Dumping French nuclear waste to Russia

The nuclear industry likes to make a big song and dance about reprocessing nuclear waste

Did you know, for instance that France has sent 33,000 tonnes of nuclear waste to Russia for reprocessing since 2006? How much of that has come back to France? A mere 3,090 tonnes. That’s less than 10%. The rest is dumped and abandoned in places like the ‘closed’ city of Seversk, the nuclear waste storage facility in Siberia. Some of it is even stored in open air car parks. This is the fabled nuclear safety we’ve heard all about.

After these revelations in October this year, along with it emerging that plutonium had been ‘forgotten’ at the Cadarache nuclear plant, the French government announced a moratorium on nuclear waste shipments to Russia while the High Committee for Transparency and Information on Nuclear Safety conducts a full inventory of France’s nuclear waste products. The results are expected in January.

So when the French government decided to pre-empt the inventory’s findings and break the moratorium this weekend, resuming nuclear waste shipments to Russia, Greenpeace France sprang into action. Nuclear campaigner Yannick Rousselet chained himself to the railway line along which the nuclear waste was to be transported, delaying the shipment.

It’s a strange coincidence that French nuclear giant AREVA would choose to resume nuclear waste shipments exactly when attention is focussed on the opening of the Copenhagen climate change summit. Thanks to Yannick and his colleagues, however, AREVA’s dirty little secret is in the public eye once more.

– from greenpeace.org