Nuclear- not good vibrations in France
Renew Extra 25th Jan 2025, https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2025/01/nuclear-not-good-vibrations-in-france.html
France is having problems with nuclear power. It was once the poster child for nuclear energy, which, after a rapid government funded build-up in the1980s based on standard Westinghouse Pressurised-water Reactor (PWR) designs, at one point supplied around 75% of its power, with over 50 reactors running around the country. Mass deployment of similar designs meant that there were economies of scale and given that it was a state-run programme, the government could supply low-cost funding and power could be supplied to consumers relatively cheaply.
But the plants are now getting old, and there has been a long running debate over what to do to replace them: it will be expensive given the changed energy market, with cheaper alternatives emerging. At one stage, after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, it was proposed by the socialist government to limit nuclear to supplying just 50% of French power by 2025, with renewables to be ramped up.
That began to look quite sensible when, in 2016, faults were found with the steel forgings of some of the old PWR plants. There was an extensive programme of reactor checks, with some units having to be shut down for the duration. But the industry, though chastened by stories about cover-ups, survived, and, with a new government in power led by Macron, the 50% limit was delayed. Indeed, proposals were made for significant expansion, based in part on an upgrade European Pressurised-water Reactor (EPR) design.
Macron said ‘Our energy & ecological future depends on nuclear power; our economic and industrial future depends on nuclear power; and France’s strategic future depends on nuclear power’:
The first EPR in France has been built at Flamanville on the Normandy coast, but all did not go well. It was 12 years late and four times overbudget. And new vibration problems could mean that it may not be able to run at full power. In addition, more problems (this time with stress corrosion) have been found with some of the old plants.
With at one stage, 28 of them shut down for tests and/or repairs, EDFs financial situation became increasingly weak. And, it has got worse. With, in 2024, the French government and economy also being in some disarray, it looked as if plans for more projects might have to be reconsidered, their being reports that ‘in the absence of financial commitment from the State, EDF (is) raising the possibility of halving the investments planned in the EPR2 program in 2025.’
It was the same for EDFs programme of building more EPRs in the UK- with one at Sizewell in Suffolk being proposed to follow on from the part-built one at Hinkley Point in Somerset. Indeed, the French Court of Auditors has just recommended ‘not approving a final investment decision for EDF in Sizewell C before obtaining a significant reduction in its financial exposure in Hinkley Point C’.
So what next? The somewhat beleaguered French government evidently wants the European Commission to revise EU renewable energy directive to also provide support for new nuclear! But back home, it is arguably ‘far from ready’ for a new nuclear expansion programme. And, with nuclear costs rising, the idea of treating it as ‘low risk’ compared with renewables in EU plans is being resisted. Then again EDF evidently think some new nuclear options are too risky- it has pulled out of work on its initial design for a Small Modular Reactor, so it is no longer a contender for the UK SMR competition.
What does all this mean for the UK? Well, although its overall finances are not good, up until recently, EDF has done quite well out of the UK, still running its fleet of old AGRs and its single PWR, with the UK’s funding subsidy schemes providing support for French profit-making via surcharges on UK consumers bills – in the case of the proposed new RAB scheme for Sizewell C, in advance of project completion. Indeed, some might say EDF’s exploitation of the UK has been overdone and not helpful!
Certainly, EDF’s current troubles add to the increasing level of uncertainty about Sizewell C. China had provided some backing for Hinkley, but, with there being growing concerns about security, the UK government decided that China could not be allowed to back Sizewell. So the hunt was on for new backers. However, it has proven to be hard, and with talk of the bills for these projects ballooning, allegedly to £46bn for Hinkley, the opposition lobby is getting more assertive. Hinkley Point C was originally meant to start up in 2017, but may finally get going in 2031 or so. It is a giant project, impressive in a way, but arguably not what is needed, with renewables getting so much cheaper. Same for Sizewell C- it’s getting increasingly hard to justify it.
