Rain or shine, Christiane Lamiraud, 63, likes to swim in the Channel from the beach near her home in the village of Saint-Martin-en-Campagne, north-east of Dieppe. From the water, it is hard to miss the Penly nuclear power station just 700 metres up the coast at the foot of the chalk cliffs, sucking in seawater to cool its two reactors, then pumping it back out to sea a few degrees warmer. But ignore it she does. Reports of incidents do not deter the teacher from her daily swim. “Questions are quickly stifled here. Where there is a nuclear industry, it’s a non-subject. It is hidden behind the cliff and we don’t talk about it,” she says.
Like many villages and towns in close proximity to France’s nuclear plants, St Martin-en-Campagne in the Petit-Caux district is close enough that it could be evacuated in case of an accident. But most residents prefer not to dwell on that, says villager Pierre Pouliquen, 45. “There is a real need for clean energy. The problems of nuclear power aren’t hidden, but we don’t even think about them. Even when we go to the beach, we don’t look at the power station.”
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Christiane Lamiraud lives in Saint-Martin-en-Campagne in Normandy, about 700 meters from the Penly nuclear plant. She swims in the English Channel every day, despite the proximity to the power station.
France’s enthusiastic relationship with nuclear power – it has the most plants out of any European country – and people’s ambivalent attitudes to life in the shadow of the plants themselves are the subject of a project by British photographer Ed Alcock. He spent six months capturing the lives of people living within 5km of five nuclear power stations in France, for an exhibition sponsored by the country’s culture ministry.
Alcock, who moved to France in his 20s, was struck by what he saw as people’s “head-in-the-sand” attitudes towards nuclear power, which marked a contrast to his experience growing up in Norwich in the dying days of the cold war. He remembers being sent home from school and hiding inside to escape radiation from the 1986 Chornobyl disaster. “We spent 24 hours sitting in the house with the doors and windows closed hoping nuclear particles weren’t coming down the chimney,” Alcock says. “Growing up, nuclear was the thing that kept me awake at night. I used to go to bed wondering if we’d be here in the morning.
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A young couple embrace in the river Loire, opposite the Belleville nuclear power station in Belleville-sur-Loire in central France. The plant uses water from the river to cool the two reactors, which is then ejected as vapour and as water further downstream. Heatwaves, low water levels or high water temperatures can restrict operations at the power station.
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Above left: Bathers in the swimming pool in Belleville-sur-Loire. The village has a population of only 1,000, but taxes paid by the French multinational electric utility company EDF fund leisure facilities usually only found in towns of 100,000 inhabitants or more.
Above right: ‘There are not many inhabitants here, but the power station makes many things possible,’ says Olivier Martin. He is a French adapted-boxing champion and member of the Bellevillois boxing club in Belleville-sur-Loire – one of the many sporting clubs financed by EDF.
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Children at the Stade Abdou Sené, home to a football club in Bollène-Ecluse. The village in southern France is a few hundred meters from Tricastin nuclear station and uranium enrichment plant – one of the largest nuclear sites in Europe.
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Françoise Pouzet and Bernadette Moreau are members of the Sortir du Nucléaire network. They are taking water samples from the river Loire, near the Belleville plant, to measure radioactivity levels.
“Then I moved to France in 2000 and talked to people my age about Chornobyl. They told me that when it happened, French television showed maps of the radioactive cloud spread across Europe and it stopped at Belgium and reappeared across the Channel.
“You would imagine it’s a subject that would worry most people, but not here. Almost nobody questions it, which always surprises me. And whenever you talk about the dangers, everyone looks at you as if you’re mad to be worried about it.”
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‘I am the last of the Mohicans of Belleville,’ says Christian Gaudin, the last farmer in Belleville-sur-Loire. Some of his fields are just a few metres from the power station. Other farmers have been bought out by EDF, which is acquiring the land for future projects that are not yet public knowledge.
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Above left: Françoise Aubert, 78, is the retired former communications officer at the Tricastin power station, photographed in her garden, in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, about 4km from the plant. A corrosion defect shut down 12 out of 56 reactors in France in 2022. She says: ‘The corrosion is in a circuit that has no contact with radioactivity. I don’t see why we should make a big deal of it.’
Above right: Jean Grelier lives on a farm 300 metres from the Blayais nuclear power station on the Gironde estuary. A storm in 1999 flooded the region, and his family were stranded for nearly 24 hours, watching, terrified, as steam spewed from the flooded station. The deluge disabled some, but fortunately not all, of the cooling pumps. A nuclear accident was narrowly avoided. ‘Fortunately, EDF engineers have learned the lessons of that storm,’ he says.
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Didier Eymard is an organic winegrower in Saint-Ciers-sur-Gironde. His family has been working the land for at least five generations. He is a rare sceptic, saying: ‘Henry IV drained the marsh in the 17th century. But with climate change, the water will come back, I can feel it. What a crazy idea to build a nuclear power plant here.’
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Above left: ‘We need energy. We’re not in the stone age, heating ourselves with campfires!’ Elena Diochir travels more than 60km to the swimming pool in Belleville-sur-Loire.
Above right: ‘There are people who would be afraid of living near a nuclear power plant. Not me. There are lots of advantages: the community is rich, with sports facilities, a health centre, and we pay half the taxes other French people pay,’ says David Dehez, a technician at Blayais power station. He is pictured with his family outside their house on an EDF housing estate in Braud-et-Saint-Louis
Nuclear power has been the principal source of electricity in France since 1973, when an embargo by Middle Eastern oil producers led to soaring prices and new concerns for energy security. The country now has 56 reactors across 19 sites all run by the state-owned Électricité de France (EDF), which produce up to 76% of the country’s electricity. No other European Union country comes near; the Czech Republic and Spain have six each, Sweden has three, while Germany, Poland and Lithuania have none. (Britain has nine nuclear reactors across five sites.) “These French communities depend on nuclear power,” Alcock says. “People either work at the power station or a company that supplies it, so it’s hard to find anyone who is critical.
“The power stations pay huge local taxes so, if you can ignore cooling towers and mile-high vapour plumes on your doorstep, you have a fantastic municipal swimming pool, skating rink, boxing club and pay less council tax. For locals, these are attractive places to live.
“There’s a kind of fatalism, the idea that the day it goes wrong we won’t know about it. The authorities provide iodine tablets to those living within a 20km radius. People jokingly say if a nuclear accident happens they’ll just pop a couple of iodine pills.”
The Penly site, where teacher Lamiraud swims, has been selected by the French government and EDF as the location for the construction of two new reactors, despite sitting only a few metres above the current sea level. In January last year, shortly after Alcock took Lamiraud’s picture, she learned the local authority had banned swimming and fishing from the beach after an unspecified “incident” at the plant. Lamiraud fears it will not be the last time she is prevented from taking her daily swim
This project was produced as part of the France Before Their Eyes exhibition, financed by the Ministry of Culture and piloted by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library).
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Fathia and Thierry Bernadini live in Neuvy-sur-Loire. ‘Are we worried about the nuclear power plant? No,’ says Fathia. ‘In any case, if it blows up, there’ll be nobody left for miles.’ They are photographed in front of their house, about 700 meters from Belleville.