French Nuclear Industry Faces Meltdown

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French activists block train with radioactive waste for Russia Updated at 3:05 PM

Source: RIA Novosti

French Greenpeace activists blocked a train carrying some 650 metric tons of radioactive waste in protest against the export of nuclear waste to Russia, the Greenpeace Russia website said.

A shipment of depleted uranium hexafluoride was due to be loaded onto the Captain Kuroptev in the port of Le Havre and sent to St. Petersburg. However, the ship weighed anchor and headed towards the port of Montoir-de-Bretagne pursued by the Greenpeace ship Esperanza.

The Greenpeace statement said the activists chained themselves to railway tracks, delaying rail traffic towards Montoir-de-Bretagne for more than four hours.

The activists said that the radioactive nuclear waste shipment from their country to Russia violates French law and an EU directive banning the import and export of dangerous waste.

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Read more: http://en.rian.ru/Environment/20100311/158165719.html

http://www.fissilematerials.org/blog/2010/02/a_french_documentary_on_n.html

A French documentary on nuclear waste
By Mycle Schneider on February 22, 2010 11:10 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

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However, remarkably enough, the largest impact had a simple mass calculation that the journalists presented. Constantly facing the AREVA PR that states that 96% of the nuclear materials are "recycled" through the reprocessing scheme, the reporters inquired where the recovered uranium, roughly 95% of the mass of spent fuel, does end up. In fact, AREVA has been sending most of the reprocessed uranium (23,000 tons were still stored in France at the end of 2008), to Russia officially for re-enrichment. In fact, even if all of that uranium had indeed been re-enriched, which is not the case, over 90% of the mass remains in Russia as enrichment tails. This material is waste, because there is absolutely no economic incentive to re-enrich it, in particular considering the hundreds of thousands of tons of "clean", first generation enrichment tails that are stored in Russia and in the other major enrichment countries, including in France (close to 260,000 tons at two sites).

The message that AREVA's "recycling" ratio had to be corrected from 95% to less than 10% of the original mass send a shockwave through the French political landscape. The minister of Environment asked for clarifications and the parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technological Option Assessment (OPECST) organized public hearings. During the hearings EDF has admitted that, apart from a period of about five years, 100% of the reprocessed uranium had been sent to Russia. Between 2000 and approximately 2005 (the EDF representative was not certain) reprocessed uranium was sent to URENCO's Dutch plant that can re-enrich reprocessed uranium (contrary to URENCO's UK and German plants). EDF signed a contract with AREVA to use part of the Georges-Besse-2 plant, currently under construction, to enrich reprocessed uranium for a period of about 10 years starting in 2013. The French Nuclear Safety Authority ASN announced that by the end 2010 it will have finished studies into the potential requalification of reprocessed uranium as waste.

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http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/nuclear_recycling_fails_the_test

Nuclear Recycling Fails the Test

July 2, 2008 · By Robert Alvarez. Edited by Miriam Pemberton
The debate over nuclear power is heating up, along with the planet. Can nuclear fuel recycling be part of the mix? Not a chance.

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Recycled Uranium

In 2007 the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that “reprocessed uranium currently plays a very minor role in satisfying world uranium requirements for power reactors.” In 2004, about 2 percent of uranium reactor fuel in France came from recycling, and it appears that it now has dwindled to zero. There are several reasons for this.

Uranium, which makes up about 95 percent of spent fuel, cannot be reused in the great majority of reactors without increasing the levels of a key source of energy, uranium 235, from 1 to 4 percent, through a complex and expensive enrichment process.

Reprocessed uranium also contains undesirable elements that make it highly radioactive and reduces the efficiency of the fuel. For instance, the build up of uranium 232 and uranium 234 in spent fuel creates a radiation hazard requiring extraordinary measures to protect workers. Levels of uranium-236 in used fuel impede atom splitting; and to compensate for this “poison, recycled uranium has to undergo costly “over-enrichment.” Contaminants in reprocessed uranium also foul up enrichment and processing facilities, as well as new fuel. Once it is recycled in a reactor, larger amounts of undesirable elements build up – increasing the expense of reuse, storage and disposal. Given these problems, it’s no surprise that DOE plans include disposal of future reprocessed uranium in landfills, instead of recycling.

Costs

As a senior energy adviser in the Clinton administration, I recall attending a briefing in 1996 by the National Academy of Sciences on the feasibility of recycling nuclear fuel. I'd been intrigued by the idea because of its promise to eliminate weapons-usable plutonium and to reduce the amount of waste that had to be buried, where it could conceivably seep into drinking water at some point in its multimillion-year-long half-lives.

But then came the Academy's unequivocal conclusion: the idea was supremely impractical. It would cost up to $500 billion in 1996 dollars and take 150 years to accomplish the transmutation of plutonium and other dangerous long-lived radioactive toxins. Ten years later the idea remains as costly and technologically unfeasible as it was in the 1990s. In 2007 the Academy once again tossed cold water on the Bush administration’s effort to jump start nuclear recycling by concluding that “there is no economic justification for going forward with this program at anything approaching a commercial scale.”

Meanwhile, the client base for Areva, the French nuclear recycling company, has shrunk to one new contract for a relatively small amount of spent fuel from the Netherlands. Most revealing is that its main customer, the French utility, Electricité de France, is balking at doing further business unless the price goes down – something that Areva says it can’t do. It appears that even the French may be starting to say no instead of oui.

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http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=rethinking-nuclear-fuel-recycling

April, 2008

Nuclear Fuel Recycling: More Trouble Than It's Worth
Plans are afoot to reuse spent reactor fuel in the U.S. But the advantages of the scheme pale in comparison with its dangers
By Frank N. von Hippel

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It is exactly this failed reactor type that the DOE now proposes to develop and deploy—but with its core reconfigured to be a net plutonium burner rather than a breeder. The U.S. would have to build between 40 and 75 1,000-megawatt reactors of this type to be able to break down transuranics at the rate they are being generated in the nation’s 104 conventional reactors. If each of the new sodium-cooled reactors cost $1 billion to $2 billion more than one of its water-cooled cousins of the same capacity, the federal subsidy necessary would be anywhere from $40 billion to $150 billion, in addition to the $100 billion to $200 billion required for building and operating the recycling infrastructure. Given the U.S. budget deficit, it seems unlikely that such a program would actually be carried through.

If a full-scale reprocessing plant were constructed (as the DOE until recently was proposing to do by 2020) but the sodium-cooled reactors did not get built, virtually all the separated transuranics would simply go into indefinite storage. This awkward situation is exactly what befell the U.K., where the reprocessing program, started in the 1960s, has produced about 80 tons of separated plutonium, a legacy that will cost tens of billions of dollars to dispose of safely.

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