Maintenance Woes for French Nuclear Reactors

November 17, 2022

With Russian natural gas imports already blocked by war, France could well face even greater energy challenges this winter as nearly half of the country’s nuclear power reactors are offline following decades of delayed maintenance, the New York Times reports. This would be old news to Guru Madhavan. In Issues, he argues that maintenance is the critical backbone that supports all technology—and indeed is the unsung partner of all innovation. “There can be no useful innovation,” Madhavan writes, “without a vast, invisible infrastructure of maintenance activity that keeps civilization running.”

Posted by Tom Burroughs