STANDING IN FRENCH HELL

By David Frum - Tuesday, June 30, 2009 9:46 AM

Today I did something to tell the grandchildren about: I stood in a large room, looking rather like a high school gymnasium, atop something like one-third of France’s most radioactive nuclear waste. After a few minutes of this, I turned in disappointment to my hosts: Aren’t I supposed to have gained superhero powers by now? Alas, when the dosimeter was scanned on the way out of the facility, it showed that we had absorbed in our visit rather less radioactivity than on the air flight from Washington to Paris.

Unlike the United States, France reprocesses spent nuclear fuel. After approximately four years of service, the fuel rods containing uranium are removed from the reactor cores and moved to this large plant near La Hague, just east of Flamanville.

Here the fuel rods are sliced into pieces by robot arms, then dumped into vats of nitric acid. The acid dissolves the metal rods and the depleted uranium enclosed within, yielding four byproducts: metal, liquid uranium, liquid plutonium, and other radioactive wastes.

The metal is removed, crushed, and encased in a new stainless steel cladding that looks very like a tall thin thermos. The liquid uranium is mixed with more radioactive uranium, re-enriched, and used for another fuel cycle. The plutonium is blended with other chemicals to produce a gas, MOX, that is used as fuel by a specialized reactor in the south of France.

Last, the residue, the most radioactive material, cesium and other byproducts of nuclear fission, is bonded with glass - vitrified is the technical term - and transformed into a black glass that looks like obsidian and that never degrades. Even if smashed into pieces, even if ground into dust, the glass and waste will be bonded together. Trying to separate them, as our guide explained, would be like trying to grind the blue out of a blue-tinted glass.

The vitrified waste is also encased in the familiar steel thermos tube. The two kinds of waste, low-grade and high-grade, meet the same fate. If non-French, they are returned to the customer that generated them for storage. If French, they are kept at La Hague, almost 20 meters below ground, in a massive concrete vault topped by more concrete, accessible only through concrete topped tubes like that on which I stood as the story was told.

The tubes will be opened again and the metal thermoses removed when France completes the selection and preparation of a permanent storage site, a task scheduled for completion by the end of this decade.

Until then, however, they sit here, no trouble to anyone.

Nuclear waste conjures up images of ultra-toxic green sludge, one spill away from poisoning the planet. In fact, all energy production generates waste, including some very dangerous wastes: not only carbon dioxide, but sulphur dioxide and coal slag. The waste from fossil fuels typically evanesces invisibly into the atmosphere, but that disappearance from view does not render it harmless. If anything, the very invisibility of fossil waste enhances its harm, by deluding us into imagining that what has vanished from sight has vanished from existence.

David Frum, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the editor of NewMajority.com

FRANCE GOES NUCLEAR

By David Frum - Monday, June 29, 2009

I traveled to Normandy this week to see something not to be seen in the United States: a nuclear reactor under construction. I visited the Flamanville reactor as a guest of NEI, the Nuclear Energy Institute. An executive at the Institute had seen me on television lecturing Bill Maher that nuclear energy was an indispensable foundation of any serious plan of action on climate change. The Institute apparently decided I was their kind of pundit and invited me to join a delegation to Flamanville in Normandy on the Channel coast near Cherbourg where EdF, Électricité de France, is building France’s first new reactor since the early 1990s. (Of France’s 58 operational reactors (soon to be 59), 40 were built in the single decade 1980-1990.)

Flamanville may be the biggest construction project I have ever seen. The great concrete cylinder of the containment building has already begun to rise from the slab base. Alongside, the girders outlining the steel structure that will house the turbines are joining together. Underneath are mighty concrete columns that will together form the pump house, drawing cold water to cool the reactor and returning it through a tunnel that will extend far into the sea.

Large as the project is, it surprisingly fits into an unexpectedly human scale. The new reactor will be the third to stand on the Flamanville site, with room for a fourth later. The entire complex is wedged between cliff and water in an indentation of the coast of only 120 hectares, less than 300 acres, about the size of a small commuter airport. For a project so big it is strangely invisible, dominated by the trees and hedgerows of the farms on the higher ground above. This relatively small space produces four percent of France’s electricity, enough to power a good sized city. The fifty-eight reactors in service -- Flamanville 3 will be the fifty-ninth -- altogether produce 80% of France’s electricity.

Nuclear energy in France operates almost entirely without controversy. This absence of controversy is the most exotic and puzzling thing about French nuclear power. Probing our French hosts on the subject, I collected or devised the following theories on why nuclear energy has avoided controversy in France:

1) France is an energy poor country. Lacking oil and gas altogether and possessing only meager supplies of coal. Nuclear was the only practical alternative to importing energy – and the Arab oil boycott of 1973-74 jolted the French into a united national determination to minimize reliance on imports.

2) France’s civil nuclear energy program is widely seen as a grand national achievement that confirms France’s standing as a major power, and the French are united in their determination to uphold that standing.

3) Nuclear power is a project of the French state. To the extent that environmentalists are motivated by mistrust of private enterprise, French nuclear power does not present an attractive target.

4) Through the period 1980 to 1990, the growth years of nuclear power, the United States and Great Britain had right-of-center governments. Germany had a right-of-center government for most of that period. In all these countries, the post-1960s left, ejected from power, hungered for targets to protest. France had left-of-center governments through the 1980s under François Mitterrand. There was nothing “New Labour” about Mitterrand. He nationalized banks and included communists in his first cabinet. And just for that reason his support neutralized opposition to nuclear power on the French left.

5) The French Communist party always supported it, largely on grounds that these things were done in Holy Mother Russia. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the nuclear agitated gathered, Communist support was still essential for any mass political movement of the left.

6) The French nuclear industry is now state-owned but independently managed, with a traded stock and no guarantee of the debts of either EdF (the operator of the plants) or AREVA (the company that mines and reprocesses nuclear fuel). But again in the 1980s, both companies in their previous organizational incarnations were state-run - and provided many attractive sinecures for politicians who had outlasted their usefulness. That did tend to mitigate opposition!

David Frum, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the editor of NewMajority.com

D-DAY: ALLIED ORDER OF BATTLE

Operation Overlord, the Allied Invasion of Northern France, was a combined effort of many countries. I wish to give tribute to the brave men & women of the British Commonwealth, and Free France - they fought the Germans in France years before the United States entered the war, of course. Future postings will explore these historical events; Dunkirk, Dieppe, Gold, Sword and Juno Beaches.

Supreme Commander--General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Allied Expeditionary Naval Forces--Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay
21st Army Group--General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery
Allied Expeditionary Air Forces--Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh- Mallory
United States Army United Kingdom Land Forces

First Army Second British Army
V Corps 1st British Corps
VII Corps 30th British Corps
1st Infantry Division 3rd British Infantry Division
4th Infantry Division 6th British Airborne Division
29th Infantry Division 50th British Infantry Division
82nd Airborne Division 3rd Canadian Infantry Division
101st Airborne Division

Air Forces

U.S. Army Air Forces Royal Air Forces

Eighth Air Force 2nd Tactical Air Force
Ninth Air Force

Allied Expeditionary Naval Forces

Western Task Force Eastern Task Force
(United States) (British)


NOTE: This Order of Battle does not mention the Free French forces included in the first wave at the British beaches, nor the Free French forces that jumped in with the British Special Air Service Brigade. Of course, French Resistance forces are not ennumerated here either.