Dave Stegen 🦉

The greatest man you've never heard of died this week on Wednesday, September 6th. Marcel Boiteux built the French nuclear fleet as head of national utility EdF, making superb, far-sighted decisions against powerful entrenched interests. Decisions such as abandoning the poorly-performing French gas reactors for outstanding Westinghouse technology. And insisting on ruthless standardization that allowed true learning-by-doing, with his teams completing several reactors a year for more than a decade. His fleet provides 70% of French electricity, and but for the sabotage by his weak, stupid successors inside and outside French government, it should be making half again as much electricity as the 56 reactors do today. Boiteux's reactor fleet (plus a few more units after his retirement) cost about $150 billion. Compare this to Germany spending about $500 billion on their mess of an "energy transition" which requires them to keep almost all of their coal and gas plants in service. As a young man Marcel Boiteux refused to accept France's defeat and at age 21 in 1942 as an elite university student he escaped Nazi-occupied France while escorting downed Allied pilots over the Pyrenees mountains to safety in Spain. Brass. Balls. This episode revealed the pattern for the rest of his life. After the war, he studied economics and wrote *the* foundational paper in electricity economics, on how to price electricity service in a way that covered system costs while being fair and sustainable. He completely understood liberal economics, and knew it did not apply to electricity grids and service. He built cheap power for all, then after his retirement watched as a bunch of pathetic hack economists broke the grid with idiotic "markets" that are failing all over the world. He rapidly rose in public service after university graduation, and after appointment to the head of Electricité de France, successfully built the most astonishing energy system in the history of the world, proving for all time that a country could truly rely on its own fleet of standardized nuclear reactors producing low-cost emissions-free energy. Anti-nuclear terrorists exploded a bomb outside the door of his family home in 1977 but he kept building. It must have been torture for this truly great man to watch twenty years of silly, unserious leaders damage and begin to destroy his beloved EDF and its fleet of reactors, leading France straight into its worst energy crisis since the oil crisis of 1973 that triggered Boiteux's nuclear fleet construction in the first place. But he didn't come up with the idea of a nuclear fleet powering a total electrification of the economy because an oil crisis hit. He was too prophetic to be a mere reactionary. Rather, he declared the slogan "All nuclear, all electric" months before the OPEC embargo hit in 1973. Marcel Boiteux died this week at the age of 101.