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France’s failing atomic energy industry

Tom Friedman’s Idiocy Atomique
COUNTER PUNCH By HARVEY WASSERMAN 23 Sept 09 France’s atomic power industry is a failed radioactive flame. Its 58 reactors are unpopular, unsafe, uneconomical, dirty, direct agents of global warming, weapons proliferators and major generators of atomic waste for which there is no management solution.
………… In fact, France’s unsolved waste problem has thousands of ultra-hot fuel rods building up at reactor sites, just like here. Its hugely expensive attempts to reprocess spent fuel cause devastating radiation releases into the English Channel and elsewhere, prompting continual demands from around Europe that they stop.
……………French public opinion that has turned decisively against building new reactors while strongly approving new wind production. The big “Non” to new nukes stems in part from massively inefficient, unreliable reactors, some of which have recently been forced shut because they are overheating the rivers meant to cool them.
3) Friedman complains that the US has “not been able or willing to build one new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, even though that accident led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or neighbors.” Friedman misses those 2400 “wimpy” central Pennsylvania families who sued for widespread death and disease they suffered after TMI’s radiation releases showered their homes and fields. The utility responsible quietly paid out more than $15 million in secret settlements………….

France’s first shot at a “new generation” reactor—in Finland—is an engineering, economic and ecological catastrophe. French taxpayers are enraged about funding an Olkiluoto project that’s years behind budget and billions of Euros over budget. Anne Lauvergeon, the chief of AREVA…………….a parallel project at Flamanville, France, isn’t faring much better. AREVA’s fortunes have plummeted, throwing the government-controlled agency into deep financial crisis.

Harvey Wasserman: Tom Friedman’s Idiocy Atomique

September 23, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 1, business and costs, France | antinuclear, AREVA, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear secrecy, nuclear wastes, radioactive, wastes