Or so says India journalist Pallava Bagla, in France at the invitation of the French government, about France’s so-called flagship European Pressurized Water Reactor which Bagla suggests India is considering purchasing. ‘Mother’ is a useful comparison, we suppose, all the other reactors being smaller and making messes, smells, noises and, generally behaving like feral children.

Regular readers of Nuclear Reaction will of course know all about Areva’s EPR. The technology has quite the reputation as disastrously expensive and extremely problematic. Not that you’d find that out from Bagla’s piece that extols the reactors virtues as told to him by Areva.

He says ‘the Finnish [EPR] reactor being made at Olkiluoto is likely to start generating power next year’. He’s only three years out, with recent estimates saying the Olkiluoto reactor won’t now produce a watt of electricity until 2012 at the earliest after huge schedule overruns. He also fails to mention the massive cost increases and multiple safety violations that have dogged the Finnish project.

Bagla goes on to describe EPRs as ‘monsters’. Here we can agree. When you look at the two current EPR construction projects in France and Finland – rampaging, out of control, terrifying and ugly – ‘monsters’ is the word we’d use as well.