How France is disposing of its nuclear waste

[hunter]

By Rob Broomby
British Affairs Correspondent, BBC World Service

Half a kilometre below ground in the Champagne-Ardenne region of eastern France, near the village of Bure, a network of tunnels and galleries is being hacked out of the 160 million-year-old compacted clay rocks.

The dusty subterranean science laboratory built by the French nuclear waste agency Andra is designed to find out whether this could be the final resting place for most of France's highly radioactive waste, the deadly remains of more than half a century of nuclear energy.

Emerging from the industrial lift there are a series of passageways about the size of an underground rail tunnel.

The walls are reinforced with steel ribs and sprayed with grey concrete and there are huge bore holes drilled 100m into the rock walls which would hold the capsules of radioactive waste. If the scheme gets the final approval, the first waste could be inserted here in around 10 years.

--more--

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26425674

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I don't believe that "paying off communities" would work here. Our corrupt system is more geared to paying off politicians. Just look at all the crap the fossil fuel industry is getting away with.

[kristopher]

1. French handling of nuclear wastes is a clusterf**k

Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing in France
Mycle Schneider and Yves Marignac www.fissilematerials.org
April 2008

Summary
France initiated a spent nuclear fuel reprocessing program to provide plutonium for its nuclear weapons program in Marcoule in 1958. Later, the vision of the rapid introduction of plutonium- fuelled fast-neutron breeder reactors drove the large-scale separation of plutonium for civilian purposes, starting with the opening of the La Hague plant in 1966, financed under the military and civilian budgets of the Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, CEA). This effort initially was supported broadly by neighboring European countries who contributed to the French fast breeder project and, along with Japan, signed up for French reprocessing services in the 1970s.

Military plutonium separation by France produced an estimated total of about 6 tons of weapon grade plutonium and ceased in 1993. But civilian reprocessing continues. Virtually all other European countries, apart from the United Kingdom, have abandoned reprocessing and the U.K. plans to end its reprocessing within the next decade. France’s last foreign reprocessing customer for commercial fuel is the Netherlands, which has only a single small 34-year-old power-reactor, and Italy, which ceased generating nuclear electricity after the 1986 Chernobyl reactor accident in the Ukraine.

This report looks at the reprocessing experience at France’s Marcoule and La Hague sites. Since commercial reprocessing ended at the Marcoule site in 1997 and its operational history of reprocessing gas-graphite reactor fuel is not very relevant to today’s commercial light water reactor (LWR) reprocessing, the report focuses primarily on the La Hague site.

Since its inception, France’s reprocessing industry has benefited from strong financial, technical and political support. The French experience therefore constitutes a case of reprocessing under optimal conditions. Since reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel does not “close the nuclear fuel cycle”, as is often claimed, but involves at each stage the production of significant waste streams, we treat it as an open “fuel chain” and assess the record of French reprocessing in terms of waste management, radioactive discharges, radiological and health impacts as well as cost.

...

Waste Volumes. A major argument made for reprocessing is that it dramatically reduces the volume of radioactive waste. A number of serious biases have been found, however, in official comparisons made by EDF, AREVA and the National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management (ANDRA, the organization responsible for radioactive waste disposal in France). These include:
• Exclusion of decommissioning and clean-up wastes stemming from the post-operational period of reprocessing plants;
• Exclusion of radioactive discharges to the environment from reprocessing. Their retention and conditioning would greatly increase solid waste volumes;
• A focus on high-level waste (HL W) and long-lived intermediate-level waste (LL-IL W), leaving aside the large volumes of low-level waste (LLW) and very low-level wastes (VLLW) generated by reprocessing;
• Comparison of the volumes of spent fuel assemblies packaged for direct disposal with those of unpackaged wastes from reprocessing, which overlooks for instance the fact that packaging reprocessing waste is expected to increase its volume by a factor of 3 to 7; and
• Failure to include the significantly larger final disposal volumes required for spent MOX fuel, because of its high heat generation, unless it is stored on the surface for some 150 years instead of the 50 years for low-enriched uranium spent fuel.

We find that, with past and current operating practices ...


http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr04.pdf

This is a 60 page chapter in a book, btw.

[djean111]

2. Yes, the money would go directly to politicians, absolutely.

[quadrature]

3. what is the objection to separating the caesium and strontium...

from the rest of the used fuel?

Cae and Str are most of the decay-heat problem
of used nuclear fuel.

[Demeter]

4. I thought France was dumping it off the east coast of Africa...

"European companies" are blamed for Somalia's toxic waste...Russia is accused of dumping entire reactors...more specific information either doesn't exist or is being suppressed...

