AFP, published on Sunday 09 February 2020 at 6.10 p.m.
“I find it sad that it ends like this”. Less than two weeks before the shutdown of the first reactor on February 22, Jean-Luc Cardoso, 52, has had the idea of closing his workplace for three decades, but he keeps one bitter taste.
Among the employees, “there is a form of resignation, a certain weariness and still a great anger of incomprehension”, reports the operating technician, former voice of the CGT. “We fought against, we lost,” he said.
After the stages of “anger” and “the hope that this will not materialize immediately”, it is now “rather sadness” that drives the thousand employees (EDF and providers) still on the job. central, says Frédéric Simeoni, 56, also thirty years at home.
This engineer expects a “special” 2020 year. “Little by little, colleagues are going to leave, it is emptying”, relates the man who will continue his work until 2023, the date scheduled for the end of fuel disposal, but also of his retirement. “It’s chance”.
– “A mess” –
When Hervé Nolasco was transferred to Fessenheim in 2015 to join his wife doctor in Alsace, the closure of the plant was already envisaged, but this prospect was then “still unthinkable” for the employees. “It seemed so absurd that we shut down a plant that works well,” says the original Marseillais. The shutdown “in the summer of 2020” will finally be implemented at the end of 2018, after years punctuated by hopes and disappointments, remembers the 35-year-old employee, who defends “one of the powerhouses where he does the most + bon vivre + “, less concrete and closer to attractive cities, and denounces” a mess “when the plant had successfully passed recurrent checks by the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN).
Son and grandson of EDF agents, Jean-Luc Cardoso remains convinced that he has “the best job in the world”, every day different. Most of the employees learned the specifics of nuclear power by training when they arrived.
Like Jean-Marie Rohé, who knew the beginnings of the plant. In 1974, employed on a coal-fired power station, he applied to Fessenheim to “go and see” for himself in this period when we heard “so many contradictory things” about nuclear power. The plant is not yet finished, but it already impresses with its “gigantism”.
The first reactor will be put into service in spring 1977. That day, “there is an extremely high collective concentration”, recalls the 74-year-old pensioner. “It’s the excitement and at the same time a great silence in the control room”.
“We knew we had in our hands a tool that required a lot of rigor and precision,” explains the former assistant to the shift supervisor who stayed at the plant until the early 1990s. The first nuclear accident, on the Central American Three Mile Island in 1979, having “forced to review all procedures” will not shake his confidence in his working tool.
– Four years of blur –
Once, he was “scared”: when, in the midst of a boom in nuclear disputes, a commando set off two explosions on the site. They warn by phone to avoid the victims, but, on duty, Jean-Marie Rohé is one of the first to enter the enclosure fearing another explosion. It was in 1975, the plant was not yet operating, but this led to increased site security.
At the start, “we were looking back in time”, many built their homes in the surroundings, explains Mr. Rohé.
Jean-Luc Cardoso moreover does not intend to leave his red house in the center of Fessenheim, a village which “is going to fall asleep”, he fears. He can claim retirement in 2025 and hopes to work at the plant until then.
Hervé Nolasco will also want to stay in the area, and will be on the Fessenheim site until 2023, but he does not know how his work at the central plant’s store will evolve. “And in 2023, I don’t know what I’m going to do either, so I have four years to spend a little bit in the dark,” he admits, nevertheless refusing to complain while “in private, people find themselves unemployed overnight. “
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