re: #97 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

They had a practical reason for that: they needed fissile material for their own atomic weapons program, the Force de Frappe

This is of course totally wrong.

1. The post 1973 French nuclear expansion is all PWRs. You don’t use PWRs to make bomb plutonium, they’re all IAEA inspected and anyway the refueling schedules and isotope ratios are all wrong.

2. The Force de Frappe (we’re supposed to call it Force de dissuasion to be all touchy feely) predates the Plan Messmer by decades.

3. France, like the UK, made it’s bomb plutonium in the pre-1973 gas cooled reactors (Magnox for the UK, UNGG in France).

No, the whole reason for the Messmer plan was the 1973 oil crisis. France, unlike Germany or the UK had no remaining coal, electricity was all being generated from imported oil.