EDF do seem to be having it tough with nuclear of late, but although the costs of the EPRs may be disputed, whatever they turn out to be, it’s far from clear if the French EPRs will be value for money. The UK has done quite well so far with renewables, which have helped it get its emissions down by a half between 1990 and 2022, compared to a 23% reduction in France, where nuclear is still predominant and renewable are, so far, less developed. Time for a change everywhere? Certainly, back in 2021, the IEA and RTE Agency in France produced a study asking if it was technically possible to integrate very high shares of renewables in large power systems like that in France. It concluded that, if coupled with adequate storage and system balancing, for renewables to supply 85-90% of power by 2050 and 100% by 2060. However, it would be expensive. But then so would continuing with nuclear, maybe more so.
The Atlas Network talking about itself
The MPS and its Atlas Network have conscientiously worked to change university campuses from places of free inquiry and critical thinking. Those beachheads in universities are matched by opportunities to find and promote “conservative” students. The idea is to shape them and potentially promote their careers in politics, the law, media, policy, academia and business.
January 26, 2025, Lucy Hamilton , https://theaimn.net/the-atlas-network-talking-about-itself/
There is much to learn about the Atlas Network from one of Ron Manners’ Mannkal Economic Education Foundation newsletters. This Mannkal newsletter was issued in April 2015. The project continues unabated.
The Atlas Network is a global interconnection of over 500 faux “thinktanks” (or junktanks), dedicated to reinforcing and propagandising the “free market” message. The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) is considered its steering committee. The Atlas Network was designed from 1981 to metastasise similar bodies to sell “business” ideas. It finds local enthusiasts and donors around the world to eliminate obstructions to profit for American corporations and local fellow-travellers. The MPS is secretive: its membership is only rarely leaked.Ron Manners, with mining money, founded Mannkal in 1997. He is currently a life member and on the board of the MPS. He was appointed to the Advisory Council for the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in 2010. In 2020, he was awarded Atlas’s Sir Antony Fisher Achievement award. The newsletter explains that the name Mannkal originated in the cable/telex address of the company he inherited.
The Mannkal newsletter illustrates the connection to the MPS which first met in 1947. It brought together Austrian School economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises together with the Chicago School’s Milton Friedman. The MPS, through Hayek, began the process of creating plutocrat-serving law and economics institutes in universities around America.
It also took the model provided by bodies such as the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), founded in 1946, to create the mirage that a chorus of genuine policy experts supported the political economy that the donors desired. Friedman did much of the public relations for the project before the junktanks became more organised.
In the 1950s, Brit Antony Fisher, inspired by The Road to Serfdom, visited Hayek for advice. One of the UK junktanks in the Network explains that Hayek “told him bluntly to forget politics. Politicians just follow prevailing opinions. If you want to change events, change ideas.” He instructed Fisher to found thinktanks to help shift the prevailing mood away from the consensus that government, labour and capital all had a say in how society should operate towards a world where capital could dictate all including directing the government for its own ends.
When the co-founder of the Atlas Network Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner, visited Australia in 1985 to conduct a workshop, he contrasted Friedman’s role marketing supply side economics, privatisation and the flat tax with the need for bodies to “set the terms and agenda of public policy.” The intent was to propagandise or “market an idea.” There must be “permanent saturation campaigns with multi-pronged, longterm strategies.” Proctor and Gamble, he explained, sell Crest toothpaste by “keeping the product fresh in the consumers’ minds.” That was to be the junktanks’ role. (These are a combination of Dr Jeremy Walker’s summaries and Feulner’s own words. The essay is well worth your time to see the history and people of Atlas in Australia.)
That Adam Smith Institute essay continues to boast that the Atlas Network had grown at the time of writing to 450 bodies. Now, the essay boasts, “They are changing events all over the world – from land reform in Peru, through privatization in Britain, public debt control in Pakistan, to low-cost education in India. And spreading the ideas of liberty in even the most unlikely places, in the Muslim world from Morocco through Turkey to Yemen and Kazakhstan; in Africa from Mali and Ivory Coast to Ethiopia; in Europe and the Far East.”
