France gets about 80% of their power from nuclear.
Doesn’t that make Royal’s 17% statement ridiculous?
I am sure that if you shake the numbers enough, you can come up with a 17% figure. Perhaps nuclear energy is only 17% of France's peak projected capacity after completion of the great Socialist Pie-In-The-Sky Solar Programme.
The technique is to twist the figures enough to give you a certain narrowly construed answer that you like, followed by three pages of explainatory footnotes about why that figure is not ridiculous on it's face. One then consistently cites that figure without any reference to the footnotes, and pretends to believe it is true.
See "Global Warming" or "Gore Won in Florida 2000" for US examples of same...
She HAS to have misunderstood that question, or that wasn’t actually the question.
If she has the nuclear power in France that wrong, Sarokzy and his staff will really make hay about this the next two days. That 17% sounds more like the US numbers, or maybe Europe in general.
Just checked:
From http://www.iea.org/dbtw-wpd/Textbase/nppdf/free/2006/key2006.pdf
Says France nuke electricity = 78% of total production
US nuke electricity = 20% of total
World nuke electricity = 16% of total
Other sources show Europe as a whole ~ 30% of total production.
Weird that these two have the French numbers so far away from the truth.