This
week’s post is an update on the struggle of several non-governmental groups in
France to shut down the government’s plan to bury nuclear waste under the
village of Bure. There have always been plenty of good reasons to object to
this project, but the discovery of a geothermic energy source directly under
the proposed waste depository added what, one would think, would surely be a
fatal blow. However, the legal case brought by the NGOs has not been proceeding
well. This post puts the most recent news first, then republishes some previous
posts on the topic in reverse chronological order.
1.
__________
translation
of:
À
Bure, les antinucléaires se battent toujours, L’Essentiel (Luxembourg), 2015/05/20
Meuse, France
Antinuclear
groups fighting against the nuclear waste burial project in Bure have filed an
appeal after having lost a case against ANDRA (Agence Nationale Pour La Gestion des Déchets Radioactifs).
The
case brought by the antinuclear groups was dismissed at the end of March. Their
lawyer said they had accused ANDRA of “lies… concerning the controversial
project to store highly toxic nuclear waste in the Meuse region.” She announced
on Wednesday that they have filed an appeal. Sortir du Nucléaire, and five other local organizations had accused ANDRA of
“wrongful act” (faute in French legal
terminology), but on March 26, 2015, the High Court in Nanterrre judged that
these groups did not have a stake in the issue, thus they had no right to this
legal action.
The
lawyer, Etienne Ambroselli, said, “This decision is not what we expected. We
have registered our appeal in the court of appeals in Versailles.”
The
antinuclear groups have targeted a project that is unique in France: CIGEO is
to bury, for thousands of years, the most highly radioactive waste in the
country 500 meters below the small village of Bure. The groups allege that
ANDRA lied in deliberately underestimating the extent of warm water aquifers
under the site. This was done, allegedly, to facilitate the continuation of the
project in this rural area of Haute-Marne.
However,
the court in Nanterre decided that it was up to the “public authorities” to
evaluate the validity of the study done by ANDRA on the geothermic potential of
Bure because it was they who were responsible for the project.
Buried
in impermeable argillite rock, CIGEO will be a hermetically sealed tomb. It
will receive only 3% of the volume of radioactive waste that has been produced
in France, but this small volume will contain 99% of the radioactivity of all
these French wastes. The most toxic materials remain dangerous for more than a
million years.
Final
authorization is still far from being acquired. ANDRA hopes to have a green
light from the government to proceed by 2020, and hopes to begin filling the
site by 2025.
__________
Unfortunately,
the general public is not thinking too deeply about the proposals in all
nuclear powered countries to bury nuclear waste. It seems so intuitively
obvious that if you bury something it will be gone and the problem will be
solved. The nucleocrats who promote these projects don’t want the public to
hear the contrary voices that have raised the obvious questions about nuclear
waste burial. For example, the French
astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Petit had this to say in an interview in in
2014:
In
general, there are two sorts of wastes. There are those that can be called
“passive,” like asbestos, and those that can be called “active” that evolve
chemically, decompose, and eventually produce flammable gas, and heat. Nuclear
wastes obviously belong in the second “active” category. They release heat by
their exo-energetic transmutation. So
storage sites require powerful ventilation systems that need to be maintained
for centuries. Some wastes that are plastic decompose relatively quickly,
releasing hydrogen. When the air reaches 4% hydrogen, it becomes explosive.
In
the year 2000, they began to store various types of waste, one of which was
mercury, underground at a mine in Alsace. In 2002, a fire broke out. They
wanted to get everything out, but they realized it could never be recovered… A
fire in a mine is more complicated to manage than a fire above ground. It’s
like an oven. The heat has no way out. A small fire can quickly result in
elevated temperatures at which the containers begin to melt.
In
Bure, a fire would be catastrophic. The wastes are vitrified (in a glass-like
state), but glass is not really a solid. It’s a very viscuous fluid. At
ordinary temperatures, it can do the job for thousands of years. It is not
soluble. But the weak point of glass is its low resistance to heat. At 600°C,
the glass will flow and liberate its contents. Underground, this temperature
could be reached very quickly. In the mine there are also support structures
made of metal and reinforced concrete.
Concrete melts above 1100°. The clay in Bure is also saturated with
water. It couldn’t withstand being heated above 70°. The creators of the CIGEO
project have great faith in a material called bentonite with which they hope to
seal the caverns. It’s a particular type of clay that can absorb water and
dilate, but it has the same problem as clay in terms of heat resistance.
Fire
hazards come not only from the concern about hydrogen explosions. The plan at
Bure is to deposit some elements treated with bitumen, but bitumen becomes
fluid at 60° and flammable at 300°. Any way you look at it, this project is
absurd.
