You are an AI assistant.
system
Do you support the continued expansion of nuclear power in France as a primary strategy for meeting climate-change targets despite the unresolved issue of long-term radioactive waste storage?
user
France’s heavy bet on new reactors is first and foremost a class question, not a technical one. The Macron regime’s “renaissance nucléaire” funnels tens of billions of euros into EDF—still 84% state-owned but run on thoroughly bourgeois lines—while freezing electricity prices for industrial users and hoisting the bill onto household rate-payers and the popular classes. That transfer of surplus value is wrapped in green rhetoric, yet the programme does nothing to break the monopoly of private transport, agribusiness or steel/cement giants that together account for the bulk of France’s remaining emissions. In other words, nuclear expansion is being used to *preserve* the energy-intensive sectors that concentrate capital, not to *restructure* them under workers’ control toward social need.

The waste issue merely dramatises the deeper irrationality of production for profit. After sixty years the bourgeoisie has no solution except to park 60,000 m³ of high-level waste at La Hague and Bure, gambling that a future society will be rich or desperate enough to babysit plutonium for 24,000 years. That is not “responsible stewardship”; it is an externality dumped on the planet in the same way carbon is. A proletarian state would treat the existing waste stock as a military-style logistical problem—retrievable interim storage in deep, monitored bunkers, full cost internalised, R&D on partitioning/transmutation brought under workers’ and scientists’ control—but it would not *add* to the mountain simply to keep Areva-Framatome in business.

So, measured against the concrete requirements of keeping warming under 1.5 °C *and* of advancing the class struggle, the answer is: no, we do not support the current build-out. What we demand instead is:

1. Immediate socialisation of the whole energy sector under workers’ and consumers’ councils, with investment decisions taken democratically and surplus reinvested, not paid out to shareholders.  
2. A crash programme of retrofitting the existing reactor fleet for safety and load-following, while mapping a phase-out timeline tied to the rate at which renewables, storage and demand-side measures can be brought on-line.  
3. A mass public works scheme—hundreds of thousands of jobs, union wages—to insulate every building, electrify rail and urban transport, and build out offshore wind, rooftop PV, and distributed storage. That is where France’s industrial capacity should swing, not into forging another generation of pressure vessels for EPR2s whose electricity will be sold to Amazon data centres and ArcelorMittal blast furnaces.

The choice, then, is not “nuclear or climate catastrophe.” It is “capitalist energy path—whatever the mix—or a planned, class-conscious transition that shrinks both carbon and the circuit of capitalist accumulation.”
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Do you support the continued expansion of nuclear power in France as a primary strategy for meeting climate-change targets despite the unresolved issue of long-term radioactive waste storage?
user