Ironically, since Germany has shut down some of its older nuclear plants in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, they now have to import nuclear power from France and the Czech Republic.
Instead of sending their nuclear waste to France and Britain, the power stations will have to build local storage facilities.
Such developments will require Germany to purchase more natural gas from Russia and other countries, and to import additional nuclear power from France.
While the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl turned public opinion in the United States and Europe against nuclear energy, in France nuclear power never went out of fashion.
France and Sweden have decarbonized more than any other nation through public deployment of nuclear power and hydro.
Over three-quarters of France's energy, and 91% of its electricity, comes from nuclear power, compared with just over a third in Germany.
France, for its part, never had much coal and is heavily reliant on nuclear power today.
The NRC's last new reactor approval predates Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, all of which dented public support (and not just in America either: nuclear power supplies three-fourths of France's electricity, yet in one poll 57% of French respondents favoured abandoning it).
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France remains committed to nuclear power, which provides nearly four-fifths of its electricity, and exports both electricity and nuclear-power reactors.
The same month he championed a successful bid by a chaebol-heavy consortium under the aegis of the Korean Electric Power Company to provide nuclear power to Abu Dhabi, pulling the rug from under industry leaders in France and Japan.
France has 58 nuclear plants like this which meet 80 percent of its total electricity needs and allow it to export power to Britain, Germany and Italy.
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