Germany’s $500 Billion Mistake (The Green Energy Trap ): • Germany’s $500 Billion Mistake (The Green ...
Why France is Winning the Energy War (and Germany is Losing)
While the rest of Europe scrambles for energy security, France just cashed a record-breaking €5 billion check by exporting power to its neighbors. In 2025, the verdict is in: the "French Model" is winning. But how did a country with no oil and no gas become the energy kingpin of the continent?
In this deep dive, we uncover the 50-year gamble that saved the French economy. From the historic 1974 Messmer Plan to the "Corrosion Crisis" of 2022 and the rise of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), we analyze how nuclear power allowed France to decouple from fossil fuels while Germany faces deindustrialization.
We explore the economics of EDF, the controversy of the Flamanville 3 reactor, and why tech giants are flocking to Paris for stable, low-carbon electricity.
In this video, we cover:
The Numbers: How France exports 89 TWh while Germany burns coal.
The History: Inside the secret 1974 plan to go 100% nuclear.
The Crisis: How EDF fixed the "corrosion" defects that nearly broke the grid.
The Future: Why SMRs and "Pink Hydrogen" are the next industrial revolution.
The Economics: Why French electricity bills remain stable while others skyrocket.
Timestamps:
0:00 - The €5 Billion Checkmate
1:01 - France vs. Germany: The Energy Scoreboard
4:12 - The Messmer Plan: A 50-Year Gamble
7:52 - The 2022 Corrosion Crisis
11:29 - The Truth About Flamanville 3
14:37 - SMRs: The "IKEA" Nuclear Reactor
17:10 - Why Nationalization Won
19:50 - The "Pink Hydrogen" Revolution
23:09 - Geopolitics & Uranium Risks
25:24 - The Verdict
#France #EnergyCrisis #NuclearPower #Economics #Germany #EDF #SMR #Geopolitics
Why France is Winning the Energy War (and Germany is Losing)
While the rest of Europe scrambles for energy security, France just cashed a record-breaking €5 billion check by exporting power to its neighbors. In 2025, the verdict is in: the "French Model" is winning. But how did a country with no oil and no gas become the energy kingpin of the continent?
In this deep dive, we uncover the 50-year gamble that saved the French economy. From the historic 1974 Messmer Plan to the "Corrosion Crisis" of 2022 and the rise of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), we analyze how nuclear power allowed France to decouple from fossil fuels while Germany faces deindustrialization.
We explore the economics of EDF, the controversy of the Flamanville 3 reactor, and why tech giants are flocking to Paris for stable, low-carbon electricity.
In this video, we cover:
The Numbers: How France exports 89 TWh while Germany burns coal.
The History: Inside the secret 1974 plan to go 100% nuclear.
The Crisis: How EDF fixed the "corrosion" defects that nearly broke the grid.
The Future: Why SMRs and "Pink Hydrogen" are the next industrial revolution.
The Economics: Why French electricity bills remain stable while others skyrocket.
Timestamps:
0:00 - The €5 Billion Checkmate
1:01 - France vs. Germany: The Energy Scoreboard
4:12 - The Messmer Plan: A 50-Year Gamble
7:52 - The 2022 Corrosion Crisis
11:29 - The Truth About Flamanville 3
14:37 - SMRs: The "IKEA" Nuclear Reactor
17:10 - Why Nationalization Won
19:50 - The "Pink Hydrogen" Revolution
23:09 - Geopolitics & Uranium Risks
25:24 - The Verdict
#France #EnergyCrisis #NuclearPower #Economics #Germany #EDF #SMR #Geopolitics
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TeknolojiDöküm
00:00Imagine for a second that you were a factory owner in Bavaria. It's the winter of 2025.