[LouisvilleDem]

5. I believe...

...that the nuclear waste dumped off the Somali coast was all medical in origin.

Someone else might know for sure though.

[kristopher]

6. It is difficult to tell what has been dumped where...

A French documentary on nuclear waste

By Pavel Podvig on February 22, 2010 11:10 AM | 3 TrackBacks
On 20 February 2010 Greenpeace issued a call for a moratorium on shipments of reprocessed uranium from France to Russia. Activists had been repeatedly blocking rail shipments of the material from the La Hague reprocessing plant to Cherbourg port.

Parliamentary enquiry, government statements, Greenpeace actions are a few of the stunning consequences of a 100-minutes TV documentary Déchets - Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire (Waste - The Nuclear Nightmare) broadcast by the Franco-German station ARTE for the first time on 13 October 2009 and re-broadcast by various television stations since. The documentary presents the results of an investigation into nuclear waste management in the US, Russia, Germany and France. The authors Eric Guéret and Laure Noualhat were often accompanied by technicians of the French independent radiation-monitoring lab CRIIRAD. They detected and measured radiation in many places where they went, from the Columbia river close to the US nuclear weapons lab in Hanford to the Soviet counterpart Mayak in the Urals. Some of the most remarkable scenes include a Geiger counter that goes crazy under a publicly accessible bridge over the Techa river and a scene outside the French "plutonium factory" called reprocessing plant at La Hague. In the latter case a spokesman for operator AREVA, when asked about radiation levels in the fields outside the plant, stated after a long hesitation that he would not call this contamination, but "absence of impact" before stumbling: "Well, we'll redo that one..."

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 ...

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

Fuel "recycling" a myth, a French report involuntarily demonstrates
By Yves Marignac on September 8, 2010

French industry and government assertions about the "closed" character of the nuclear fuel "cycle" are misrepresentating the facts. This is the main finding of the High Committee for transparency and information on nuclear safety (Haut comité pour la transparence et l'information sur la sécurité nucléaire - HCTISN), which on 12 July 2010 published its conclusions on "the transparency of the fuel cycle management".

The independent Committee was created by the 2006 Act on Nuclear Transparency, comprises operators, state authorities, trade-unions and environmental NGOs and advises Government and Parliament on nuclear issues. The report had been commissioned by the Minister of Environment and the Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Options (Office parlementaire d'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques - OPECST) and was triggered by a controversy in October 2009 about French uranium exports to Russia. A TV documentary had shown that reprocessed uranium was sent to Russia for storage with little realistic perspective to be used, contradicting official assertions about the recycling of uranium and its benefits. The end of this uranium waste trade, confirmed by AREVA in May 2010, was reported by Greenpeace as effective as of 11 July 2010. Incidentally, the HCTISN report was presented to the Minister of environment the very next day.

Although the report centers on this issue, providing unreleased public information on the long-standing natural, enriched, reprocessed and depleted uranium trade between France and Russia, it also develops a broader analysis of the nuclear materials of the French nuclear fuel chain, with a focus on current practices and future prospects for the reuse of uranium and plutonium....

http://fissilematerials.org/blog/2010/09/fuel_recycling_a_myth_a_f.html

Less than 4% of French nuclear fuel "recycled", NGOs calculate

By Yves Marignac on September 8, 2010 1:28 PM | 3 TrackBacks
This is the fourth in a series of four posts on the openness of the French "closed" fuel cycle

Several members of the French High Committee for transparency and information on nuclear safety (HCTISN) declined to endorse the report it published on 12 July 2010 on the transparency of the management of the French nuclear fuel cycle (see Part 3 of this series). In an explanatory note, the representatives of various environmental NGOs (Greenpeace, ACRO, France Nature Environnement), backed by another member, representative of the Network of Local Commissions for Information near nuclear sites (ANCLI) "emphasize that the discussions did not enable a complete and representative picture to be reached at this stage" and "call for the group's work to be continued". (1)

Complaining that the deadlines set for the official publication of the report did not allow for the group to discuss some of the questions raised, they could only introduce a short statement of reservations after the report's executive summary. These reservations are exposed in detail in an explanatory note (in French).

The note insists that it is the focus of the working group's referral on uranium trade with Russia, poor methodology and the unrealistically tight schedule that explain the shortcomings, and expresses confidence in the capacity of the HCTISN to "bring the work to its conclusion". Nevertheless, the members point to a number of major failures in what they call "an incomplete and unfinished work".

The authors' first concern is that the report centers on the Russian dimension of the French fuel chain but "does not provide a historical perspective"...

http://fissilematerials.org/blog/2010/09/less_than_4_of_french_nuc.html