The
only thing to do now is to leave everything on the surface, even for centuries
if necessary, as a way to make them less toxic by transmutation. There is no
hurry. But the government and the barons of nuclear are exerting an enormous
pressure to begin burial by 2015. They want to hide all signs of the nuisance
that has accumulated for half a century and given nuclear energy such a bad
image. If the CIGEO project is realized, this will be a precedent for
nucleopaths the world over, and they will all follow suit, saying, “après moi, le déluge!”
Note
that these comments made no mention of the geothermic energy source under the
proposed caverns. If catastrophic fires or leaks happen sometime in the future,
the toxic contents will leak down into this valuable water and energy source.
The
articles below, about the antinuclear groups’ case against ANDRA, were posted
earlier this year (2015):
2.
France's Bure Nuclear
Waste Site on Trial
Recently, I posted a translation from France’s other satirical/serious political journal
Le Canard enchaîné regarding the inconvenience
of a geothermic energy source that
was discovered under the planned site of France’s underground nuclear waste
storage facility (see the article below). Several citizens’ groups banded
together to sue ANDRA, the government agency building the facility, and they
had their hearing on January 5, 2015.
Even if they get a favorable ruling in the case,
the court is powerless to order ANDRA to halt construction. The most that can
be hoped for is a condemnation and increased public awareness of this serious
flaw in the plans of the French state to deal with its nuclear waste problem.
In normal times, nuclear issues have a hard time getting onto the radar of
public discourse, and this tendency was only increased when the horrific
murders happened in Paris on January 7th, pushing all other news to the
margins. It is unfortunate that this recourse to the courts is the only way to
bring attention to what is really a public policy problem—a political issue
concerning a looming environmental catastrophe. One might think that the issue
would be taken as seriously as freedom of speech, or the importance of
defending values that one holds sacred. Fighting the despoiling of the land is
an issue that could unify everyone in a divided nation and a divided world, but
instead we argue about religion and the right to insult others.
What follows below is a statement about the
hearing prepared by the plaintiffs who brought the case to court.
__________
The
French National Radioactive Waste Management Agency (ANDRA) kept lying in
court: Summary of the court hearing on January 5th, 2015
Following a lawsuit by six concerned citizen groups (ASODEDRA,
BureStop55, Cedra52, Habitants Vigilants de Gondrecourt-le-Château, MIRABEL -
Lorraine Nature Environnement, Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire"), on
January the 5th, ANDRA was called to the Superior Court of Nanterre [near
Paris].
We sued ANDRA for
the offense of hiding data on the geothermal resource of the Bure site for more
than 15 years. This geothermal
energy resource impedes the construction of a nuclear waste disposal site there,
as it might lead to people of the future drilling through the wastes. Our lawyer demonstrated that
ANDRA willingly failed to execute
its duty to honestly inform the public. As a public agency, it is compelled to do so by law. Attorney Etienne Ambroselli said, “We want to stop ANDRA from practicing the art of
misinformation. We expect the court to condemn ANDRA for
not telling the truth about the difficulties it has encountered in carrying
out its mission to manage nuclear
wastes over the long term.
The misinformation went on during the legal procedures before the hearing. ANDRA did not produce any new arguments; the
weaknesses of these had been emphasized in the citizen groups’ replications before the hearing. Stuck in this awkward position, ANDRA now has
to modify its message with further misinformation. While it had declared there was no geothermal
potential, it now recognizes there is. Henceforth,to elude the problem of
safety, ANDRA now says it would
be possible to tap the geothermal brine near the site, but this
would not affect the safety of
the site. Henceforth, according to ANDRA's attorney, incidentally drilling
through the wastes would release
only one hundredth the amount of natural radioactivity! It appears
that there is nothing to worry about with these high-level long lived wastes,
which raises an interesting question: why bury them if they are so
inconsequential? As for the
Safety Rules [Règle Fondamentale
de Sûreté, RFS III.2.f, then, Guide de Sûreté 2008 of the French legislation]
they would be meaningless...
When the memory of the waste dump will have faded, people of the future might wish to take advantage of the earth's
thermal energy, and drilling operations might contact the wastes (this is quite possible considering the decline of fossil resources). The future generations will be the victims. It
would be irresponsible for our leaders to give the go-ahead to
such a project.
Without new arguments, ANDRA's attorney could not justify the
malfeasance and unacceptable malfunctions
which happened during ANDRA’S drilling in the
geothermal investigation. He only pretended that such problems (anomalous
obstruction of the tool by mud, inability to conduct sufficiently long
hydraulic testing, inappropriate sampling and temperature recording...)
would be the "usual" problems encountered in such a task.