00:05The wind has stopped blowing. The sun hasn't been seen in three days, a phenomenon the
00:09Germans call Dunkelfläuter. Your energy bill just landed on your desk and it's thick enough
00:14to stop a bullet. You're looking at electricity prices hovering around 30 cents per kilowatt
00:19hour and you're sweating. Not because it's hot, your heating is turned down to save cash,
00:25but because you know your competitor across the border in Lyon is paying half that. Now,
00:29look at the map. While Europe scrambles for gas contracts and prays for wind, one country
00:35is sitting pretty, quietly raking in a record-breaking $5 billion in cash just by selling its excess
00:41power to its desperate neighbours. France isn't just surviving the energy crisis,
00:46they're actively winning it, and they're doing it with technology that half the world
00:50spent the last 20 years trying to ban. This is the story of how a 50-year-old gamble turned
00:55France into the energy kingpin of Europe, and why the rest of the continent is suddenly
01:00realising they bet on the wrong horse.
01:02Let's cut the fluff and look at the scoreboard, because the numbers coming out throughout
01:102025 are nothing short of humiliating for France's critics. For years, the narrative was that France
01:16was the sick man of European energy. Their nuclear fleet was ageing, reactors were offline for
01:22corrosion repairs, and the media was having a field day predicting blackouts in Paris. Berlin,
01:27meanwhile, was touted as the shining beacon of the renewable future. Well, life comes at you
01:34fast. Fast forward to today. In 2024, France didn't just keep the lights on. They became
01:41the ultimate power broker of the European grid. Official data from RTE, the French grid operator,
01:46dropped a bombshell. France exported a net total of 89 terawatt-hours of electricity. To put that
01:54in perspective, that's enough electricity to power the entire country of Belgium for a year.
02:00And the cheque they cashed for that service? A record $5 billion. While Germany was busy
02:05shutting down its last three nuclear reactors in a move that historians will likely look
02:09back on as economically suicidal, France was revving its engines. The result? A massive
02:16flow of electrons moving from west to east. Here is the dark irony of the situation. Germany
02:22has spent hundreds of billions of euros on their energy vendor, their energy transition. They
02:27have carpeted their countryside in wind turbines and solar panels. And yet, when the weather
02:32doesn't cooperate, who do they call? They call EDF. In the second half of 2024 alone, France
02:39exported eight terawatt-hours specifically to Germany. The green giant of Europe is running
02:45on French nuclear power. And it's not just about reliability. It's about cold, hard cash.
02:51If you're a French household, your regulated electricity cap kept prices around 0.17 to
02:560.20 per kilo lent. If you're a German household, you're looking at 0.30 to 0.40 dollars. That
03:02price gap is a killer. It is the difference between an industrial sector that stays home and
03:07one that packs its bags and moves to America or China.
03:11We are seeing deindustrialisation happen in real-time in the Rhine-Rue Valley, while France
03:16is actively courting foreign investment with the promise of stable, decarbonised, cheap power.
03:23But here is the kicker, the stat that really hurts the anti-nuclear crowd. We often hear
03:28that nuclear is too slow or too expensive. Yet, in 2024, France's carbon intensity, the amount
03:35of CO2 pumped out for every unit of electricity hovered between 30 and 50 grams. Germany? They
03:42frequently spike to 400 or 500 grams whenever they had to fire up their coal plants to compensate
03:48for low wind. So France is making money, keeping prices lower and polluting 10 times less than its
03:54main economic rival. That is not just a win. That is a checkmate. But to understand how France
04:02pulled this off, we have to go back. We have to leave the 2020s and travel back to a smoke-filled
04:07room in 1974, where one man made a decision that would change the course of history.
04:132. The ghost of Pierre Mesmer, the 1974 gamble.
04:18The year is 1973. The Yom Kippur War has just broken out. The OPEC nations, furious at Western
04:25support for Israel, turn off the oil tap. For France, this was a catastrophe. You have to understand,
04:30France in the 70s was addicted to oil. Most of their electricity came from burning it.
04:36They had no coal mines like Germany. They had no gas fields like the Americans or the Dutch.
04:40They had absolutely nothing. The country was facing an existential threat. If the oil stopped,
04:46France stopped. The lights go out, the factories close, the tanks don't run. It was a national
04:51security nightmare. Enter Prime Minister Pierre Mesmer. Mesmer wasn't a man of half measures.
