French expediency versus the patience of a Russian endgame.

Posted by Pointman on October 22, 2022 · 9 Comments 

France is hurriedly trying to get all of its 56 nuclear power plants back up online and generating. It was always a slightly smug Gallic boast that about 70% of their electricity came from nuclear generation. That fact that their power strategy evolved in that totally different direction to all other countries in Europe is really down to two considerations. The first is the common perception that in WWII that they had been let down or to put it frankly, betrayed by the other great powers. While France had been spending a lot of blood trying to stem the blitzkrieg sweeping across France, their allies had been quietly heading for Dunkirk and the grand retreat without telling them, so when their left flank completely disappeared, it left no choice but to come to an accommodation with the invading Germans.

That common perception, right or wrong, reinforced the heavy reliance on nuclear generation which would also enable them to build a nuclear strike force, which again would remove France from any dependence on Britain or the USA for protection and was also the reason France refused to join NATO for years. They simply didn’t want to ever again rely on an exterior power for their security.

France was in a sweet position up until roughly two decades ago when all the nuclear plants started to show appreciable wear and tear. Currently, half of its 56 nuclear reactors have been shut down for maintenance mainly addressed at curing corrosion problems. Any industrial factory or complex after nearly half a century in constant use gradually becomes uneconomic anyway because the cost of increasingly heavy maintenance begins to outstrip its profitability and also its up time. The choice becomes make a very expensive refurbishment effort or bulldoze the whole thing and build a new one. The cost differential between either course is slight but the downside is both will also take years to complete.

In common with most EU countries, France started what turns out to be the strategically suicidal move of transitioning to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind while at the same time decommissioning boring old nuclear power plants like Fessenheim, which was taken out of service in 2020. Add into that mistake that the French power workers have been on strike for several weeks for wage increases and the net result is that currently about half of their power plants are either out of action or limping along.

As with most countries who walked over the green energy cliff, they’ve been forced of late to do a very quick rethink. The first step was to get nuclear quickly reclassified as a green power source, which neatly circumvented all those tiresome regulations about types of polluting power generation that would have prevented France scurrying back to nuclear. It was the quickest way of preventing what they wanted to do not being stuck in the EU regulatory committee stages for three years or so.

With help from the Germans, who desperately need power from any source even if it means burning the volumes of regulatory manuals the EU have came up with over the last twenty years, they rammed the change through despite a few squeaks from the green blob which were roundly ignored. No doubt the Germans have been promised a nice cut of the lubbely jubbly electrickery stuff by their neighbours on the west side of the Ardennes.

There’s only one snag in the whole cunning plan and it’s a grand one. Yes, France has lots of nuclear power generation plants but they don’t actually manufacture for themselves the fissionable material for all those wonderful plants to notionally burn. That ceased years ago. Nowadays it’s imported from the biggest producer and exporter of fissionable material for commercial use in the world and I’ll give you one guess who that party is.

Well done that gentleman at the back of the room wearing the funny chapeau for coming back with the correct answer so quickly, it is indeed Russia! The chances of Russia boosting production for France which would indirectly keep industrial Germany alive and therefore the EU afloat are zilch. Almost as good as Saudi Arabia boosting oil production to help out Joe Biden rather than cutting it back. Don’t forget, the EU’s foreign minister Josep Borrell has openly boasted on many occasions the we, meaning the EU, are at war with Russia. Well, welcome to the war Joe.

In professional golfing circles there’s a saying that you drive for show but you putt for dough. When it comes to winning, it’s all about the endgame. In a similar fashion, that’s how the Russians operate and you’d be a fool to ignore that deep thinking aspect of the Slavic approach to things. That accounts for their love of chess.

Western politicians think in relatively short election cycles forcing their strategists to do the same, but the Russians have no such limitation on the range of their thinking. They’ve always been quite happy to talk about what they call their “energy weapon” and with one exception, the Trumpie Monsta, western politicians have always dismissed that ever so slowly cultivated complete dominance over western Europe’s energy as a problem for tomorrow’s politicians, but unfortunately for the current crop, tomorrow has arrived.

There are lots of chess books written on opening moves and the middle game but very few on the endgame. The most attention that part of the game gets is in novelty problem solving. ie Find the mate in three etc. With the Russians and their energy weapon, we’re in the endgame phase of a twenty year game. France thought they had a neat way out of the energy dilemma but are discovering the Russians got there well ahead of them and had that escape covered.

Supply western states like France with extremely cheap fissionable material then after long enough they’ll fold their own production facilities to make such materials and in the end whether they’ll live in light or darkness of an evening is up to you. Endgame, zugswang, there isn’t a decent move left to them on the board.

Sure, there are patches, work arounds and palliative measures they can take, but like the natural gas and petroleum commodities formerly supplied by Russia, they’re band aids slapped over a sucking chest wound.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Economics, France, Nuclear Power, Russia, Ukraine