Warning Sound as France Moves Ahead on Reactor

January 31, 2009
By JAMES KANTER - New York Times
BRUSSELS - As France presses ahead with building more next-generation nuclear reactors, new evidence emerged Friday to suggest that industry and governments might be unprepared to handle the increasingly toxic waste that will result.Highlighting the importance of the technology in France, both as its main source of electricity and as a major export, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced late Thursday that Électricité de France had been chosen to develop a second reactor using next-generation technology at Penly in northern France.
Areva, the Paris company that designed the so-called EPR, says the system will generate far more electricity more safely than previous reactors, is easier to build and will last longer.
Areva, the world's biggest reactor maker, also says the EPR - which is expected to generate more than 1,600 megawatts, making it more powerful than any other reactor in commercial use - will use about 15 percent less uranium and produce 30 percent less waste.
But an antinuclear group, Greenpeace, said that information it had gleaned from industry reports - which are public but have received little attention so far - showed that waste from the EPR would be more radioactive by a factor of seven.
That will make it more expensive to handle and to store safely, according to Greenpeace, which provided the details to The International Herald Tribune.
"Despite the French government's global marketing of the EPR as cheap and safe, the evidence proves otherwise," said Rianne Teule, who focuses on nuclear issues for Greenpeace.
The next wave of reactors "poses an ever-increasing burden on people's budgets and danger to their health, now and far into the future," Ms. Teule said.
A spokeswoman for Areva, Patricia Marie, said the claim was "grossly inaccurate." She said the waste would be 15 percent more radioactive at the most.
There are currently 58 reactors in France. No EPR reactors are up and running; the first is under construction at Olkiluoto, an island in the west of Finland, and the second in Flamanville, in the Basse-Normandie region of northern France.
Ms. Teule said the evidence about the waste's radioactivity was drawn from a report by Posiva, a waste disposal company owned by Finnish nuclear operators, and from the Swiss organization Nagra, which oversees management of nuclear waste.
She said the waste would pose greater dangers to workers from higher radiation doses during transfer and storage than current waste. In addition, she said, the waste would need to be stored longer in areas above ground.
Those factors, among others, would increase the overall cost of nuclear energy - costs that Ms. Teule said were not properly accounted for by industry and governments.
There are no long-term facilities for disposing or burying high-level nuclear waste anywhere in the world, although Posiva is digging a tunnel at Olkiluoto in anticipation of approval for storing waste a quarter of a mile underground.
American authorities have sought to put high-level waste inside Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, but that plan is foundering because of local opposition.
Spokeswomen for Posiva and Nagra said they were unable to give any immediate comment about the reports.
Hans Riotte at the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris said waste from the EPR, although smaller in volume, would be more radioactive because it would be denser.
But Mr. Riotte, who heads the agency's radiological protection and radioactive waste management division, was unable to say whether the waste would be more radioactive by a factor of seven, as Greenpeace contends.
Mr. Riotte conceded the waste would have to be stored above ground longer, but said that waste-handling and storage procedures could be adapted to deal with much more toxic waste without much added expense.
Ms. Marie, the spokeswoman for Areva, said the company "was confident that all costs have been taken into account" for construction and operation of EPR reactors.
Greenpeace has vowed to oppose construction of the plant in France, but has not said how it will pursue that goal.
This week Areva reported rising sales for 2008 as its uranium mining and reactor construction businesses benefited from increasing demand for nuclear power. The company is competing to become the designer of reactors for the next generation of plants in the United States and elsewhere.
Problems at the EPR site in Finland mean the reactor already is overdue and vastly over budget, even though it was designed to have a shorter construction period than previous models. The site has been plagued by waterlogged concrete, faulty welds and flawed pipes, delaying the reactor start date by at least three years and raising costs by roughly 50 percent.
Two more EPR reactors, called Taishan 1 and 2, are scheduled for construction in China. Areva said the design was also being used by Électricité de France and the large German utility E.On, which are bidding to refurbish aging reactors in Britain.
Areva also is vying to sell the technology to the United Arab Emirates as part of a project led by Total and GDF Suez.
Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington.