So you’re thinking that, after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, you’d like to drop nuclear energy? Fine. But you’d better be prepared to pay the price...Mr. Proglio told the paper that it was his ‘‘conviction’’ that France, which gets more than three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear energy, would need to invest somewhere in the vicinity of $544 billion to build new fossil fuel power plants to replace lost generating capacity if it shut down its reactors.
That, he said, would have to be financed by a doubling of the price of electricity and would bring a 50 percent increase in France’s greenhouse gas emissions...‘‘In total, about one million jobs would be endangered,’’ the executive told Le Parisien, ‘‘and that would cost 0.5 percent to 1 percent of gross domestic product....
