Check out this great profile of AREVA Inc.’s president.  In this profile, Mr. Besnainou talks about the future of nuclear energy in the U.S. and some of AREVA’s plans for helping combat climate change.

As President of AREVA Inc., Jacques Besnainou provides oversight and vision for the North American arm of a world leader in energy. Besnainou, a French and American citizen, brought 20 years of management and systems engineering experience to his current role. He has served as senior executive vice president for the company’s Nuclear Back-End sector in France, managing recycling operations at two of AREVA’s plants and began his career as a systems design engineer. He also served as a civilian advisor for nuclear affairs at the French Ministry of Industry and spent several years in the United States directing an environmental consulting company and working at COGEMA Inc., a predecessor of AREVA.

“In the energy business we are faced with the growing challenge of providing clean energy for growing demand in a difficult market,” says Besnainou. AREVA uses multiple technologies to provide solutions for generating clean energy. The heart of the company’s clean-energy business is nuclear power, yet we are expanding our activities in renewables.

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From George Monbiot at The Guardian, an argument that nuclear power should be paired with renewables in the clean energy gameplan:

It’s true that my position has changed. As the likely effects of climate change have become clearer, nuclear power, by comparison, has come to seem less threatening.[...]

So why contemplate nuclear power at all? Why not, as Merrick suggests, decarbonise our economy solely through energy efficiency and renewable power?

In principle it could – just about – be done, as Mark Barrett at University College London and the authors of the ZeroCarbonBritain report suggest.

But as you load more renewable energy onto the grid, it becomes more expensive and harder to manage. As Mark Barrett, ZeroCarbonBritain and the German government have shown, you could have a balanced, reliable electricity supply consisting largely of renewables. But the balancing costs will rise a good deal as the penetration of renewables increases beyond, say, 60 or 70%. It is also worth noting that some of the more ambitious renewables proposals will take at least as long to implement as a new nuclear programme. We could decarbonise the electricity supply quicker and more cheaply if we complement renewables with other sources.

In the United States, nuclear energy provides about 70% of CO2-free power generation; most of the rest is from hydropower. These are important numbers to keep in mind as we consider how we will face these challenges.