French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission
The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, or CEA (French: Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives), 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.
Agency overview
18 October 1945 by Charles de Gaulle
- Commissariat à l'énergie atomique
Paris and Gif-sur-Yvette, France
21,000+ (2022)[1]
- François Jacq, General administrator
- Patrick Landais, High Commissioner for Atomic Energy
cea.fr (en)
CEA is headed by a board headed by the general administrator (currently François Jacq since 20 April 2018[2]), advised by the high-commissioner for atomic energy (currently Patrick Landais). Its yearly budget amounts to €5.8 billion and its permanent staff is slightly over 21,000 persons.[1]
History[edit]
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, Catherine Cesarsky,[3] Daniel Verwaerde, and François Jacq.
In December 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared[4] that CEA should change its name from Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (English: Commission for Atomic Energy) to Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (English: Commission for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies); this change took effect on 10 March 2010, when the decision was published in the French Official Journal.
Research[edit]
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.[5] TERA 100, first system designed and built in Europe to reach the petaflops in 2010, was ranked in 5th position in the worldwide TOP 500.[6][7] CEA is now building TERA-1000 which is a key step in the implementation of their Exascale program for the computing needs that CEA would face by 2020.
In March 2016, Reuters published an article describing the "Top 25 Global Innovators – Government"[8] and placed CEA as "number one" amongst "The World's Most Innovative Research Institutions."[8]
CEA has spun off multiple companies, some being partial subsidiaries or where CEA has minority interest. Some such companies are listed below:
CEA in Academics[edit]
University of Paris-Saclay[edit]
CEA has played an active role in research, development and innovation in the four main areas of low-carbon energies (nuclear and renewable), technologies for information and health technologies, very large research infrastructures (TGIR), and defense and global security.
Moreover, two of the ten CEA centers across France have joined with the University of Paris-Saclay[21] to develop high quality research and training. The centers which form a part of the University of Paris-Saclay include: