ENVIRONMENT: France Tightens Security around Nuclear Facilities

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Nov 7 2001 (IPS) - Fear that some 56 French nuclear power stations could be targeted for attacks, similar to those perpetrated against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, has prompted the government to tighten security around the country’s most dangerous facilities.

This fear also has boosted France’s anti-nuclear campaigns.

To take precautions, the French army has installed radar units and anti-aircraft missiles around the country’s main nuclear reprocessing plant at La Hague, at the Atlantic Coast, some 500 kilometres west of Paris.

Besides, the Ministry of Defence has raised the minimum flying limit for aeroplanes over La Hague to 1,000 metres.

Radar and missiles also have been installed at the Brest harbour, some 150 kilometres south of La Hague, where the French atomic submarines are based.

These measures form part of an urgent security plan conceived in Paris in the wake of the Sep 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The plan aims at protecting all “sensitive sites” in France against possible terrorism.

The fear of a possible attack against nuclear power stations has triggered a new wave of protests against the French nuclear policy.

In simultaneous demonstrations across several French cities two weeks ago, some 10,000 people urged the government to abandon nuclear power and launch an alternative energy policy based on renewable sources.

The demonstrations took place in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Nantes and Colmar, among other major cities.

Dominique Voynet, General Secretary of the Green Party, who until last July was Minister of Environment, led the demonstrations in Lyon. “For more than 20 years now, people laughed at us because we warned that a plane accident could destroy a nuclear power plant,” he claimed.

“We have been warning against small planes accidentally falling over La Hague or other French power plant,” Voynet added. “We didn’t have in mind terrorism, we didn’t think of a big plane, such as a jumbo, seized by terrorists and loaded with hundreds of tonnes of fuel.”

“Now everyone, who laughed at us, want to prevent such an attack,” Voynet said. La Hague plant is the world’s largest reprocessing installation, and the only one currently in operation. Nuclear waste from Japan, Germany, and Switzerland, among other countries, is processed in La Hague.

In recycling chemical process, plutonium, the atom bomb’s main raw material, is separated from nuclear garbage destined for “preliminary” storage.

Nuclear experts and environmental activists consider chemical recycling exercise as extremely dangerous and ecologically unsuitable.

They claim that La Hague plant does not respect the security and emission norms imposed by international conventions, especially those concerning the disposal of nuclear waste into the North Sea.

In a report, commissioned by the European Parliament, on Oct 23, Wise-Paris, a nuclear consultant firm, claimed that the radioactivity released in 1999 by the recycling plant at La Hague was 15,000 times higher than that of the nearby power station at Flamanville.

Wise-Paris also reported that the recycling plants at La Hague and Sellafield, in England, produced eight times more iodine 129, a highly radioactive by-product, than all tests of atom bombs carried out to date.

The nuclear firm revealed that the quantity of carbon 14 released by the plant at La Hague into the atmosphere has increased by eight percent over the last 10 years.

Anti-nuclear activists also complain about the term “preliminary” used for defining the current method of storing nuclear waste.

“This euphemism is used to conceal the failure by scientists and politicians to find a concrete solution to the growing problems of radioactive waste produced by nuclear power,” Mycle Schneider, director of Wise-Paris, said.

La Hague plant is “temporarily” storing over 5,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste, including plutonium, uranium and other dangerous chemical nuclear by-products, waiting to be transported back to the countries of origin of the material.

According to research carried out by the Green Party, the destruction of La Hague plant by an explosion or by a crash of a major plane would produce 67 times more radioactivity than the melting of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the former Soviet Union in 1986.

The Green Party said the processing plants like the one at La Hague were built to resist the crash of a small plane.

“A bigger collision would certainly destroy the plant and spark a major nuclear accident,” warned Bruno Rebelle, director of the Greenpeace in France.

Rebelle said La Hague plant is not the only unprotected nuclear site in France. “The power plant at Gravelines, in the north of the country, aligns six nuclear reactors not built to resist a major impact,” Rebelle claimed. “There are several French nuclear plants that are potential Chernobyl”.

The anti-nuclear demonstrators chanted slogans such as “A Cessna would pass. But with a Boeing we wouldn’t survive.”

Another slogan said “A Generation to end the French nuclear policy.”

Voynet said France should not “depend on nuclear power, but shift to a new energy mix based on sparing and renewable sources.”

“The French government should follow the examples of Sweden, Germany and other European countries,” Voynet said. “All these countries have begun to phase out their nuclear power plants, an exercise which will take them 20 to 30 years.”

Noel Mamerre, Green Party’s presidential candidate, warned the ruling Socialist Party that, without an agreement on an end of nuclear policy “there won’t be a coalition with us”.

The Socialists have formed a coalition with the Greens, the Communist Party and other small leftist movements, and intend to renew the alliance after the presidential elections next spring.

France operates 56 nuclear power stations that provide up to 80 percent of the electricity that the country consumes. “We’re the only country that depends a lot on nuclear power,” Mamerre claimed.

The anti-nuclear protests will likely continue in the next few weeks, as several trains transporting radioactive waste are expected to cross France.

They include a German convoy destined to the English nuclear plant site at Sellafield, that will traverse northern France from the eastern border with Germany to the western Atlantic port of Dunkirk.

Mid-November, another convoy carrying recycled German nuclear waste will depart from La Hague towards the storage site at Gorleben, in Lower Saxony, northern Germany.

Under the new tough security measures set up by the German government in the aftermath of the Sep 11 attacks, the regional government of Lower Saxony, has prohibited anti-nuclear demonstrations from Nov 5-20.

In France, no ban has been decreed. The anti-nuclear movement “Sortir du nucleaire” (Get ride of nuclear power) has announced major protests along the train trajectory.

In addition, a third convoy, with Swiss nuclear waste, should leave La Hague in December. All convoy will likely be escorted by police units.