BEAUMONT-HAGUE, France — Thousands of canisters of highly radioactive waste from the most nuclear-energized nation lie beneath this jutting tip of Normandy. Aboveground, cows graze and Atlantic waves crash into heather-covered hills.
The spent fuel, vitrified into blocks of glass that will remain dangerous for thousands of years, is in “interim storage.”
Like nearly all the world’s nuclear waste, it is still waiting for the long-term disposal solution that has eluded scientists for six decades since the atomic era began.
Industry officials hope renewed worldwide interest in nuclear energy will break a long, awkward silence surrounding the waste. They want to revive momentum for scientific and political breakthroughs that stalled after the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, which raised worldwide fears about radioactivity’s risks to human and planetary health.
So far, though, recent talk of a nuclear renaissance has focused on the “front end,” reactor construction. Engineers are designing the next generation of reactors to be safer than today’s — and they’re being billed as a solution to global warming. Nuclear reactors do not emit carbon dioxide.
Few people have been talking about the “back end,” industry-speak for the hundreds of thousands of tons of waste produced each year, and the lucrative business of storing it away.
Waste “is the main problem with this so-called nuclear rebirth,” said Mycle Schneider, an independent expert who co wrote a study for the European Parliament casting doubt on a global nuclear resurgence.
Workers at the waste treatment and storage site on France’s Cherbourg peninsula, run by industry giant Areva, don’t see a problem.
Though much of the technology dates from the 1970s and 1980s, they point to a strong safety record and the 26,000 environmental tests conducted every year as evidence that the public has nothing to fear.
The tests routinely find crabs, cows and humans living nearby to be healthy. One longtime plant employee gestured toward her pregnant abdomen, holding her third child, as proof that there’s nothing to worry about.
But Greenpeace accuses the government of playing down accidents and contamination.
