The French Nuclear-Prosperity Paradox: EDF Balance-Sheet Debt Accumulation, Grand Carenage Corrosion Outages, European Merit-Order Marginal Pricing Contagion, and Intergenerational Payroll Extraction in an Aging Welfare State

Abstract

A persistent paradox of contemporary European political economy is exemplified by the French Republic: despite possessing the Western world's most concentrated per-capita nuclear fission infrastructure (56 operational pressurized water reactors totaling 61.4 GWe, historically generating ~70% of national electricity under the 1974 Messmer Plan), French households and younger cohorts increasingly experience declining real purchasing power, fiscal austerity, and acute socio-economic stagnation. Why does sovereign ownership of massive baseload energy fail to translate into broad-based national affluence or youth upward mobility? Building upon our prior CERN Zenodo monographs on energy-infrastructure capital expenditure (CapEx) cliffs (Records 23353509 and 23379242) and sovereign financial settlement architectures (QFS-zkVM, Record 23335988), this monograph formalizes the mathematical, market-microstructural, and demographic-fiscal mechanisms governing the French Nuclear-Prosperity Paradox. We prove four structural theorems: (1) The EDF Debt Ratchet and ARENH Suppression Trap: State utility Electricite de France (EDF) accumulated over EUR 64.5 billion in net financial debt (requiring full state renationalization in 2023) due to the collision between regulatory below-cost wholesale mandates (ARENH at EUR 42/MWh), massive aging-fleet life-extension CapEx (Grand Carenage, > EUR 66 billion), Third-Generation EPR construction overruns (Flamanville 3 at EUR 13.2-19 billion, Hinkley Point C inflation), and decommissioning liabilities; (2) Stress-Corrosion Availability Shocks and Spot-Import Inversion: When Stress Corrosion Cracking (SCC / corrosion sous contrainte) and river-thermal limits reduced fleet availability to a 30-year low (279 TWh in 2022), France inverted from Europe's top power exporter into a net importer at peak spot prices (EUR 400-1,000/MWh), socializing over EUR 24-45 billion in fiscal losses and tariff shields (Bouclier Tarifaire) onto public debt; (3) European Merit-Order Marginal Gas Contagion: Under the EU coupled day-ahead auction (EUPHEMIA), uniform clearing prices are dictated by the marginal fossil-fuel generator (P_clear = c_CCGT^gas), transmitting imported natural gas and carbon-permit inflation directly into domestic industrial and household bills despite low nuclear short-run costs; and (4) Bismarckian Payroll Extraction and the Youth CDD/CDI Dual-Labor Trap: Financing an aging pay-as-you-go pension system (~14% of GDP) and sovereign debt service requires a ~52%-58% fiscal-social wedge on labor, rationing permanent employment (CDI), trapping young workers in precarious fixed-term contracts (CDD), and depressing real net youth wages below housing and living-cost inflation. Finally, we formulate a deterministic reform architecture combining zero-knowledge two-tier electricity pricing (QFS-zkVM) with high-margin quantum-industrial upgrading. License & Integrity Covenant: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) with Strict No-Learn Covenant (NLL-v1.0-2026).