‘The day it goes wrong? We won’t know about it … ’: life next door to a nuclear power
Rain or shine, Christiane Lamiraud, 63, likes to swim in the Channel from the beach near her home in the village of Saint-Martin-en-Campagne, north-east of Dieppe. From the water, it is hard to miss the Penly nuclear power station just 700 metres up the coast at the foot of the chalk cliffs, sucking in seawater to cool its two reactors, then pumping it back out to sea a few degrees warmer. But ignore it she does. Reports of incidents do not deter the teacher from her daily swim. “Questions are quickly stifled here. Where there is a nuclear industry, it’s a non-subject. It is hidden behind the cliff and we don’t talk about it,” she says.
Like many villages and towns in close proximity to France’s nuclear plants, St Martin-en-Campagne in the Petit-Caux district is close enough that it could be evacuated in case of an accident. But most residents prefer not to dwell on that, says villager Pierre Pouliquen, 45. “There is a real need for clean energy. The problems of nuclear power aren’t hidden, but we don’t even think about them. Even when we go to the beach, we don’t look at the power station.”
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Christiane Lamiraud lives in Saint-Martin-en-Campagne in Normandy, about 700 meters from the Penly nuclear plant. She swims in the English Channel every day, despite the proximity to the power station.
France’s enthusiastic relationship with nuclear power – it has the most plants out of any European country – and people’s ambivalent attitudes to life in the shadow of the plants themselves are the subject of a project by British photographer Ed Alcock. He spent six months capturing the lives of people living within 5km of five nuclear power stations in France, for an exhibition sponsored by the country’s culture ministry.
Alcock, who moved to France in his 20s, was struck by what he saw as people’s “head-in-the-sand” attitudes towards nuclear power, which marked a contrast to his experience growing up in Norwich in the dying days of the cold war. He remembers being sent home from school and hiding inside to escape radiation from the 1986 Chornobyl disaster. “We spent 24 hours sitting in the house with the doors and windows closed hoping nuclear particles weren’t coming down the chimney,” Alcock says. “Growing up, nuclear was the thing that kept me awake at night. I used to go to bed wondering if we’d be here in the morning.
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A young couple embrace in the river Loire, opposite the Belleville nuclear power station in Belleville-sur-Loire in central France. The plant uses water from the river to cool the two reactors, which is then ejected as vapour and as water further downstream. Heatwaves, low water levels or high water temperatures can restrict operations at the power station.
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Above left: Bathers in the swimming pool in Belleville-sur-Loire. The village has a population of only 1,000, but taxes paid by the French multinational electric utility company EDF fund leisure facilities usually only found in towns of 100,000 inhabitants or more.
Above right: ‘There are not many inhabitants here, but the power station makes many things possible,’ says Olivier Martin. He is a French adapted-boxing champion and member of the Bellevillois boxing club in Belleville-sur-Loire – one of the many sporting clubs financed by EDF.
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Children at the Stade Abdou Sené, home to a football club in Bollène-Ecluse. The village in southern France is a few hundred meters from Tricastin nuclear station and uranium enrichment plant – one of the largest nuclear sites in Europe.
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Françoise Pouzet and Bernadette Moreau are members of the Sortir du Nucléaire network. They are taking water samples from the river Loire, near the Belleville plant, to measure radioactivity levels.
“Then I moved to France in 2000 and talked to people my age about Chornobyl. They told me that when it happened, French television showed maps of the radioactive cloud spread across Europe and it stopped at Belgium and reappeared across the Channel.
“You would imagine it’s a subject that would worry most people, but not here. Almost nobody questions it, which always surprises me. And whenever you talk about the dangers, everyone looks at you as if you’re mad to be worried about it.”
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‘I am the last of the Mohicans of Belleville,’ says Christian Gaudin, the last farmer in Belleville-sur-Loire. Some of his fields are just a few metres from the power station. Other farmers have been bought out by EDF, which is acquiring the land for future projects that are not yet public knowledge.
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Above left: Françoise Aubert, 78, is the retired former communications officer at the Tricastin power station, photographed in her garden, in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, about 4km from the plant. A corrosion defect shut down 12 out of 56 reactors in France in 2022. She says: ‘The corrosion is in a circuit that has no contact with radioactivity. I don’t see why we should make a big deal of it.’
Above right: Jean Grelier lives on a farm 300 metres from the Blayais nuclear power station on the Gironde estuary. A storm in 1999 flooded the region, and his family were stranded for nearly 24 hours, watching, terrified, as steam spewed from the flooded station. The deluge disabled some, but fortunately not all, of the cooling pumps. A nuclear accident was narrowly avoided. ‘Fortunately, EDF engineers have learned the lessons of that storm,’ he says.
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Didier Eymard is an organic winegrower in Saint-Ciers-sur-Gironde. His family has been working the land for at least five generations. He is a…
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2024-07-20 05:00:00