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NBC Nightly News Incorrect on French Nuclear Industry
November 9, 2007, the NBC Nightly News gave a flagrantly inaccurate account of the French nuclear industry. Four obvious errors concerned nuclear waste and the French attitude to nuclear power.
1) The announcer interviewed people living near the Flamanville nuclear power station in Lower Normandy and stated that a "single" nearby storage facility stores "all of France's nuclear waste." He must have been referring to the La Hague reprocessing plant, since he then showed photographs of that facility. La Hague, operated by Areva, stores and reprocesses irradiated fuel. France has a separate site storing "low-level" waste and other material adjacent to La Hague, La Manche (the CSM). This site, managed by the radioactive waste authority Andra, stopped receiving waste in 1994. "Low-level" waste generated since that time goes to Soulaines (Aube) (the CSA). "Very low level" waste goes to another site, Morvilliers (Aube). Additional waste is scattered around France, mostly at sites belonging to the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Electricité de France (EDF), and Areva (formerly Cogéma).
2) A reporter interviewed a man inside a unit at La Hague that stores the liquid high-level waste produced by reprocessing. The liquid is turned into glass and stored in canisters beneath the floor. The person interviewed assured the reporter that "all of the nuclear waste" produced by France in a year was directly beneath the feet of the two of them. Reprocessing produces much waste in addition to the high-level liquid waste , and none of this additional waste goes under the floor. Some of the waste goes into the English channel; some is stored elsewhere at La Hague in canisters like those used for glass; some goes to the CSA . . .
3) Viewers were told that the high-level waste underneath the floor was safely stored "deep underground." The storage at La Hague is not deep underground and is regarded as temporary. Andra is currently conducting experiments on storage in a deep underground laboratory at Bure (Meuse). Parliament is expected to approve deep underground storage in a yet-to-be-constructed site similar to and near the laboratory, but will not do so for several years.
4) The segment of the news on nuclear power closed with a statement that although Americans are still fiercely debating the nuclear issue, the debate in France has moved on to how to use less energy. For President Sarkozy this may be the case. (In fact, Sarkozy, a strong supporter of nuclear power [and nuclear weapons as long as they are in France and the United States], recently misled the public by promising not to establish any new nuclear sites. France has so many existing sites that it can build its new projects on them and is, in fact, doing so.) Nevertheless, there is still very active opposition to to nuclear energy in France, in which the umbrella organization Sortir du Nucléaire plays the most visible role. Ironically Sortir du Nucléaire, together with organizations in southeastern France, has organized a major rally at Marseille for the day following the NBC presentation. The object of the demonstration is the international fusion reactor Iter to be built at Cadarache (Bouches du Rhône) in Provence.
As to the safety of France's reactors, suffice it to say here that a window made of glass one-yard-thick, as shown by NBC, is not a guarantee that a reactor will operate as intended.
--posted November 9, 2007