France's new ecology minister, Roselyne Bachelot, unexpectedly defended the nuclear industry as "the least polluting", and said nuclear energy was needed to meet France's carbon emissions reduction commitments.
Bachelot said that wind and solar energy were: "Not up to the industrial stakes of our country." However, she also underlined the need to control nuclear wastes, and recalled that she had joined a protest against a proposed long-term radwaste repository project some years ago. She said that long-lived radwastes "shouldn't be regarded as inevitable, and we can do much better in handling long-lived waste thanks to dynamic research."
