Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives
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Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives | |
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| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | October 18, 1945 |
| Preceding Agency | Commissariat à l'énergie atomique |
| Headquarters | Paris and Gif-sur-Yvette, France |
| Employees | 15,989 (2010)[1] |
| Annual budget | 4.7 billion € (2009) |
| Agency executives |
Bernard Bigot, General administrator Yves Bréchet, High Commissioner for Atomic Energy |
| Website | www.cea.fr (in English) |
The Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (English: Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission) or CEA, is a French public government-funded research organisation in the areas of energy, defense and security, information technologies and health technologies. The CEA maintains a cross-disciplinary culture of engineers and researchers, building on the synergies between fundamental and technological research.
CEA is headed by a board headed by the general administrator (currently Bernard Bigot), advised by the high-commissioner for atomic energy (currently Yves Bréchet). The missions of the CEA are equivalent to those of the United States Department of Energy. Its yearly budget amounts to 4.7 billion euros and its permanent staff is slightly under 16,000 persons.[1] It owns Areva.
CEA was created in 1945; since then, the successive high-commissioners have been Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Francis Perrin, Jacques Yvon, Jean Teillac, Raoul Dautry, René Pellat, Bernard Bigot and the incumbent.
It conducts fundamental and applied research into many areas, including the design of nuclear reactors, the manufacturing of integrated circuits, the use of radionucleides for curing illnesses, seismology and tsunami propagation, the safety of computerized systems, etc.
It has one of the top 100 supercomputers in the world, the Tera-100.
It is divided into 5 directions, or divisions:
- the division of nuclear energy (DEN);
- the division of technological research (DRT);
- the division of life sciences (DSV);
- the division of sciences of matter (DSM);
- the division of military applications (DAM), which builds the nuclear weapons of the French military and designs the power plants of the nuclear submarines of the French Navy
In December 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared[2] that CEA, at this time named Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (English: Commission for Atomic Energy) should change its name to Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (English: Commission for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies); this change took effect on March 10, 2010, when the decision was published in the French Official Journal.
Facilities
Civilian research centres
- CEA Saclay, Essonne (48°43′30″N 2°09′01″E / 48.725135°N 2.150346°E, headquarters since 2006) and the associated National Laboratory GANIL at Caen - Calvados
- CEA Fontenay-aux-Roses, Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine
- CEA Grenoble, Grenoble, Isère
- CEA Cadarache, Cadarache, Bouches-du-Rhône
- CEA Valrhô, Marcoule and Pierrelatte, Gard
Civilian emergency organizations
Research centres for military applications
- CEA DAM Île-de-France, Bruyères-le-Châtel, Essonne
- CEA Cesta, Gironde
- CEA Gramat
- CEA Valduc, Côte-d'Or
- CEA Le Ripault, Indre-et-Loire
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Le CEA, acteur clef de la recherche technologique" (in French). CEA. 2010.
- ↑ See Les Echos in French
External links
- CEA official website (English)
- CEA official website (French)
- For more on the CEA and its work with Israel see the Woodrow Wilson Center's Nuclear Proliferation International History Project Avner Cohen Collection
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