French nuclear energy is facing a dual challenge: extending the lifespan of existing power plants while building new reactors. The restart of unit 1 of Paluel on September 12 illustrates the effort to extend the life of existing reactors, with more than 60% of modification work initiated eighteen months before the review. This process involves mobilizing over 130 companies and nearly 4,000 people at the peak of activity. Extending the lifespan of a nuclear power plant is an immense industrial project that requires continuous intervention to demonstrate that it can continue to operate under the required safety conditions. The Grand Carénage, which groups three categories of activities—renovating or replacing major components, performing modifications for improving safety, and ensuring the continuity of equipment qualification—plays a crucial role in this effort. The challenge of the coming years will be to carry out both building new nuclear power and extending the existing fleet simultaneously. While new reactors will not replace current capacity overnight, the industry will have to manage these two industrial programs at the same time. The industrial means required are considerable, with a single decade review mobilizing several thousand people. This activity will continue for years as reactors pass their various periodic reviews. Extending a power plant's lifespan is also transforming it, as requirements evolve, technologies become obsolete, and safety standards progress. Drones and automated flights open new possibilities for inspection, allowing the creation of a real health record of the structures. However, nuclear energy has the particularity of making the very recent and the very old coexist, requiring the mastery of analog electronics designed at the time of the power plant's construction. The question of skills may be even more decisive than that of technologies, as some inspection reports carried out nearly thirty years ago are still used today to understand the evolution of a structure. Engineers may find themselves inspecting structures they have already controlled ten years ago, highlighting the importance of continuity in monitoring the aging of an infrastructure. Approximately 100,000 jobs will be needed over the next ten years, and some skills are already under strain. The visibility regained on future programs is therefore essential, as one does not train a welder, a civil engineering inspector, or a nuclear monitoring specialist at the precise moment when it is discovered that they are needed. The lost industrial time is difficult to make up, and the time of expertise is even less. The experience accumulated on the existing fleet should allow avoiding discovering, in twenty or thirty years, constraints that could have been anticipated from the design phase. The challenge of the new nuclear energy therefore does not consist solely in building quickly. It consists in building quickly what the industry will be able to maintain for a long time. Paluel reminds us that the French nuclear restart does not begin with the first concrete of an EPR2. It is already underway in the existing power plants, in the thousands of operations needed to extend their lifespan, and in the skills that must be preserved and transmitted today. French nuclear energy is thus facing a dual imperative: preparing new capacities while taking care of those that already exist. These two challenges are not competing. The experience gained in meeting the first should allow better success in the second.