French president Sarkozy said that unsave nuclear power plants will be closed - Lesson learnt?

Nicolas Sarkozy pledged on Friday that the French nuclear power plants that do not successfully pass the future European tests of resistance would be closed.

The European Union is preparing a large "cleaning" of the park after the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, probably the worst since Chernobyl. To complete this operation, the European Commissioner for Energy, Günther Oettinger, announced Wednesday the establishment of European controls. The objective is to verify the security of all the 143 reactors in 14 EU countries and possibly lead to the closure of the most vulnerable.

If the principle was endorsed Friday by EU leaders at an EU summit in Brussels, the content and format of the tests have not yet been defined. The general idea is to analyze the capacity of the reactors and plants to resist to a major earthquake, flood or power failure.
Nuclear experts from the European Commission and ENSRG, an independent group of European regulators created in 2007, will meet from Monday to try to agree on procedures to implement.

Rough translation from this French paper

can't see them shutting them down so i call fake on this one it's all talk and no shut down's i dare say it just to keep us happy until we forget a bout it

its a pity they did not think about all that stuff before building them. you just assume that the people who build these things and governments etc who approve and decide it is the best root to take are educated enough and smart enough to take into account unforseen possible events and combat them.

but obviously not...... why do they always have to wait for the disaster to happen to think about it, when it is not hard to sit down and think of likely possible scenerios and build in saftey features to combat them BEFORE they happen.

o.k. you would never beable to foresee every possible thing that could ever happen, but there are common risks in every area that should be obvious. power cuts is certainly one, living in an earthquake zone which would also put you at risk of tsunami's if within so many miles of the coast. it is unbelievable that none of those things were taken into account before deciding how to build them and where to place them to lessen the risks.

In 2010 there were 1000 incidents in nuclear power plants in France, some pretty serious. France depends for 80% on nuclear energy. They still have to learn their lesson, I'm afraid.

reply to post by Spinoza73

Well, let me be more accurate:
France depends of 80% of the nuclear power plants for its electricity product, and represent 17% of the whole energy production.

About the incidents/accidents, here's the INES chart with the total occurence of them in France:




But I agree, too much of recklessness....

How about we get rid of the nukes that are designed to kill people first.

No sector is accident free....

How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy
There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology...

reply to post by elevenaugust
My French is a little rusty but I think it translates to unsafe, not unsave.

So it has to meet certain safety requirements to stay open? I thought that was the case for every power plant in the Western world already?

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Yes unsafe, thanks for the correction, too late to edit for me anyway.

So it has to meet certain safety requirements to stay open? I thought that was the case for every power plant in the Western world already?

Yes, this is already the case, but they said that those safety requirements will be much more stricts...
It haven't been decided if it will be done to a great extend or not though