EDF estimates that France's nuclear industry needs to recruit between 10,000 and 15,000 workers a year over the next seven years. Despite relatively high unemployment, France's manufacturing, construction, engineering and IT industries complain they can't get the workers they need. These people work with molten metal at 1,500 degrees Celsius, and sometimes have to stand upside down," said one welder in the nuclear industry, who asked not to be identified. Before the war in Ukraine, successive administrations sought to reduce France's reliance on nuclear energy, not build new reactors, they say. For a long time, France was Europe's nuclear energy champion - and its biggest electricity exporter.

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