“The Boss” of the month is Jacques Besnainou, CEO of the North American subsidiary of the French industrial nuclear company, AREVA, Inc. In the United States for close to 20 years, Jacques Besnainou passionately defends the important reconciliation between nuclear energy and respect for the environment. All this, in a country where the recycling of used fuel and the fight against global warming are still hotly debated.
Jacques Besnainou does not have the typical profile of an engineer. The CEO of the American subsidiary of AREVA is first and foremost a communicator. After the catastrophe of Fukushima last March, he didn’t hesitate to make television appearances to defend the safety of the French company’s power stations. And when he speaks about the nuclear industry, however technical, he still manages to capture the attention of his interviewer with his pure enthusiasm. “I fell into the world of nuclear energy very early on,” tells the 47-year old Parisian CEO. “I held my first internship on mining at the reprocessing plant at La Hauge. This was an exciting experience for me; I saw the French engineer in all his splendor.” This was in 1986, the year of the Chernobyl disaster.
“I believe in ecology, in respecting the environment and in clean energy”affirms the boss of AREVA Inc. Jacques Besnainou didn’t rush to knock on the doors of companies in the nuclear power industry. He had a childhood dream: to go to the United States. After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole des Mines, France’s leading engineering schools, and five years as an advisor to the French Ministry of Industry for civilian nuclear affairs, he left it all in 1993 to settle in Washington DC with his wife, Isabelle, who he met in an advanced math class. “I was 29 years old and I really wanted to discover this country, in an entrepreneurial spirit.” Without money, he created the American subsidiary of Ecobalance (Ecobilian in France), a French start-up specializing in environmental consulting. But new beginnings can be difficult. “One day an American told me: to succeed as an entrepreneur, you must first be a hard worker, and then you need a lot of luck. It doesn’t hurt to be a little brilliant too, but this is not the most crucial element of success. He was right!”
The company took off against the backdrop of an economic boom in the United States. In 2000, Jacques Besnainou sells Ecobalance US to Pricewaterhouse Coopers “to ensure a roof above the head of my three children,” then he contacts Anne Lauvergeon, who he had known at the Ecoles de Mines. He tells her of his journey and she convinces him to join her at the much larger company, Cogema, where she is the director. This is the beginning of his career in the heart of the nuclear industry. Here, Jacques Besnainou witnesses the merger of Cogema with Framatome in 2006 and the birth of AREVA. He is named CEO of the company’s American subsidiary in January 2010.
Even today, Jacques Besnainou has never lost his entrepreneurial spirit, a strong asset in a country that has struggled with its nuclear policies. The United States is, by far, the leading nuclear power in the world, with the largest number of reactor plants on the planet, 104, in front of France (58). Present in North America for the last 50 years, AREVA experienced these very beginnings. “Each site operates like a garage, and we are the mechanics. We clean the motor, change the parts, remove the spent fuel and replace it with the new.” But it’s an aging fleet; nothing has really changed in 30 years. The 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania is often used to explain why the brakes are put on new projects. For Jacques Besnainou, there’s another reason. “In a deregulated market like that of the United States, competition with other sources of electricity is deep. And in the 1980’s, electricity of nuclear origin was too expensive.” The result: today, 20% of electricity in the United States comes from nuclear energy compared to 80% in France.”
From mining in Saskatchewan, in eastern Canada, (the leading country in the global production of uranium) to the maintenance of nuclear reactors, and the recycling of military plutonium from the Cold War, AREVA is the number one nuclear industrial player in North America. The United States constitutes its biggest market after France, with last year’s revenue at $2.2 million (a little less than 20% of the global group’s revenue) and 5,000 employees in the United States and one thousand in Canada.
The disaster at Fukushima has not put into question the re-launch of the United States nuclear program initiated by George W. Bush in 2005 and continued by President Obama. The current president has reaffirmed his commitment to developing this source of electricity. “Americans tend to be pragmatic and sensitive to their purse strings. Nuclear energy has become rather inexpensive in the United States due to its longstanding plants: $20 to $25 per megawatt-hour (energy consumed), versus 50 Euros in Europe!”
Just two weeks ago, AREVA Inc. was selected to finish the construction of the Bellefonte 1 plant in Alabama. Construction was interrupted 23 years ago, when the demand for electricity fell dramatically. Once in service, in 2020, the plant will feed 750,000 homes; a project worth $5 billion, of which $1 billion will go to AREVA. And the future is promising since the majority of plants being constructed will occur by the time Jacques Besnainou turns 60, in 2025. The stages of these developments are taken under close consideration; construction projects for new reactors are coming out of the woodwork, similar to the EPR reactor developed by AREVA, a third generation reactor. And a new construction is planned for Maryland.
Competition from the Japanese company Toshiba, owner of Westinghouse Electric, and the American company General Electric, is harsh in this market “but we are all in the same boat.” Jacques Besnainou says he wishes success for the Japanese company, who won the contract to build the first nuclear power plant in recent decades at the site of the Vogtle Plant in Georgia. The boss of AREVA Inc. is optimistic because, according to him, the United States simply can’t take steps backwards. Next year’s presidential election won’t change things either: there is a new political consensus between Republicans and Democrats. “Contrary to what we’ll see in Europe, civil nuclear power will not be a theme in the United States presidential election campaigns.”
There are only two folders left that Jacques Besnainou is actively working on: first and foremost, his mission to increase recycling. Americans still do not have a plant dedicated to the reprocessing of used fuel. They have held onto their position adapted in the 1970’s, a framework built upon the limitation of nuclear weapons, because plutonium extracted during the recycling of used fuel can be used to manufacture atomic bombs. “60,000 tons of used fuel are stored each year in the United States; the equivalent of 8 years of energy consumption!” These figures send the mind reeling. No solution has yet been found and government organizations are struggling to search for a landfill site to house this amount of waste. But Jacques Besnainou hasn’t lost hope. “I prefer the French solution, the construction of a plant like La Hauge, but in the U.S. Or even the re-routing of used fuel to Hague. But the transportation for this option would be very expensive.” American pragmatism has its limits.
Finally, the last battle: the fight against greenhouse gases. Far from heated debates across the Atlantic between those who believe in climate change and those who don’t, Jacques Besnainou is a strong supporter in the fight against carbon emissions. “It is indisputable that we must fight against global warming. To not find a solution to this problem is, for me, out of the question. We have a responsibility to our children.” A plea in favor of nuclear energy, nine months from the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.
Written by: Elisabeth Guedel Treussard on 09/27/2011
Translated by: Adrienne C. Gaskell
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