Nuclear Energy

sports and fishing were also banned. Tricastin wine growers have struggled to market their products
since the accident.cxxx A week later, nuclear-safety officials discovered a burst underground pipe
at a plant in Romans-sur-Isere, southeastern France, run by an Areva subsidiary; the pipe had been
broken and leaking uranium for several years and didn't meet safety standards.cxxxi After initially
downplaying the seriousness of the accidents, France's Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo
finally acknowledged that France's nuclear facilities had experienced a total of 115 "small
irregularities" in the first half of 2008.cxxxii
“No leakage” storage systems cxxxiii
The Centre de Stockage de La Manche (CSM), in Normandy, France, which contains a
massive 520,000 cubic meters of nuclear waste, is one of the largest dump sites of nuclear waste in
the world. Dumping here started back in 1969 and continued for 25 years till its closure in 1994.
Even though the site was designed to contain low level waste, a government appointed commission
found that the site contains unknown quantities of high level waste too. And now, it has been found
that the radioactive waste from the storage facility is leaking into the groundwater used by local
farmers. In 2005, scientists from a French laboratory found that radioactivity levels in nearby
underground aquifers close to the dumpsite averaged 9000 Bq/l, or 90 times above the European
safety limit of 100 Bq/l ! The situation is bound to get worse in the coming years, as more
hazardous radionuclides, including plutonium and strontium gradually leak out.
After closure of CSM in 1994, the so-called low and intermediate level waste was
transported to another dumpsite, the Centre de Stockage de l'Aube (CSA) in the Champagne-
Ardenne region. This was claimed to be a state-of-the-art facility, and when the site was being built
in the 1980s, people of the area were assured that there would be no radioactive leakage from the
site. By 2002, the site had already received over 100,000 cubic meters of nuclear waste. Soon after,
in 2006, it was found that the storage site had started leaking. Tritium leaking from CSA was found
in underground water! And this is just the beginning; gradually more deadly radionuclides are
bound to find their way into the groundwater in the coming years. Moreover, in an attempt to make
it a high quality nuclear dump site, the storage site has been designed in such a way that no
corrective measures can be taken! The people of this region and all their future generations are
condemned to live with this radioactivity and all its consequences till eternity.
La Hague Reprocessing Plant: Polluting the Planet
The dirtiest French nuclear site -- with the cleanest of reputations -- is the vast reprocessing
plant at La Hague on the Normandy coast. It is the world's number one plant, reprocessing more
than 1700 tons of highly irradiated nuclear fuel rods annually. The plant produces huge volumes of
liquid radioactive waste and radioactive gases. These are simply dispersed into the sea and air.
The plant has been pumping as much as 350 million litres of liquid radioactive waste every
year into the English Channel – it has been going on since the 1980s, and has radioactively
contaminated the seas as far as the Arctic Circle. These liquid wastes have been measured at 17
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