have to be addressed worldwide, and that's going to connect with all these other issues we're talking about, including concerns about proliferation. Right now, in Europe we're worried about the possible use of nuclear weapons and if so, the impact that would have on the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide. All of these different parts are interconnected and the main lesson of all of this is that we can no longer look at climate change in isolation from all of these other questions.

How are France and Europe navigating the nuclear question? 

In Europe we do see a move towards nuclear power, either from countries which were hesitating - like Sweden, who clearly took a very new stance towards developing nuclear energy once more. This will also be a highly relevant topic especially in the eastern European countries, where you can no longer sell the idea that the energy transition will go through gas. 

To the point on safety: we do have this life extension program, which systematically includes an upgrade in safety with the latest lessons taken from Fukushima or other places. What we don't do, and this is what is actually done in the US or in Canada, is to make life extension include not only safety upgrades but also power upgrades; it wouldn't have cost a lot more and would have added the equivalent of one or two reactors without building anything. This is one of many missed opportunities in France in recent years. Steps taken by the US and other countries to transition from coal to nuclear are very interesting: taking some brown field coal fire plants and studying the possibility of turning them into SMR power plants. This is interesting and in some parts of Europe it will be a very attractive model, especially in coal regions, meeting both security and long-term energy supply concerns.

How will the midterm election results impact climate policy in the US? 

It is still unclear what the exact consequences of the election results will be, but there is not much of a risk of a reversal of the Inflation Reduction Act. We are looking at what can be done more from a bottom-up kind of perspective, and there's a lot to cheer about. At the same time, there is a lot more that needs to be done to understand the impact of approaching something like climate from the point of view of carrots mainly as opposed to sticks. 

Politically we've learned something from the Inflation Reduction Act. The problem of course is that you also pay a price because to please all those interests it's not a pure climate bill anymore. It’s a compromise and that makes it more difficult to know the impact it's going to have. This situation is somewhat unique in the US but it will play out in other countries too. 

Copyright: SAUL LOEB / AFP