04:58He was a former colonial administrator, a man who had served in the French Foreign Legion.
05:03He looked at the situation, a France on its knees begging for oil, and he decided never again.
05:10On March 6, 1974, he went on television and announced what is now known as the Mesmer Plan.
05:16The premise was terrifyingly simple. He said famously,
05:20In France, we do not have oil, but we have ideas. The idea? Nuclear. All of it.
05:27Mesmer didn't propose building a couple of reactors to test the waters. He proposed switching the entire
05:33electrical grid of the nation to nuclear power. Overnight. It was a gamble of insane proportions.
05:39The technology was still relatively new. The cost was astronomical. Imagine betting your entire GDP
05:46on a single technology. There was no public debate. There were no focus groups. There was no environmental
05:52impact assessment that took 10 years to process. The government simply said, we are doing this.
05:58And they moved with a speed that is incomprehensible to us today.
06:02Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, France went on the biggest construction bender in human history.
06:08They built 58 reactors. They were bringing new plants online every few months.
06:13They achieved this through a strategy called standardization. Unlike the Americans, who
06:18custom-built every nuclear plant like it was a unique snowflake, which made them expensive and
06:22impossible to repair, the French treated nuclear reactors like cars. They picked one design,
06:29the pressurized water reactor, PWR, and they copy-pasted it across the country.
06:34The same control room in Gravelines was used in Trikasten. The same pumps, the same valves,
06:40the same training manuals. If a part broke in one plant, you could grab a spare from another. It
06:45drove costs down and safety up. By the 1990s, the transformation was complete. France had gone
06:51from being an oil-dependent vulnerability to the most energy-independent nation in Europe.
06:57This is why, when you drive through the French countryside at night, you see the warm glow of
07:02villages that are powered by atoms split in reactors built by men who are now long dead.
07:07Pierre Mesmer died in 2007. He didn't live to see the 2022 energy crisis. But if he were alive today,
07:14watching Germany dismantle their nuclear plants, while begging for Russian gas, he would probably
07:20light a cigarette, take a sip of wine and say, I told you so, because that's the difference.
07:25France treated energy as a matter of national survival, managed by engineers and strategists.
07:31Germany and much of the West treated it as a political playground for ideologues.
07:35But the Mesmer plan wasn't perfect. It created a beast, a massive state-owned monopoly called EDF.
07:43And as we entered the 21st century, the beast started to get sick. The fleet was aging,
07:47the engineers were retiring, and France was about to face a crisis that almost broke the entire system.
07:533. The Corrosion Heart Attack, The Darkest Hour
07:57If the Mesmer plan was the golden age, 2022 was the year the music died.
08:01You have to appreciate the timing here. It was almost comedic in a dark, tragic way.
08:06Vladimir Putin had just invaded Ukraine. Gas pipes were being blown up. Europe was screaming for energy.
08:12And at that exact moment, France's nuclear fleet decided to have a heart attack.
08:17It started with routine checks. Engineers at the SIVO plant looked at the pipes in the safety injection
08:23system. These are the OST pipes, the ones that flood the reactor with water if things go wrong.
08:28They found tiny, microscopic cracks. Stress corrosion. Now, in any other industry,
08:35you might slap some duct tape on it or schedule a repair for next year. But this is nuclear.
08:40In nuclear, microscopic crack translates to shut it all down. Now.
08:46EDF realised the problem wasn't just at SIVO. It was a generic defect in their newest,
08:51most powerful reactors, the N4 and P4 series. Suddenly, the Grim Reaper came for the French grid.
08:58One by one, reactors were taken offline. At the peak of the crisis in late 2022,
09:0332 out of 56 reactors were shut down. France, the battery of Europe, was running on empty.
09:10For the first time in decades, France had to go hat in hand to its neighbours.
09:14They had to import electricity from Germany, generated by coal, and Spain.
