It’s a classic of PR spin by AREVA which blatantly ignores several unpleasant facts about nuclear waste reprocessing in France. If you want a corrective to this glossy AREVA propaganda, you should take a look at Eric Guéret and Laure Noualhat’s film Déchets – Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire (Waste – The Nuclear Nightmare). As the International Panel on Fissile Materials’ blog puts it…
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.
In the Discovery Channel film, AREVA describes nuclear as ‘a very green form of energy’, ‘a very clean technology’ which produces ‘relatively small volumes of waste that has to be disposed of’ (260,000 tonnes?). It’s difficult to know whether to laugh at AREVA’s audacity or be incandescent at the deception. We wouldn’t tolerate such transparent lies from our children and yet AREVA clearly think they can get away with it.
Now, this is a family blog and we don’t like to use bad language. So we’ll restrain ourselves to comparing AREVA’s claims to the solid waste produced by male cows.
– from weblog.greenpeace.org