French Nuclear Project Assailed over Proliferation, Security Concerns

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Antinuclear activists are expressing fears of plutonium proliferation and terrorist attacks after a top French official indicated last week that France could be about to launch a major new phase in its massive civil nuclear program.

Minister Delegate for Industry Nicole Fontaine announced last Wednesday that she is recommending to Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin that France ― which gets about three-fourths of its electricity from nuclear plants and is the world’s largest net electricity exporter ― begin construction of the European Pressurized-water Reactor (EPR), a French-German design that can be fueled with 5 percent-enriched uranium 235 or with mixed uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX).

The announcement followed renewed debate in recent months, spurred by the European heat wave and resulting energy difficulties, about the use of nuclear power in France and other European countries.

Areva, a parent company of EPR developer Framatome, describes the reactor on its Web site as “extremely safe” owing to “advanced technological features,” and a company spokesman defended the reactor today as safe, profitable and resistant to attacks and accidents. Nevertheless, Fontaine’s announcement provoked immediate criticism of the model, development of which began in 1989.

Technically, Fontaine’s recommendation applies only to construction of an EPR prototype, but all involved appear to be equating approval of the proposal with the choice of EPR to replace the national electric company’s current stable of pressurized-water reactors. The existing reactors are expected to be retained for about 20 more years.

After French media reported that Areva had already secured Raffarin’s approval of EPR, the prime minister said last Thursday that “no decision has been made,” that Fontaine is acting “in her role of making recommendations” and that the future of the French energy sector will be submitted “in the coming weeks … to very broad public consultation.”

Fontaine responded Saturday by reiterating her support for EPR but echoing Raffarin’s assertion that the decision is not hers to make. Her office did not respond to requests for comment in time for this article.

As Raffarin sought to reassure the public, activists decried what they called a lack of open debate ahead of a decision they said will, among other things, perpetuate existing security shortfalls and encourage proliferation by necessitating large-scale MOX production. EPR can use up to 100 percent MOX.

“There is really a problem of international security and proliferation,” Greenpeace France antinuclear campaign chief Frederic Marillier said last week in a telephone interview.

World Information Service on Energy Paris Director Yves Marignac said yesterday that converting nuclear material to MOX ― a strategy the United States is pursuing under a 2000 agreement with Russia on disposal of weapon-grade plutonium stocks (see related GSN story, today) ― would be a “nearly acceptable means” of disposing of France’s 40-metric-ton stock of plutonium generated in civil reactors but that the adoption of EPR would signal a nearly opposite strategy, with Paris bolstering the “plutonium sector” to provide MOX fuel for new reactors.

Contacted by telephone in Paris, Marignac said France should consider vitrification or other spent fuel-disposal methods, rather than the reprocessing that would be required to fuel the new reactors and to treat the resulting spent fuel. Instead, he said, the country appears to be embarking on a policy of encouraging reprocessing in general, “the plutonium sector” and “the pursuit of MOX.”

The Areva spokesman, in a telephone interview from Paris, rejected Marignac’s characterization of the reactor, citing the U.S. choice of conversion to MOX as a means of uranium disposal as an example of the attractiveness of the method. The spokesman said EPR not only would be used to consume France’s stock of plutonium but could also be used to recycle its own spent fuel, an approach he called ultimately safer from an environmental and health standpoint than immobilizing and burying nuclear material, as is done in some other methods.

The EPR debate follows months of scrutiny of the security of vehicles transporting nuclear material in France, and critics are seeking to link the debate over EPR and MOX to the question of whether nuclear shipments are secure in France. They say producing more nuclear material in the country would make existing vulnerabilities more readily exploitable by terrorists.

In a bid to demonstrate the vulnerability of French nuclear shipments to attack, 25 Greenpeace activists in February successfully stopped and chained themselves to a truck carrying 150 kilograms of plutonium from the La Hague nuclear plant, a northern facility operated by Areva and Cogema, to a reprocessing site in the southern town of Marcoule. Despite government assurances about varying the day and time of such shipments, Greenpeace said it found the trips were highly predictable; according to Marignac, the government said it had detected Greenpeace operatives as they staked out the route but offered no explanation as to why it did not therefore prevent the incident.

Highlighting the proliferation risk it said is posed by the “plutonium industry,” Greenpeace said at the time that “civil nuclear [activity] does not exist” and called on French President Jacques Chirac to complement his opposition to war in Iraq by “stopping proliferation at the source.”

Marignac, whose group concluded in a Greenpeace-commissioned study that about 90 vehicles carry a total of almost 12 metric tons of plutonium each year in France, said yesterday that the February operation showed transportation is the “weak link” in efforts to secure nuclear material in the country. “The overall level of security of a system is the level of security at its weakest link,” he added.

Apparently in response to such developments, France ― in the person of the Ministry of Industry’s senior defense official, Didier Lallemand ― decreed July 24 that a wide variety of information about nuclear material in the country be classified as a defense secret. Marignac said he asked Lallemand last week whether the decree means that, if it were discovered that plutonium was missing from La Hague, the case would not be made public. According to Marignac, Lallemand replied, “The situation has never presented itself.”

Security concerns have also emerged about the EPR design, which Marignac said “is in fact a little bit safer” than existing models ― “there are more mechanisms to avoid the most serious accident scenarios” and a “greater redundancy” in the security system, he said ― but does not appear to be significantly more protected than previous facilities against a violent attack.

Existing reactors are designed to survive the crash of a small tourist airplane. The Areva spokesman said EPR could resist a larger military plane and, based on studies of what he called less fortified U.S. reactors, could probably resist an airliner as well. Marignac said EPR is unlikely, given its dimensions, to survive an airliner incident.

The government’s push to build new reactors is in part an attempt to prepare for a coming gap of at least 15 years between the end of the current reactors’ lifespan and the availability of the next, or “fourth,” generation of reactors. A recent report on energy commissioned by Raffarin’s office indicated EPR’s design does not place it in the fourth generation, but the authors expressed support for adopting the design anyway because of the coming time gap.

According to both Areva and EPR critics, EPR reactors introduced around 2020, when the first of France’s existing reactors are expected to have outlived their usefulness, would remain usable until at least 2080. The Areva spokesman said a long period of use would help make EPR profitable, while Marignac said the likely EPR lifespan means weak security conditions and an increased risk of plutonium proliferation would persist for decades at many sites even after new, better reactors became available.

A former top official in France’s Atomic Energy Commission, International Conseil Energie consultant Bernard Laponche, has been stressing the inadequacies of EPR when compared with likely attributes of fourth-generation reactors.

Laponche argued last week in the newspaper La Croix that EPR ― chosen, he wrote, without democratic debate and “to respond to the urgent request of Areva” ― is “a reactor model that is certainly improved but offers no decisive technological change and remains poor in terms of productivity.” The “radically different reactors” of the coming decades, he said, will probably be more productive, smaller and “much safer.”

“They are not likely, for example, to be vulnerable to a terrorist attack, and they are likely to have resolved the crucial problem of plutonium proliferation,” Laponche wrote.

The Areva spokesman suggested discussion of the fourth generation of reactors is irrelevant to the choice with which France is faced.

“The fourth generation is great on paper,” he said, “but for now, it is not a reality in the industry.”

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