By STEVEN ERLANGER

FLAMANVILLE, France - It looks like an ordinary building site, but for the two massive, rounded concrete shells looming above the ocean, like dusty mushrooms.
Here on the Normandy coast, France is building its newest nuclear reactor, the first in 10 years, costing $5.1 billion. But already, President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that France will build another like it.
Flamanville is a vivid example of the French choice for nuclear power, made in the late 1950s by Charles de Gaulle, intensified during the oil shocks of the 1970s and maintained despite the nuclear accidents of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Nuclear power provides 77 percent of France’s electricity, according to the government, and relatively few public doubts are expressed in a country with little coal, oil or natural gas.
With the wildly fluctuating cost of oil, anxiety over global warming from burning fossil fuels and new concerns about the impact of biofuels on the price of food for the poor, nuclear energy is getting a second look in countries like the United States and Britain. Even Germany, committed to phasing out nuclear power by 2021, is debating whether to change its mind.
France is way ahead. Electricite de France, or EDF, is in talks to buy British Energy, for about $24 billion, to renovate Britain’s nuclear plants and build new ones. The French have already contracted to build a third-generation European Pressurized Reactor of the Flamanville type - the world’s safest and most powerful - in Abu Dhabi and China.
A senior aide to Jean-Louis Borloo, the minister of ecology, sustainable development and planning, said that France “sees a wide trend developing” toward more use of nuclear energy.
“A lot of countries realize that with the rising price of fossil fuels and energy, and the climate emergency, nuclear can be part of the solution,” said the aide, who spoke anonymously under the rules of his ministry.
He said that France’s choice for a “closed fuel cycle” - reprocessing used nuclear fuel to recover plutonium made in the reactors so it can be reused - was safer. “This way, nuclear energy can bring a lot - it’s CO2-free energy.”
Mr. Sarkozy said that each European Pressurized Reactor that “replaces a gas-powered electricity plant saves two billion cubic meters of gas each year, and each E.P.R. replacing a coal plant means cutting 11 million tons of CO2.”
France generates half of its own total energy, up from 23 percent in 1973. Electrical power generation accounts for only 10 percent of France’s greenhouse gases, compared with an average of 40 percent in other industrialized countries, according to EDF.
France has 58 operating nuclear reactors, the highest number of any nation besides the United States.
The Nuclear Regulatory Agency has in hand or expects applications to build 34 reactors, of which seven are European pressurized water reactors of the Flamanville type - and, unlike current American reactors, allow output to vary to meet fluctuating demand.
The Flamanville reactor is based on a French-German design, which itself is based on an earlier Westinghouse design. EDF has an American partner, Constellation Energy, to sell the new model as a joint venture called UniStar Nuclear .
There are continuing doubts and confusion about nuclear power, accentuated by a series of accidents and alerts in July. At a nuclear plant in Tricastin, in Provence, 174 kilograms of untreated uranium in liquid leaked from a faulty tank during a draining operation, seeping into the ground and then into rivers that flow into the Rhone.
For Flamanville, though, a village of 1,780 people, nuclear power has reenergized the town. “At the regional level, some towns accept having nuclear plants and others oil refineries,” said Mayor Patrick Fauchon. “I don’t ask Bretons if they’re happy about having pigsties and raising pigs, which creates another source of pollution.” Still, he thinks these days of the effect on towns that are losing their regiments as France’s military modernizes.
“At least when we speak of energy, it’s a permanent need,” he said. “When we speak of an industrial tool with a lifespan of 60 years, we have economic activity for two generations.”