09:19The price of electricity on the French wholesale market hit $1,000 per megawatt hour.
09:24For context, the normal price is around $50. It was a national humiliation.
09:29The critics came out of the woodwork. The Germans, the anti-nuclear NGOs,
09:34the sceptical economists, they all pointed and laughed. They said,
09:38See? This is what happens when you rely on one technology. Nuclear is a dinosaur. It's failing.
09:44President Macron was sweating. The grid operator, RTE, was issuing ECOWatt alerts,
09:51basically telling French citizens, Please, for the love of God,
09:55Turn off your Wi-Fi router and don't wash your clothes at 6pm or the lights will go out in Paris.
10:01But here is where the story pivots. Here is where French engineering culture kicks in.
10:07They didn't panic. They didn't dismantle the plants. They didn't pivot to gas. They mobilised.
10:12EDF brought in 500 specialised welders. Now, these aren't your local guys fixing a muffler.
10:18These are the navy seals of welding. They work in high radiation environments,
10:23often using robots, doing precision work on pipes that are essential for preventing a meltdown.
10:29They flew in experts from the US and Canada. It was an industrial war effort. They called it the
10:34Grand Carinage, the Great Refit. And guess what? It worked. By the winter of 2023,
10:41the fleet was ramping back up. By 2024, they were back to export levels we hadn't seen in years.
10:48They identified the problem. They fixed the problem. And they hardened the system.
10:53While Germany was busy trying to figure out how to run an industrial economy on sunshine and wishful
10:57thinking, France was fixing its engine. And by the time the winter of 2025 rolled around where we are
11:04now, that engine was purring. The corrosion crisis proved that nuclear is complex, yes. But it also
11:11proved that it is fixable. When a wind turbine stops because there is no wind, you cannot fix the weather.
11:18When a reactor stops because of a pipe, you replace the pipe.
11:22One is an engineering challenge. The other is a meteorological impossibility. France chose the
11:28engineering challenge. 4. The Flamenville Redemption, the late arrival.
11:34We cannot talk about French energy without addressing the elephant in the room. The big,
11:38expensive, embarrassing elephant named Flamenville 3. If you've been following energy news for the last
11:44decade, this name probably makes you cringe. Flamenville 3 is an EPR, an European pressurised
11:51reactor. It was supposed to be the Ferrari of nuclear plants. Safer, more powerful, more efficient.
11:58Construction started in 2007. It was supposed to cost 3.3 billion dollars and turn on in 2012.
12:05Well, that didn't happen. 2012 came and went, then 2015, then 2018. The cost ballooned from 3 billion
12:15to 13.2 billion dollars. It became a laughing stock. It was four times over budget and 12 years late.
12:22It was the poster child for why nuclear is too expensive. But, keep watching.
12:27Because in 2024, something miraculous happened. The fuel was loaded. The divergence happened.
12:34The atom was split. And Flamenville 3 finally connected to the grid. And now, here in late 2025,
12:41it is churning out 1,600 megawatts of power. That is a monster amount of energy. That single building
12:48produces enough juice to power millions of homes. And unlike a solar farm that needs the size of a small
12:53city to generate that much, at peak noon only, Flamenville sits on a few acres of coast.
12:59Why does this matter? Because Flamenville was the prototype tax. France, and the West,
13:05had forgotten how to build nuclear plants. We stopped in the 90s. The supply chains dried up.
13:10The engineers retired. Flamenville was the painful process of relearning how to ride the bike.
13:15And now that they have relearned it, they are ready to scale again.
13:19While the media focused on the delays, they missed the bigger picture. The EPR works.
13:26It is now generating cash. And more importantly, it paved the way for the EPR-2.
13:31This is the streamlined, simplified version of the reactor. The lesson learned edition.
13:37President Macron has already announced the construction of six new EPR-2 reactors,
13:42with an option for eight more. The first concrete is set to be poured soon.
13:46France isn't backing down because Flamenville was hard. They are doubling down because they solved it.
13:52Compare this to the UK or the US, where we are still arguing about permits. France has the designs,
13:58they have the land, mostly on existing sites. And crucially, they have the public will.
14:04Support for nuclear power in France is at an all-time high, sitting around 75%. Why?
14:12Because French people looked at their bills, looked at the Germans, and realised that maybe,
14:17just maybe, the atoms aren't the enemy. The bill collector is.
14:22So, while Flamenville 3 was a financial disaster on paper, historically it might be viewed as the
14:28tuition fee France paid to own the future of European energy. And speaking of the future,
14:34France isn't just building giant concrete cathedrals anymore. They are going small.
14:385. The IKEA reactor, the SM pivot
14:43If Flamenville 3 is the cathedral of energy, massive, bespoke, and taking decades to finish,
14:49France has a new trick up its sleeve. They are getting ready to build the IKEA flat of nuclear reactors.
14:55Welcome to the world of SMRs, small modular reactors. For 50 years, the philosophy of nuclear was
15:03bigger is better. You built giant gigawatt scale plants because of economies of scale.
15:09But as we saw with Flamenville, when you build a giant monster, a single mistake costs billions.
15:14So, France is pivoting. Enter the Neuward project. Imagine a nuclear plant that produces 340 megawatts,
15:23enough for a medium-sized city or a massive industrial cluster, but fits on a site the size of a football
15:28stadium. But here is the revolution. You don't build it in a muddy field in the rain. You build it in a
15:34factory. Robots weld the vessels on an assembly line. Quality control is perfect. Then, you put the
15:41modules on a truck or a barge, ship them to the site, and snap them together. France isn't just
15:46building these for themselves. This is an export play. Look at the map of Europe again. You have
15:52countries like the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Finland, even Poland. They want off Russian gas.
15:57They want off coal. But they can't necessarily afford a $15 billion EPR. But they can afford a
16:03couple of Neuards. France is positioning itself to be the apple of atoms. They want to sell the hardware
16:09and the service contracts. And by late 2025, the order books are starting to look interesting.
16:15We're seeing partnerships forming where French tech becomes the backbone of the Eastern European grid.
16:20This scares the hell out of the anti-nuclear lobby. It's hard to protest a construction site when the
16:26construction is happening inside a factory in Burgundy and the plant arrives overnight.
16:32It also solves a huge problem – industrial heat.
16:36We talk a lot about electricity. But industry needs heat to make steel, glass, cement,
16:43chemical fertilizers. You can't do that easily with wind turbines. You need fire.
16:49SMRs can be placed right next to a chemical plant. They pipe the steam directly into the factory.
16:55It decarbonizes the hard-to-abate sectors that solar panels can't touch.
17:00So, while the media was obsessed with the Flamenville drama, French engineers were quietly
17:05designing the iPod of energy – small, standardised and mass-producible.
17:106. The nuclear Marxist pricing model
17:14Now let's talk about the thing you actually care about – the price.
17:17Why is your bill so high? And why is the French bill relatively stable?
17:22To understand this, we have to use a phrase that makes Wall Street bankers vomit.
17:267. Nationalisation
17:28In 2023, the French government finally admitted that the free market experiment in nuclear power
17:33was a delusion. They bought out the remaining shareholders of EDF. EDF is now 100% state-owned.
17:40Critics called it nuclear Marxism. They said it was inefficient. They said the state shouldn't run
17:45businesses. But here is the reality of 2025. Energy is not a business. It is infrastructure.
17:52It is the blood of the economy. France treats EDF the way most countries treat their highway system.
17:59You don't build a highway to make a 20% profit margin. You build a highway so trucks can drive on
18:04it and create value elsewhere. Because EDF doesn't have to chase quarterly profits for Blackrock or
18:10Vanguard, they can sign long-term deals.
18:128. In late 2023, France struck a deal regarding the future price of nuclear power.
18:18The goal? To keep the average price around $70 per megawatt hour.
18:23This creates a moat around the French economy. If you're a manufacturer making aluminum or hydrogen,
18:28where are you going to build your factory?
