The French Nuclear Industry Is Bad Enough in France

France’s monopolistic dependency on splitting the atom to turn on the lights has come with a huge price — not only financially but in environmental and health costs. In reality, France is a radioactive mess, additionally burdened with an overwhelming amount of radioactive waste, much of which is simply dispersed into the surrounding environment.

The situation is complicated by the fact that Areva, the French nuclear corporation and biggest atomic operator in the world, is almost wholly owned by the French government. Consequently, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy has gone into high marketing gear — the Washington Post anointed him “the world’s most aggressive nuclear salesman” — pushing nuclear power to any country willing to pay, most notably in the Middle East.
This proliferation-friendly profiteering, however, ignores an ugly situation at home and in other countries where Areva has left its radioactive footprint.

France has 210 abandoned uranium mines. The leftover radioactive dirt — known as tailings — along with radioactively contaminated rocks, have been used in school playgrounds and ski-resort parking lots. Efforts to force Areva to clean up its mess have been met with resistance from the company.

Historically, uranium mining corporations, including those in the U.S., have not been obliged to pay for cleanup. Many sites remain contaminated today, and disused uranium mine sites carry no warning signs. When a French documentary exposing the French uranium mining mess was scheduled to air on national television in February, Areva tried unsuccessfully to block it from the airwaves.

Far from recycling radioactive waste, the French face the same dilemma as everyone else: they don’t know what to do with it. France has no scientifically accepted or operating high-level radioactive waste repository. The sole site identified to date — at Bure close to the Champagne region in eastern France — has been met with organized opposition and has encountered technical difficulties.

France has so much radioactive waste that the government recently approached 3,511 communities suggesting they become home to the so-called low-level radioactive wastes that have nowhere to go. ANDRA, the French national agency responsible for the disposal of nuclear waste, billed the dump project as a boon to local development but refused to publicly identify the handful of communities it says responded positively to the idea of hosting the country’s nuclear detritus.

AlterNet