Framatome Brand Guidelines: A 1958 Licence, the Areva Years & an EDF Revival

A licence from Pittsburgh and a reactor at Chooz.

Framatome — short for Franco-Américaine de Constructions Atomiques — was created on 1 December 1958, French Wikipedia says, by companies of the Schneider and Merlin Gerin groups together with the American Westinghouse, to use Westinghouse’s licence for pressurized water reactors in France. English Wikipedia adds the Empain group and says the first team was four engineers, one from each parent company. The licence and technical-assistance agreement was signed in February 1959.

Its first job was in the Ardennes. From 1962 to 1967, French Wikipedia says, Framatome worked with the Franco-Belgian company SENA, the Ateliers de Charleroi and Westinghouse to supply the first pressurized water reactor at Chooz. English Wikipedia describes a contract of September 1961 for a turnkey plant — not only the reactor but the piping, cabling and auxiliary systems around it — which turned the firm from a nuclear engineering office into an industrial contractor. In 1970 it began a reactor at Tihange in Belgium, which entered service in 1975.

The decisive year was 1975. On 6 August 1975, French Wikipedia says, Framatome was chosen as the sole builder of nuclear power plants in France; over the next 25 years it equipped the 58 pressurized water reactors of 19 French power stations, from Fessenheim to Civaux. POWER magazine, in a history published in March 2018, gives the same figure and names export plants such as Koeberg in South Africa, Ulchin in South Korea and Daya Bay and Ling Ao in China. In January 1976 Westinghouse agreed to sell its remaining 15% to Creusot-Loire and gave up control of marketing, English Wikipedia says, leaving the company wholly French-owned.

Siemens, the EPR and a dozen years as Areva NP.

In 1989 Framatome and Siemens set up a joint company to develop a new design, the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), POWER reported. In 1999 their nuclear businesses merged as Framatome ANP, for Advanced Nuclear Power, owned two-thirds by Framatome and one-third by Siemens, French Wikipedia says. Ownership had already shifted: in 1992 Framatome was held 42% by Alcatel-Alsthom and 36% by the French atomic energy commission, the CEA, with EDF and Crédit Lyonnais holding the rest, and in 1993 the Schneider group sold Jeumont-Schneider Industrie to it. In 2001 Framatome, Cogema and CEA Industrie were brought together in a new state-controlled group, Areva.

Inside Areva the old name faded. In 2006 the reactor business became Areva NP, for Nuclear Power. It took on EPR projects at Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, under a contract signed in December 2003, and at Flamanville 3 in France, signed in April 2007. Siemens announced its exit in 2009 and sold its 34% stake back in 2011, French Wikipedia says.

The period also brought a quality case at the Le Creusot forge in Burgundy. In April 2015 France’s nuclear regulator, the ASN, said the steel in parts of the Flamanville 3 reactor vessel had a higher carbon content than expected, French Wikipedia says, and quality audits then found irregularities in manufacturing records at the plant. English Wikipedia, citing the Wall Street Journal in December 2016, says company executives acknowledged that documents had been falsified, and that the forge was out of operation from December 2015 to January 2018. On 28 June 2017 the ASN allowed the vessel to be used, on condition that its lid be replaced by the end of 2024.

How nuclear companies present themselves.

Nuclear companies sell to a small number of buyers — utilities, governments and regulators — over very long timescales, and their imagery tends to reflect that. Corporate pages and reports often return to the same few scenes: cooling towers and reactor domes photographed under clear skies, turbine halls in clean, even light, and wide views of plants set against water or open country.

Newer reactor designers, many of which have not yet built a commercial plant, lean on renders instead. Small modular plants appear as low, compact buildings in green landscapes, sometimes beside a town or a data centre, with no smoke and few people. Large-reactor vendors show construction sites, cranes and heavy components such as reactor vessels and steam generators on the move, a way of picturing scale and progress at once.

People appear mostly as engineers in hard hats and overalls, inspecting a weld, reading a control-room screen or handling fuel. Two images recur across the trade: the blue Cherenkov glow of a spent-fuel or research-reactor pool, caused by charged particles travelling through water faster than light does in it, and ceramic fuel pellets held in a gloved hand. Both are used to make an invisible process visible.

The industry also presents itself in person, at trade gatherings such as the World Nuclear Exhibition and the meetings of the American Nuclear Society, where stands, renders and scale models carry much of the message. The companies in this guide range from Framatome, founded in 1958, and Urenco, set up by treaty in the early 1970s, to much younger reactor designers, and their visual languages vary just as widely.

The EDF years.

Areva was split up after record losses in 2014, POWER reported. In July 2015 EDF agreed to take a majority of Areva’s reactor business, which was moved into a subsidiary called New NP; the Olkiluoto 3 contract and some contracts for Le Creusot forgings stayed with Areva, World Nuclear News reported on 4 January 2018. The sale closed on 31 December 2017, with EDF holding 75.5%, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries 19.5% and the engineering firm Assystem 5%, and on 4 January 2018 New NP took the name Framatome. Areva’s fuel-cycle business was renamed Orano later the same month.

Since January 2024, when Assystem sold its stake to EDF, Framatome has been owned 80.5% by EDF and 19.5% by MHI, French Wikipedia says. Its offices include Courbevoie, in the La Défense business district west of Paris. It designs reactors and makes large components, fuel assemblies and instrumentation and control systems, and it services operating plants; French Wikipedia lists its part in the Hinkley Point C plant in England, the planned Sizewell C and France’s planned EPR2 reactors. On 25 January 2018 the ASN allowed the Le Creusot forge to resume making parts for French plants, French Wikipedia says, and in March 2023 Framatome announced a plan to bring the making of reactor vessel internals back to Le Creusot by 2026; in October 2023 it decided to enlarge its Saint-Marcel plant. It has also bought the cybersecurity company Cyberwatch, in 2022. French Wikipedia gives a workforce of about 22,000 in 2025.

For a design guide, Framatome shows a name set aside inside a larger group and brought back to mark a new start. Compare Westinghouse, the American corporation whose licence it was founded to use, and Orano, the other company carved out of Areva. For this guide we use a slate blue, a forge orange and graphite with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Framatome’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.