French nuclear waste on its way to be dumped in Russia

[bananas]

Photos and video at the link

http://weblog.greenpeace.org/nuclear-reaction/2010/04/french_nuclear_waste_on_its_wa.html

French nuclear waste on its way to be dumped in Russia

Remember earlier in the week when Greenpeace activists dismantled railway tracks near France’s Tricastin nuclear facility? The action was to stop nuclear waste from being exported to Russia.

Unfortunately the waste is on the move and now at sea on the Russian transport ship, Kapitan Kuroptev. That doesn’t mean Greenpeace has given up the chase…

Our colleagues managed to get alongside the ship displaying banners reading ‘Russia is not a nuclear dump’ before attempting to board it.

The Kapitan Kuroptev is carrying this waste to an uncertain future. Ninety percent of French nuclear waste shipped to Russia since 2006 has been dumped. Only 10% was returned. How much of the Kapitan Kuroptev cargo will be making the return trip and how much will be left to contaminate Russia for thousands of years?

(More photos and information in French is available at the Greenpeace France website.)

Posted by Justin on April 9, 2010 12:08 PM

[kristopher]

1. This has been revealed only recently,

There was a big stink about it in France since the claim has been unwavering that the French have been reprocessing all their waste.

Of course, it must be just a misunderstanding on the part of nuclear haters since the French nuclear sales force would never stoop to deception.

[pscot]

2. You mean they no longer dump it

in the oceans? I seem to remember years ago, a barrel of French nuclear waste turned up off the Oregon coast. No clue how it ended up there. I'm sure the Russians will know how to handle the stuff. Their environmental consciousness is legendary.

[Nihil]

3. W.T.F.?

> Greenpeace activists dismantled railway tracks near France’s Tricastin
> nuclear facility

Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy ... they blabber on about "the dangers
of shipping nuclear waste around the country" then deliberately set out to
sabotage the railway track ...

:wtf:

[Nihil]

12. Crickets here as well ...

... or maybe the anti-nuke crowd can't justify deliberate sabotage
in an attempt to create the very "threat" that they are counting
on to drive the fear in the ignorant public ... strangely similar
to the "Terror!" tactics of certain governments FWIW ...

> Greenpeace activists dismantled railway tracks near France’s Tricastin
> nuclear facility

No, no danger there then ... "wankers" is too polite a term for them ...

[madokie]

4. You reckon there will be any attempt to retrieve that which has been dumped

in the ocean? A few years back the French was in talks to ship that waste here to the usa but I guess the mafia had a better plan, until they got caught that is. :-)

[Javaman]

5. crickets from the pro nuke crowd. nt

[Kolesar]

6. Click-at the unrec button, you mean

This could embarass them!!

[Statistical]

7. Why would anyone even want to try to rebute such garbage.

Where is the evidence? Just because some anti-nukkers claim (without facts or evidence) that waste is dumped in Russia everyone should smash the reactors and sit in the cold dark?

Please.

Here is my claim:
First Solar dumps their chemical waste from solar panels into the Atlantic. No proof, just a false and unsubstantiated allegation.

[kristopher]

8. You'll deny anything, won't you?

I recall that der Spiegel ran the headline "Nuclear Waste Stored in Siberian Parking Lot"; complete with Google Earth photos.

The French denied it at first... sort of. They claimed that the left-over recycled material isn't technically classified as "nuclear waste" and therefore it isn't subject to the regulations that apply to "nuclear waste".

Hey maybe that is the next thing that is going to show up in building products, eh? Or what about used steel from the reactors? It's high quality and hot as hell; how much of that do you suppose will get circulated by into the economy by unscrupulous people looking to make a buck?

Anyway, it isn't speculation, it is fact.



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

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 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.

[Statistical]

9. Still waiting for the fact.

A press release from govt agency?
This so called admission?
A report from a respectable media source?

[kristopher]

11. I gave you der Spiegel, but you must be waiting for the Heritage Foundation...

[Javaman]

14. it's amusing really...

much in the same vein as tea baggers, when presented with facts, the use either talking points, ignore the point or go off on another tangent all together.

[amborin]

10. Europeans worried about nuclear waste:

"But large numbers of Europeans remain skeptical about the safety and environmental consequences of nuclear power, particularly the industry’s highly radioactive waste. That could limit Areva’s sales closer to home.

Günther Oettinger, the E.U. commissioner for energy, reiterated Friday that the European Commission would propose legislation promoting the permanent burial of high-level waste deep underground in geologically stable areas by the end of the year.

That move is designed to address worries about the waste, which is currently stored on an interim basis in pools of water or in casks, many near ground level and in some cases is exported.

But Mr. Oettinger also acknowledged that the issue of nuclear power would remain fraught in Europe, and he stressed that the European Commission recognized there were limits to how far it could push any nuclear agenda.

“We accept that the president of France, in nuclear plants, is seeking as many contracts as possible, both in the E.U. and beyond,” Mr. Oettinger said, but the Union had to “accept France’s energy mix just like Austria’s.”

He said Austria, which banned nuclear power in the late 1970s, already was able to generate most of its electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions — by using hydropower. "

snip

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/business/energy-environment/15green.html?scp=5&sq=french%20nuclear%20waste&st=cse

[Name removed]

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