‘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.”

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.

“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.”