The judgment will be given March the 27th at 14h. We hope the
court will recognize the obvious strengths of the plea brought forward by our
concerned-citizens groups.
__________
3.
The Inconvenience of a Geothermic
Energy Source Under France's Nuke Waste Dump
The
French weekly newspaper Le Canard
enchaîné provides aggressive and biting coverage of the nuclear
establishment in a way that mainstream media refrain from doing. Le Canard has been in print since 1915,
except for a period during the German occupation when it was forced to close.
The journal had a moment of international fame in September 2013 when it ran
satirical cartoons about Tokyo being awarded the 2020 Olympics in spite of
Japan’s troubles containing its nuclear catastrophe.
Unfortunately
for readers who would like easy access to its reporting, Le Canard has stuck to
its policy of being print-only. There is a Le
Canard enchaîné website, but it exists only to introduce the journal, sell
subscriptions and occupy the domain name that imitators and detractors would
like to possess.
Occasionally,
I notice people in my social network sharing photos of pages from Le Canard (a
previous one translated to English is here) and today I came across the
following report about a fiasco at France’s nuclear waste disposal site in
Bure. I’m posting this translation of content from Le Canard, hoping that they
won’t mind the publicity and the fact that this sample is made available to
English readers throughout the world so that they will be forewarned about how
nuclear waste disposal projects always offer a false promise of a final
solution for nuclear waste, along with pledges of jobs and economic development
for the remote communities that are always exploited for these ventures.
__________
Nuclear Waste on the Aquifer
by Professor
Canardeau
translation of
Des déchets (nucléaires) sur la nappe
Le Canard enchaîné
December 2014
A
huge pocket of warm water exists beneath what is supposed to be France’s
largest nuclear garbage pit, located near the town Bure. This site is destined
to store, for at least 100,000 years, the most dangerous high-level waste that
has accumulated since France built its first reactor. 125 meters tall, 30
kilometers wide and dozens of kilometers long, this reserve of warm water could
sooner or later be used to produce heat or energy. The water is a comfortable
66 degrees, but it is found at a depth of 1,800 meters, while the nuclear waste
is to be buried above it at a depth of 500 meters.
On
January 5, 2015, the agency for the management of radioactive waste (ANDRA)
will find itself on trial in high court in Nanterre for having divulged false
information concerning the supposed absence of concern about significant
underground water tables at the site in Bure. The citizen groups Sortir du nucléaire and Stop Bure 55, and Mirabel Lorraine Nature Environnement have brought the charges.
Some
background: The fundamental rules related to deep geological disposal of
nuclear waste, established in 1991 and still in force, clearly state that sites
should not involve significant concerns about geothermal sources or build-up of
heat. But in 2002, the geophysicist André Mourot (now deceased) was going
through the archives at the Bureau of Geological and Mining Research in Nancy,
Reims, and he discovered the existence of this aquifer, and he realized its
significance as a source of energy. The geologist Antoine Godinot remembers
that André Mourot wrote a report and distributed it to all interested groups.
Next, they demanded that ANDRA conduct testing to learn fully about the
aquifer.
ANDRA
made no response until 2008. “What a disaster, this drilling and testing,”
laughed the nuclear physicist Monique Sené. “The probe got stuck. They couldn’t
even reach the aquifer.”
This
fiasco didn’t stop ANDRA from declaring in 2009 that the geothermic source is
negligible. Since then it has stuck to this position. To the malcontents it
accuses of spreading this information about a geothermic potential, it
responds, “The studies done by ANDRA concern whether there is an exceptional
geothermic resource.” For ANDRA, as far as Bure is concerned, there is “no
geothermic resource of exceptional interest.” Everything hinges on what is
understood by “exceptional.”
Tada!
At the end of 2013, at the request of the local information committee tracking
the Bure laboratory (composed of representatives of the State, local
collectives, and civil society groups), a Swiss group called Geowatt,
specializing in geothermic energy resources, produced a report that stated, “We
are of the opinion that the geothermic resources of the Bure region could at
present be developed at an economical cost with the use of appropriate
technology.” The nail in the coffin was the additional comment stating, “The
burial of nuclear waste prevents access to the geothermic resource.”
The
physicist Bernard Laponche points out, “If we build this project at this site,
we are going to impose enormous risks on future generations, and for sure one
day people will want to exploit this geothermic energy, but they will stumble
upon the nuclear waste that is blocking access to it. ”
Perhaps
ANDRA will be able to leave their contact information for future generations to
get in touch.
__________
translation
of Des déchets (nucléaires) sur la nappe
Le Canard
enchaîné
December
2014
No comments:
Post a Comment