The risk of relying on EDF to deliver Europe’s nuclear renaissance
Revered in France as a postwar miracle, the group needs to cut its costs and rejuvenate its reactor-building expertise
In mid-March, France’s President Emmanuel Macron visited Penly in Normandy, the site of two nuclear reactors due to start generating electricity from 2038. Donning a hi-vis coat and a white helmet, he hailed the “works of the century”, saying France would “do for its children what our parents did for us”.
Some 225km to the west, another nuclear power development demonstrates how enormous that undertaking will be. Last December, the Flamanville 3 reactor reached full power, 12 years after its scheduled start-up date and costing seven times its original budget. New reactors in the UK have also been beset by delays and budget increases.
EDF, the state-owned company responsible for these projects, is Europe’s leading nuclear power generator and, for many French, a potent symbol of the country’s industrial and technological prowess. “There’s pride in the industry, linked to nostalgia for a winning version of France,” says HEC Paris professor François Gemenne.
But in the decades since France commissioned its previous generation of reactors, EDF has mutated into a sprawling, bureaucratic organisation. Its large workforce wields considerable political influence. It often finds itself torn between its own competing priorities and changing injunctions from a government that has veered between cooling on nuclear and doubling down on it.
This backdrop makes the challenge of controlling costs and refining new technology, while completing six new reactor units in France, plus four in the UK over the next decade, all the more daunting.
“Every EDF boss considers they answer to EDF and its own labour force, not to the state,” says one former government official. “It’s always a problem. The truth is, it is a state within a state.”
Chinese companies are now the fastest in the world at building new nuclear power stations. EDF has lost out to South Korean and US rivals on business overseas.
In an era of renewed energy supply disruptions, EDF’s nuclear reactors are central to energy security in France and, increasingly, across Europe. As prices rise again following the war in Iran, the task of renewing that fleet, and securing nuclear’s place in a pan-European, low-carbon energy system, has taken on even more importance.
“With what we’re seeing in Hormuz, and soaring petrol prices, the question of electrification is becoming even more central,” says Gemenne. “The French government is counting a lot on EDF to that end, and to succeed in that electrification plan.”
Agnès Pannier-Runacher, a former French energy minister who led efforts to have nuclear recognised by the EU as a source of low-emission electricity, describes EDF as “an extraordinarily precious asset for Europe”. But she adds that while the company has “incredible” engineers, it “needs to deliver the right proportion of quality and costs, and too much engineering means potentially more costs”.
Bernard Fontana, its chief executive since last year, does not dispute some aspects of this analysis. “We can improve in our speed of execution. That applies to the construction sites, to the factories, even to the way things are done in processes at corporate level,” he says.
“To succeed, we know we need the skills,” he adds, of the construction challenges. “Nuclear has suffered from stop and go. We’re recruiting 4,500 people a year in this area.”
EDF has a lot to prove. The group has pinned its fortunes on its own design for a water-pressurised reactor, but early iterations in Finland and France came on stream more than a decade late and more recent projects in the UK are also delayed.
“The toolset broke,” says one former insider. “When you only make one reactor in 20 years, it shows.”
Fontana and others say lessons will be applied to later reactors, cutting development times and budgets and converging on a standard design that can be more easily replicated.
Pannier-Runacher says that there will need to be considerable work to standardise processes and components and reduce costs, a process she acknowledges is “not innate” at EDF.
When EDF embarked on a huge programme of reactor construction after the 1973 oil price shock, it did so at pace, sometimes connecting more than four units a year to the grid during the 1980s. It relied, however, on designs from US engineering group Westinghouse.
“EDF was never a great designer of reactors,” says a person at an EDF supplier, describing it instead as a great “fast follower”.
For the next generation of power plants, it is planning an updated version of its own creation, the 1.65GW Evolutionary Pressurised Reactor (EPR), known as EPR2.
Until 18 months ago, debate was still raging within EDF about whether EPR2 was the right option or if it was still too large and unwieldy, according to several state officials and people close to the company. The designs are now with safety regulators for approval, but EDF is already ordering parts and the government is keen to proceed ahead of the presidential election in 2027, the people add.
Critics say EDF, which unusually is both a builder and operator of nuclear power plants, is conceiving reactors with its own operating constraints in mind. “EDF has limitations in the land at its disposal in France for new reactors; it’s also one of the reasons they want these extra-large, complex ones,” the supplier says.
Several other people, including company insiders, say the operator side of EDF has offered valuable input to help make the designs more practical.
The latest design is intended to be simpler than earlier versions; for instance, it includes 100 door designs, according to EDF documentation, down from nearly 300 previously, or 256 different types of piping versus more than 400 at the Hinkley Point C unit being built in Britain.
Fontana, the chief executive, is trying to cut back on red tape, recounting a recent meeting with an executive from a components supplier who told him that the part was completed a month ago but he could only deliver it by year-end “because he had 15,000 pages of paperwork to fill out”.
Some decisions on-site could be made by managers empowered to do so rather than through weeks of verifications and meetings, Fontana says. He has said that EDF could shave up to four years off construction times simply by diminishing the number of stoppages for checks — from 26,000 on Flamanville to nearer 700 — without compromising on safety.
EDF is also developing a design for smaller reactors that might one day power data centres and factories, although it faces competition from both established names such as Rolls-Royce and Westinghouse and relatively new companies.
The most immediate test of EDF’s newer working methods will be the two reactors at Sizewell C in the UK. These are supposed to be exact replicas of the Hinkley Point C reactors in Somerset, which are currently due to enter service in 2030.
