The CEA’s full name is now Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, or “Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission”
- By April Murelio -
The 2010 amending budget act published in the March 10, 2010 Offical Journal makes the name change for the French atomic energy commission (CEA) official.
The CEA’s full name is now Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, or “Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission”. The change was announced on December 14, 2009 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy as he presented the financing priorities for the national loan. The new name recognizes both the research the CEA has been conducting for many years on a broad range of low-carbon energies and its generally active role in scientific and technological research in that field.
By alternative energies, the commission means alternatives to fossil fuels. This covers both nuclear power and renewable energies. The CEA’s research in the nuclear field includes new-generation systems, boosting the capacity of current power programs, and dismantling operations. In the field of renewable energies, the CEA is working on three components: solar power, upgrading biomass, and energy storage for transport.
Faced with the prospect of a global increase in energy consumption, dwindling supplies of fossil fuels and global warming, nuclear energy has several strong points in its favor. The CEA has therefore become actively involved in a global initiative to produce an innovative new generation of reactors, known as the «fourth generation », which involve a considerable technological advance over existing systems.
With competitive pricing and nuclear safety remaining a priority, the improvements being developed are consistent with the objectives of the third generation reactors : reducing investment costs, operating costs and fuel cycle costs, better management of accidents, and being able to withstand the risk of proliferation and protect against the risk of physical attack.
However there are now two further objectives which will mean a fundamental change in design compared with existing reactors: firstly, the efficient use of natural uranium and reducing the production of long-life radioactive waste to a bare minimum, which implies the use of fast neutron technology and the closed fuel cycle; and then to expand the uses of nuclear energy, which means developing reactors designed for purposes other than the generation of electricity, that is to say designs capable, for example, of producing hydrogen or synthetic hydrocarbons for transport.
The CEA's strategy with regard to 4th generation systems takes two forms:
- Priority to be given to research into systems with fast neutrons and a closed fuel cycle (with sodium or gas coolant),
- The development, in close collaboration with industrial partners, of a very high temperature 600 MWth reactor to meet the needs of the electricity market around 2025, and the hydrogen market in the longer term.