18:308. Germany
18:33You pay volatile market rates that spike whenever the wind dies.
18:369. France
18:38You sign a contract with the French state for stable, predictable power for 15 years. It's a no-brainer.
18:45We are seeing a re-industrialization of France driven entirely by this stability.
18:50While the rest of Europe let the invisible hand of the market dictate energy prices,
18:54which led to chaos. France used the visible hand of the state to crush volatility.
19:00Is it expensive for the taxpayer? Sometimes.
19:02The French government absorbs EDF's debts. But they calculate that it is cheaper to bail out EDF
19:09than to bail out the entire economy if electricity prices triple.
19:12It's a different economic philosophy. In the Anglo-Saxon world, UK, US, we believe competition
19:20lowers prices. In the French energy world, they believe coordination lowers prices.
19:25And looking at the scoreboard in 2025, the French model is winning.
19:30Speaking of winning, if you want to win the algorithm war, do me a favour and destroy that
19:34like button. It helps us afford the electricity to render these videos. And let me know in the comments.
19:40Would you be comfortable living next to a mini-nuke, SMR, if it meant your electric bill was cut in half?
19:46Type yes or no below.
19:487. The hydrogen ace in the hole
19:51There is one final card France is playing, and it's making the green energy purists absolutely furious.
19:57Hydrogen. Everyone agrees, hydrogen is the fuel of the future for heavy transport and steel.
20:03But the fight is over how you make it. Germany wants green hydrogen, made using wind and solar.
20:09Ideally imported from Africa or the Middle East because Germany doesn't have enough sun.
20:14France said, wait a minute, we have nuclear reactors running 24-7. At night, demand drops.
20:21Why don't we use that spare nuclear juice to make hydrogen? This is called pink hydrogen, or sometimes
20:28yellow, red hydrogen, depending on who you ask. For years, Brussels, pressured by Berlin, tried to
20:34block this. They said hydrogen only counts as clean if it comes from renewables. They didn't want nuclear
20:40to qualify. France fought a diplomatic war in the EU corridors in 2023 and 2024, and they won.
20:47The EU finally conceded that nuclear-derived hydrogen is low-carbon. This changes everything.
20:53It means France can produce hydrogen domestically, immediately, and cheaply. They don't need to
20:58build a massive pipeline from the Sahara. They just need to plug an electrolyser into a nuclear
21:03plant in Lyon. This positions France to be the hydrogen hub of Europe. They can decarbonize their
21:09heavy industry faster than anyone else because they don't have to wait for the wind turbines to be built.
21:14The power source is already there. It is the ultimate efficiency. The nuclear plants run at 100%
21:20power. During the day, they light up Paris. At night, they fill the hydrogen tanks for the trucks of
21:26tomorrow. 8. The nuclear diplomat, soft power. Energy isn't just about keeping your fridge running.
21:32It's about power. The geopolitical kind. For 20 years, Germany held the soft power crown in Europe.
21:40They were the moral leaders of the green transition. They lectured the world on how to be
21:44virtuous. But as we close out 2025, the power dynamic has flipped. France is now leading the
21:51nuclear alliance. This is a real bloc within the European Union. It includes countries like Poland,
21:57Hungary, the Czech Republic, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland.
22:02These nations looked at the German model, deindustrialization and coal burning, and ran the other
22:08way. They looked at the French model, stability and sovereignty, and said, we want that. France is now
22:15exporting its regulatory framework, its safety standards, and its technology. When Sweden announced
22:21plans to lift its ban on new reactors and build more, they looked to Paris. When the Dutch decided to
22:27build two new stations, they looked to Paris. France is becoming the intellectual center of gravity for
22:32European energy. And it goes beyond Europe. As AI data centers explode in demand, consuming ungodly
22:39amounts of electricity, tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are eyeing France. Why? Because if you
22:45put your data center in Frankfurt, you have to offset your carbon footprint with expensive credits.