As it strives to perfect its new technology, the biggest obstacles facing EDF could yet prove to be cultural and political, rather than technological.
Jean-Paul Bouttes, a former strategy director at EDF who has written about its history, describes the group as “the fruit of communism and Gaullism”. Its creators were Charles de Gaulle, the father of the Fifth Republic, and members of the wartime résistance, including Marcel Paul, a communist politician and trade unionist who is still a revered figure inside EDF.
Following the second world war, they nationalised nearly 1,500 electricity and gas producers to help marshal power for big reconstruction projects. The government also created a system of protections and benefits within EDF, under energy worker statutes, that persists to this day.
“It’s the most equitable system you could find,” says Sébastien Koch, a senior representative of the leftwing CGT union and 25-year veteran of the group.
People cannot be fired unless they commit a grave error. Its employees, numbering almost 200,000, get vastly discounted electricity and 1 per cent of EDF’s annual revenue goes to finance social activities, from holiday camps for children and mobile home rentals for vacations to preferential rates for football tickets, in a system that is means-tested.
Near the hydroelectric dams from the 1950s and 1960s, EDF’s first major feat of postwar construction, company-built residences have endured. “In those valleys, you live EDF — the barbecue is EDF, the sports centre is EDF,” says another former EDF executive. “It creates loyalty and a sense of family, with the good that comes from it, and the less good.”
Staff are unusually motivated in their mission to “provide energy to the nation”, as Koch puts it. But any move to tinker with the workforce or the group is often incendiary, as Macron discovered early in his presidency, when EDF responded to proposals for a reorganisation of the indebted business by lowering output across France’s fleet of nearly 60 nuclear reactors, forcing EDF to import electricity.
“The French feel like they’re the owners of EDF, and as soon as you touch it, incredible support movements form,” says Pannier-Runacher, who became Macron’s energy minister after the overhaul was abandoned in 2022. “There’s an emotional dimension to the company which is very strong.”
Bureaucracy, meanwhile, has proliferated. Insiders have complained there was red tape even around ordering pencils inside EDF, and more than 20 different regional and local administrations in France to contend with.
“If you tell the people of EDF to conquer Everest, they’ll do it,” says one former insider, recalling how staff recovered output after half of its reactors were offline for repairs in 2022, just as Russia’s war on Ukraine caused energy prices to surge. “If you tell them to fill out paperwork, they’ll also do it.”
Recent chief executives have tried to tackle some of its internal processes and costs. During the tenure of Luc Rémont, the former Schneider Electric executive who ran EDF from 2022 to 2025, the company discreetly closed an office it used to rent in the eighth arrondissement in Paris, say people familiar with the matter. The desks and secretaries were solely for former chief executives, who could also use driver services.
Fontana, his successor, has promised to make cost savings of €1bn a year by 2030.
Within EDF, many see the government as largely responsible for its predicament. For several decades the group was encouraged to build nuclear plants then mothball some; branch into renewable energy or pull back from it; export its technology or focus on France.
The French government made EDF foot part of the bill for subsidising consumers’ energy bills when wholesale prices soared after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Macron ousted Rémont after he tried to charge big industrial customers more on new contracts, with the latter arguing EDF needed to become more competitive in order to fund its €25bn-a-year of investment. Rémont hit out in response, telling Le Figaro that a publicly owned company “is not here to subsidise a small club of private ones”.
But Denis Florin, an energy consultant at Lavoisier Conseil, says that when people at EDF were on the same page as the government, “they moved amazingly quickly and effectively”.
“They built [reactors] in the 1980s with unprecedented speed, only matched today by the Chinese.”
Fontana dismisses the idea that the company is riddled with too many competing forces, saying that its ultimate goal for the past 80 years has remained coherent.
“First there was a need to give France an electricity system, through building the dams and the grid, then there were the oil shocks and the decision to embark on the nuclear programme,” he says, describing the overarching mission as “providing competitive, sovereign and low-carbon power”.
“Now you have today’s news [in the Middle East] . . . in the end there is a huge amount of continuity.”
Along the way, France’s stable nuclear generation capacity became a cornerstone of the broader European energy market. “EDF does not get paid to provide a power supply guarantee to Spain and to Germany,” says one of the former insiders. “But that implicit guarantee is here — and it’s worth something.”
Pannier-Runacher adds that France has “secured European energy security for years, and everyone realised that the day we were no longer able to provide it, in the second part of 2022”.
EDF is now in talks with the European Commission over its financing plan for the six new reactors France has ordered, part-funded by a low-interest state loan and a guaranteed purchase price for the power they generate.
The Commission is likely to ask for some remedies to ensure state aid does not unfairly benefit other parts of EDF’s business, and has already flagged “doubts” about some antitrust aspects, requesting more information from France.
One former French cabinet adviser believes it could even revisit the idea of asking the group to carve out its nuclear activities as part of any remedy. The French government, EDF and the EU declined to comment on specifics and have said it was too soon to draw any conclusions.
Company insiders, bankers and analysts say that the state and the company are, for now, pulling in the same direction, although unions have hit out at Fontana’s proposed cost cuts.
“There is no doubt they have a sense of urgency at the top of EDF. It’s a matter of pride and a sense of mission,” says Florin, at Lavoisier Conseil. But one of the former French government officials cautions that “it’s a steep hill to climb”.
“Steep because they have to do another ‘one of a kind’ reactor that is of good quality and replicable, and steep financially.”
