ENVIRONMENT-FRANCE: Consensus Over Nuclear Waste Crumbling

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Apr 3 2001 (IPS) - More than 25 years after the introduction of nuclear power in France, the country’s consensus on the subject is crumbling under the weight of technical and legal setbacks.

The international atmosphere is also unfriendly towards atomic energy and the French population is becoming aware of its dangers.

Last month a well co-ordinated anti-nuclear activists protested in the north-west and north-east of the country, before and during the shipment of atomic waste from the French plant at La Hague in the Normandy to the preliminary German storage site at Gorleben, in Lower Saxony.

Some 4,500 tonnes of German nuclear waste at La Hague should be repatriated during the next five years.

At Caen train station, some 250 kilometres west of Paris, angry protesters say a train carrying German radioactive garbage will pass through their village every three days in the next five years.

Caen, a transit point for all trains transporting nuclear waste between Germany and the reprocessing plant, is situated some 100 kilometres from La Hague.

“This situation is no longer acceptable,” Didier Angers, spokesperson for an environmentalist group told IPS. “France should stop reprocessing nuclear waste, especially when the wastes come from foreign countries.”

The plant at La Hague is the world’s largest nuclear reprocessing installation, and the only one currently in operation. Nuclear waste from power plants all over the world is chemically processed in La Hague where recycled atomic fuel is segregated from nuclear garbage destined for preliminary storage.

Nuclear experts and environmental activists consider the chemical reprocessing of atomic waste as extremely dangerous and ecologically unsuitable.

The environmental group, Greenpeace has on several occasions proved that the processing plant dumps its unfiltered nuclear sewage in the nearby Atlantic Ocean.

This pollution is allegedly causing the death of children in the area around La Hague. In a study for the British Journal of Medicine in 1996, the French physician Jean-Fransois Viel found that the rate of leukaemia among children in a region 30 kilometres around the reprocessing plant is three times higher than elsewhere in France.

Since then, women from the area, calling themselves ‘Mothers in Rage’, have been protesting regularly, demanding the closure of the plant.

Scientists also have found the last five cases of a rare disease of bone marrow which physicians associate with the victims’ exposition to high radioactivity, in La Hague.

Another danger is the production of plutonium, an extremely venomous heavy metal – which is the atom bomb’s main raw material.

“Every time you reprocess nuclear waste, you provoke a chemical reaction that inevitably liberates plutonium,” explains Mycle Schneider, Director of the World Institute for Survey on Energy (WISE) in Paris.

Reprocessing of nuclear waste requires heavy security measures not only to guarantee the treatment of chemical safety but also to prevent the dangerous substance from falling into the hands of criminals.

According to the World’s Atomic Energy Agency, France possesses 57 nuclear power plants, which generate some 375 million Megawatts (MW) per hour, 75 per cent of all energy produced in the country. The other 25 per cent of the country’s electricity come from hydroelectric plants.

With this capability, France is the second producer of nuclear energy in the world after the United States.

France began generating electricity through nuclear power in 1974, following the first oil crisis, as a means of guaranteeing the country’s energy sufficiency.

But the French nuclear power plants have proved to be highly unstable. According to the WISE Institute in Paris, some 500 accidents occur every year in the French nuclear reactors. Last year, at least two workers died in the country’s nuclear power plants.

The fast-breeder reactor, Creys-Malville, some 700 kilometres south of Paris, was closed in 1998. The plant, based on the controversial method of fast-breeding plutonium, worked irregularly during 12 years and produced some 8000 MW, a mere fraction of its installed capacity of 1240 MW.

According to the Control Agency of Security in Nuclear Installations, the dismantling operation will take at least 50 years, costing some nine billion dollars.

A similar project, which should have been built on the estuary of the River Loire, at the Atlantic Coast, was canceled, on environmental grounds. The reactor would have put the biodiversity of the river at risk.

Another nuclear plant, Caradache, in the southern department of Gard, also has been plagued by technical failings and should be shut down in the next few months. The management of Cadarache, which produces a nuclear mixed oxide fuel called MOX composed of uranium and plutonium, was in the past often accused of laxity in the plant’s security controls.

France’s nuclear plants now cannot count on the court.

Two weeks ago, the Compagnie de Gerance de Materielles Atomiques (COGEMA), the state firm responsible for the reprocessing nuclear plant of La Hague, was forced to reject a shipment of atomic waste from Australia. Environmentalists had accused the COGEMA of illegally storing foreign nuclear waste at La Hague.

Foreign nuclear waste can be stored in France only if it’s to be reprocessed. In the case of the Australian waste, the COGEMA had not demanded the necessary reprocessing permit. Furthermore, the environmentalists could prove that the reprocessing of the Australian waste was technically unfeasible.

On Mar 17, a tribunal at Cherbourg, for the first time in French nuclear history, forbade the COGEMA from unloading the Australian shipment, which was already at the city’s port.

A similar ruling is expected over the German nuclear waste.

“Up to now, nuclear energy could count on a wide consensus in France,” Jean Luc Thierry, of Greenpeace told IPS. “But the lack of transparency that characterises the state companies managing the nuclear plants, and the serious technical difficulties associated with nuclear industry are eroding this consensus.”

A popular rejection of nuclear energy forced the German government last year to stop the use of nuclear power by 2030. Sweden made a similar decision 15 years ago.

Neither Italy nor Austria has nuclear power plants, and the United States stopped building atomic reactors since the accident of Three Mile Island in 1979.

“Nobody wants to have nuclear waste in their region,” Thierry says. “Why should they?”