The MPS and its Atlas Network have conscientiously worked to change university campuses from places of free inquiry and critical thinking. Those beachheads in universities are matched by opportunities to find and promote “conservative” students. The idea is to shape them and potentially promote their careers in politics, the law, media, policy, academia and business.
One of Mannkal’s primary roles is the selecting of libertarian students in Western Australia for scholarships to Atlas Network junktanks around the world. In this edition of the newsletter, two report back on attending an MPS conference. One celebrated attending “networking events with prominent intellectuals and businesspeople from around the world.” Another was dazzled by, “Having dinner alongside a mining magnate, the chairman of a prominent think-tank, a famous TV presenter and an ex-CIA agent”. He continued, “I was exposed to a network rich in knowledge and influence, including a plethora of world-class academics, Nobel laureates and senior political figures.” (Nafeez Ahmed’s Alt Reich shows the significance of the CIA – and their former Nazis – in the shaping of the Atlas Network.)
Melbourne’s Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), a 1943 creation, was absorbed into the Atlas Network in the era of the Liberal Party’s battle between the Wets and the Dries. It was reportedly “hijacked” by “radicals” after people senior in the body attended an MPS conference.
The newsletter report of a third scholarship holder illustrates the Cold War dread of communism that continues to motivate the MPS and its Atlas junktanks. Former Czech president Vaklav Klaus, then a member of the MPS for 25 years, spoke at a lunch. People who have suffered under communist and socialist governments are often rolled out to warn audiences of the continuing threat of authoritarianism. The offspring of refugees who have had awful experiences in such countries provide some of the enthusiastic recruits for Mannkal.
Neoliberalism was always a bunk economics that trumpeted itself as superior because it was driven by theory and rejected evidence. In fact it was an ideology – and a network of activists – that functioned to serve the rich donors. As the project became our new normal, it created ever more dramatic inequalities, resulting in the fury and pain that drives sadopopulism. Youthful interest in social democracies has been a more productive response. In 2024, the IPA was sharing American Atlas junktank Cold War 2.0 propaganda to address the risk that youth might turn away from the “freedom” they sell.
Those of us watching the Atlas Network’s Heritage Foundation plans come to fruition in the first week of Trump’s second term see where authoritarianism lurks right now. Heritage’s Mandate for Leadershiphas come a long way since its first iteration set out the Ronald Reagan economic revolution’s steps. Now it combines its ultra-libertarian positions with authoritarian social policy and autocratic governance.
In this newsletter, Mannkal boasts of 154 scholarships available. Many are to conferences. Fifteen are “midyear internships abroad.” Another 45 are “3-month internships abroad.” The students are sent to Atlas junktanks around the world with 12 partners in particular listed. They include the inspiration for Mannkal, the FEE in Atlanta mentioned above. The Institute of Economic Affairs in London is another. That’s the body that helped create Maggie Thatcher’s economics after she was inspired by The Road to Serfdom. She co-founded another Atlas junktank, the Centre for Policy Studies.
One of the interns celebrates Maggie Thatcher’s certainty of the importance of Atlas: “It started with Sir Keith and me, with the Centre for Policy Studies, and Lord Harris at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Yes, it started with ideas, with beliefs. That’s it. You must start with beliefs. Yes, always beliefs.” Thatcher and Reagan make repeat appearances as Atlas heroes in the newsletter.
Another intern went to the New Zealand Institute, where the Chief Economist is Eric Crampton, MPS director.
The intern who was sent to Atlas headquarters in Washington was delighted to attend events at several of the Atlas junktanks including the Cato Institute (where Rupert Murdoch was a board member in the 1990s) and the Leadership Institute (party to Project 2025 and, like Heritage, to the Christian Nationalist Council for National Policy). She was impressed by Tom Palmer: Atlas’s Executive Director for International Programs. His patronising speeches at the Friedman Conference over the years can be found online.
Another of the interns was deeply grateful to spend time in Melbourne at the IPA with John Roskam. Two went to the Menzies Research Centre (MRC). One was thrilled to sit in on “meetings with high-level politicians and policy-advisors.” Mathias Corman, then Finance Minister, spoke at an MRC event about “shrinking government” in New Zealand and Australia. The Atlas Network’s Project 2025 shows how brutal the cuts to government are ultimately intended to be.
