“Why another blog defending nuclear energy?” one of my friends asked me recently.

Well, I just believe that the debate around those issues, at least in this country, is most often childish and irresponsible. The pros and the cons present two conflicting ideologies and fire arguments at each other, sometimes downright heinous on one side and commiserating on the other. Both refuse to engage into any form of debate around the real issues of feasibility, which are of course driven by the technology we have in our hands, but perhaps more importantly numbers. For example, if we want to reduce the share of nuclear energy to 50% in France without increasing CO2 emissions, it means, according to Jean-Marc Jancovici that we must reduce electricity consumption by half. Now are we prepared to do this? On the other side, we keep on claiming that nuclear energy is free from CO2 emissions, which is by and large true, but we never mention that because nuclear power plants heat rivers, our ecological footprint is far from negligible.
So the debate is difficult, and let’s just say that I’d like to contribute, and give my two cents worth once in a while.

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