22:50If you put it in Marseille, the electricity is already carbon-free. France is effectively saying,
22:56come here, we have the juice. It's clean, it's steady, and the lights won't go out. This is the ultimate
23:02revenge of the old world. In a digital age, physical power, actual electrons, is the most valuable currency.
23:099. The Achilles heel, uranium and waste
23:13Now, before we paint Macron as a genius and France as a utopia, we need to talk about the risks,
23:19because they are real and they are scary. France has solved the generation problem, but they have
23:24swapped one dependency for another. They don't need Russian gas, but they do need uranium,
23:30and France doesn't have uranium mines. They closed the last one in 2001. They import 100% of their fuel
23:37where from? Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Australia, and Niger. You might remember the coup in Niger a couple
23:44of years back. It sent a shiver down the spine of the French establishment. Roughly 15-20% of their
23:50uranium came from there. While uranium is easier to stockpile than gas, you can fit years of fuel
23:56in a single warehouse. It is still a geopolitical tether. France is aggressively diversifying,
24:02cutting deals with Mongolia and Canada, but the reality remains they are dependent on foreign rocks.
24:08And then there is the waste. The trash from this industry lasts for 100,000 years. France recycles a lot
24:15of its fuel at the La Hague facility, something the US doesn't do. They extract the plutonium and reuse
24:21it. Mox fuel. It reduces the volume of waste massively. But the final, high-level waste? It's still there.
24:30France's solution is Sigeo. It's a deep geological tomb being built in the clay of Bure in northeastern
24:36France. The plan is to bury the waste 500 meters underground and seal it up for eternity.
24:41It is a massive engineering project, and it faces fierce local opposition. If Sigeo fails,
24:48or if the anti-nuclear movement stops it, France has a problem. They are currently just stacking
24:53the vitrified waste in cooling halls. It's safe for now, but it's not a permanent solution. And finally,
24:59the cost of decommissioning. Eventually, these 56 reactors will die. Taking them apart is expensive.
25:06EDF sets aside money for this, but sceptics argue they haven't set aside nearly enough.
25:11If the cost of tearing down these plants doubles or triples, the French taxpayer is on the hook for
25:16billions. France is betting that future technology, maybe Geno 4 reactors that eat waste, will solve this.
25:23But it is a bet. 10. Final thoughts.
25:27The tortoise wins. So, why is France winning the energy war? It's not because they are smarter.
25:34It's not because they are richer. It's because they were stubborn. In a world that is addicted
25:39to the next big thing, France stuck with the old big thing. While the rest of the world chased the
25:44fantasy of a grid powered 100% by the weather, France respected the laws of physics. They understood
25:51that a modern industrial society needs a baseload. It needs a heartbeat. The Mesmer Plan in 1974 was a
25:58gamble. The Grand Carrenage in 2022 was a crisis management masterclass. And the SMR push of 2025
26:05is a vision for the future. Germany bet on ideology. They bet that the world would change to fit their
26:11vision. France bet on engineering. They bet that the world would need power regardless of the weather.
26:17As we look at the energy bills this winter, the winner is clear. France is exporting power,
26:22attracting industry, and leading the low-carbon revolution. They proved that you can have a
26:27decarbonised economy without deindustrialising. It turns out the old world technology wasn't obsolete.
26:34It was just waiting for us to realise how badly we needed it. The lesson here isn't that nuclear is
26:39perfect. It's that long-term planning beats short-term politics. France planted trees 50 years ago,
26:46that they are sitting under today. The question is, what trees are we planting for 2075?
26:52If you enjoyed this deep dive into the radioactive economics of France, you need to check out my
26:57video on Germany's $500 billion mistake, the green energy trap. It's an entirely different story.
27:05And trust me, it's a tragedy. It is pinned on the comment and the description of this video.
27:10And hey, if you learned something new, hit that subscribe button. We are trying to hit 100,000
27:15subscribers by the end of the year, and I need your help.
27:18Thanks for watching. Stay curious and keep the lights on.
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