Your questions, answered: Part V

The grand finale: Allende and Pinochet, French energy policy, and hindsight

Orlando Letelier, a Chilean politician, was assassinated in 1976 in Washington DC by Pinochet’s secret police. His co-worker, a 25-year-old American woman, also died in the car bombing. Museum of Memory and Human Rights, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And this is all of them—I think.

It’s possible I overlooked a question. (There were a lot of them—thank you.) If I didn’t answer yours, please, don’t be shy. It wasn’t at all because I judged it a bad question. I just didn’t see it. I sincerely desired and desire to answer every single question, so if I missed yours, send up a flag, and I’ll treat it in the next newsletter. 

You were good sports, and this really helped. Psychologically, it’s so much easier to work when I have a specific task—answer that question about French energy policy—than it is to wake up and think, “Today, I must write about something.” So thank you to everyone who played along. It got me out of the sticky goo.

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A reader: What is the French energy situation? I read that many of their reactors are down for maintenance. Is the outlook that they will be mostly powered up for winter? Does France power itself first and then export or because of ties to the EU do shortages anywhere in Europe result in French shortages?

Claire: Nuclear power usually makes up more than 70 percent of France’s electricity generation. France has the second-biggest nuclear fleet in the world (after the US) and the highest nuclear share in its energy mix, which is why electricity here is usually cheap and France is one of the world’s biggest net exporters of electricity. It’s also why the French greenhouse gas emissions are 45 percent lower than Germany’s.¹