Nuclear Energy

are going to be correspondingly high. Furthermore, it is reported that the higher burn-up in EPR will
result in thinning of the fuel cladding, making it more prone to failure. dlxxxiii Therefore, the EPR
needs more stringent supervision just to match the safety level of present day reactors!
Not only are these reactors in no way safer than the present reactors, they also have
worrying design problems. Safety regulators in Finland and France have expressed serious
reservations about the design, particularly whether there is sufficient independence in the control
systems – in short, there is the danger that if the main control system fails, there a risk that the back-
up system will fail for the same reason. (See Chapter 6 for more on this.) dlxxxiv The Nuclear
Installations Inspectorate (NII), which is conducting a detailed review of the EPR reactor for the
UK, and the US safety regulator, have also expressed the same concerns about the technology. dlxxxv
As discussed in Chapter 6, because of the huge delay and cost escalation in construction of
both the Olkiluoto-3 and the Flamanville-3 reactors, the French government in October 2009 asked
Francois Roussely, a former chairman of the Electricite de France (EDF), to evaluate the EPR and
the French nuclear industry in general. The Roussely Report (July 2010) concludes that the
difficulties encountered in Olkiluoto and Flamanville are partly due to the complexity of the EPR
model “including ... the redundancy of safety systems.” For emphasis, we repeat what we have
written in Chapter 6: This is a damning diagnosis. One of the lessons from Three Mile Island
accident was that if a safety system fails, there should be an independent – redundant – back-up
system available. The nuclear industry claims that it has incorporated this lesson in the design of the
new Generation III+ reactors. The Roussely report questions this claim.
On Areva – the EPR Supplier
Areva, the French nuclear corporation and the biggest atomic operator in the world, which is
almost wholly owned by the French government, was voted in 2008 as one of “the world's most
irresponsible companies”. It has resisted cleaning up the radioactive waste from its abandoned
mines in France, which has been used to pave school playgrounds and public parking lots. Its mines
in Niger have caused an environmental catastrophe that is destroying the lives and livelihoods of the
surrounding communities. Its reprocessing plant at La Hague on the Normandy coast dumps more
than 370 litres of radioactive liquid waste into the English Channel every year and has radioactively
contaminated the seas as far as the Arctic Circle. The plant is also one of the world’s worst
radioactive air polluters: aerial discharges from the plant have been found to contain radioactive
krypton-85 at 90,000 times higher values than natural levels. Uranium spills from Areva's Tricastin
nuclear complex, which converts uranium from mines into fuel for nuclear plants, has polluted two
rivers, and Tricastin wine growers have struggled to market their products since the accident. (See
Section 7, Part III, Chapter 3 for more details.) dlxxxvi
More significantly for India, Areva is failing to implement vital safety measures and has
done very shoddy work in the construction of its EPR reactor in Olkiluoto, Finland, in order to
reduce costs. (See Chapter 6 for a more detailed discussion on this.) The safety and quality
standards are so poor that the Finnish Safety Regulator has publicly admitted that it may not be able
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