The Executive Director of the Liberal Party-affiliated MRC Nick Cater has just spent the European summer with Viktor Orbán’s junktanks in Budapest.
Scholarship donors are listed in the newsletter as Manners, Gina Rinehart, Willy Packer and Toby Nichols.
One public figure who shows the path and now models the Atlas policy influence is David Seymour, Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand/Aotearoa. He was recruited on his university campus by the Atlas Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT). The ACT is the now the political party that he leads. Seymour was awarded an Atlas “MBA” after a fortnight’s training at Atlas headquarters. He went on to work in the Canadian Atlas Frontier Center before returning to Atlas work in NZ. He is far from the only political leader with deep Atlas Network ties.
Austrian School economics is largely dead these days, although Atlas partners continue to try to resuscitate them. One of the intern reports in the newsletter says the “highlight of my experience was learning about Austrian economics, a stream of economics that is not taught in Australian high schools or universities.” There is a cogent reason why she was freshly discovering the contribution from “economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter and Frederic Bastiat – important economists whose ideas or names have never once been mentioned in my four years of studying economics.” Several interns mention this inculcation of Austrian School truthiness as part of their experience.
One of the most ebullient floggers of Austrian thought in America has been Rand Paul. The intern sent to Canada’s Fraser Institute was excited to report that he met the man.
The newsletter discusses its links to the then highlight of the Atlas Network calendar in Australasian region, the Friedman Conference. In 2024, the conference was reduced to a rabble-rousing event called the Triple Conference that gave a day to libertarianism, a day to Christian Nationalism and a day to conspiracy theory nonsense.
The Mannkal newsletter also links to the History of Economic Thought Society Australia (HETSA), which hosts a Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) conference. HETSA is, anecdotally, a host to MPS figures. In 2024, this event took place at the Alphacrucis University College in NSW. Alphacrucis is the official training college of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God network, Australian Christian Churches reshaped under Hillsong’s Brian Houston. Notre Dame University, also a Catholic force in reactionary politicking and culture wars, provided the YSI organiser.
A third conference series mentioned is the “Freedom to Choose” conference, hosted by Notre Dame University and “supported” by Mannkal. The 2024 conference focused as its theme on the “enduring relevance” of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, the book that inspired so many of the big money donors in the early history of neoliberalism.
Ron Manners pontificates on Public Choice Theory in the newsletter. This is a core aspect of Atlas’s history.
One of the key details to be gleaned from the newsletter is that this project is lifelong and often intergenerational for the donors. One of the interns at the IEA considered herself lucky to meet Hayek’s daughter who allowed the interns to “gain insight into the workings of her father first-hand!” Antony Fisher’s daughter, Linda Whetstone, was president of the MPS, chair of the Atlas Network and on the board at the IEA. Rupert Murdoch’s father Keith co-founded the IPA with Charles Kemp. Rupert was an official board member at Cato, and an unofficial conduit of the IPA, Centre of Independent Studies and MRC, whose people are regularly found on his platforms. The Kemp sons, Rod and David, were key figures in the thinktanks and the Atlas Americanisation of Australian politics.
Charles Koch has been a prime force financially and strategically at Atlas for decades.
It is hard to know how much of the change from Keynesian balanced economy to neoliberal brutality is attributable to the MPS and the Atlas Network, compared to how much might be due to the general impact of the donors and ideologues. Industry lobbies and the direct power of the plutocrats intermix with the marketing of the Atlas Network and its soft power impact for American corporations around the world.
The plutocrats ventriloquised through Atlas operations, but do not seem to feel the same compulsion to separate their goals from their faces any longer. Whether it’s Elon Musk or Gina Rinehart, they seem to feel comfortable now dictating oligarch policy for themselves.
Regardless, it’s worth watching Atlas talking about itself: the freedom it declares it fights for was always anti-democratic.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 