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, alongside two older ones. It is the first reactor to be built in the country in 10 years and will cost $5.1 billion. And President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that France will build yet another. Flamanville is a vivid example of the French choice for nuclear power, made in the late 1950s by Charles de Gaulle, backed up during the oil shocks of the 1970s and maintained despite the nuclear accident in Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, and the nightmare at Chernobyl. Nuclear power provides 77 percent of France's electricity, the government says, and relatively few public doubts about its safety are expressed in a country with little coal, oil or natural gas. With the wild increase in the 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 that can afford it, 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.