The cradle of French nuclear power, the Marcoule site hopes to keep the Gaullist heritage alive

Quelque 5000 personnes travaillent sur le site de Marcoule. Archive MAXPPP – *

Since 2010, the Marcoule nuclear site has no longer had an active reactor and has specialized in research and development or fuel production. It has also missed out on a few projects. 

“It is striking to see what French achievements are when we take the trouble!”The outdated archive, still visible on the INA website, shows General De Gaulle, who had just been inaugurated as the last President of the Council of the Fourth Republic in 1958, visiting the Marcoule atomic center with a smile. It was there, in the north of Gard, on the communal territories of Chusclan and Codolet, that his desire to launch an ambitious military and civil nuclear policy was expressed twelve years earlier. In the middle of the vineyards, on the banks of the Rhône, the first three reactors and a plutonium extraction plant were built. The cradle of a sector that has become a major player in France, which today produces 70% of our electricity and allows us to be among the most competitive countries in terms of decarbonized energy.

Sixty-six years later, the site still employs some 5,000 people, including 1,500 at the CEA (Atomic Energy Commission) and 800 at the Melox plant in Orano, which produces Mox, a plutonium-based fuel. A world reference with nearly 3,100 tonnes produced since the plant started up in 1995, it supplies Japan in particular.

Expertise in… dismantling waste management

But there are no longer any nuclear power plants in Marcoule, as the six reactors have been gradually shut down, the last one, Phénix, in 2010. In fact, the Gard site has become an experimental area for dismantling nuclear installations and managing their waste. The CEAr thus recalls that the law of 28 June 2006 on the sustainable management of radioactive materials and waste has established Marcoule's place in terms of upstream/downstream research and development of the cycle. In 2020, the Institute of Science and Technology for a Circular Economy of Low-Carbon Energy was also created in this corner of the Gard.

However, local stakeholders have often dreamed of a new ambitious project for the site, one that would ensure its future – and thousands of jobs – for decades to come. Alas, in the 1990s, Marcoule had applied to build an underground laboratory for storing radioactive waste, but it was the Bure site in Lorraine that was chosen. Above all, in 2019, when the area was due to host Astrid, the prototype of a 4th generation reactor with fast sodium neutrons to reduce nuclear waste, the project was postponed “until the second half of the century” by the State. So since the projects for six new EPRs have been imagined on other sites (Penly, Bugey and Gravelines), Marcoule aims to be the cradle, in France, of the SMRs that represent the new era of nuclear power. In line with the Gaullist heritage.

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