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How AREVA and EDF of France sell the nuclear industry

The many financial failure tsunamis of nuclear power Ace Hoffmann October 7th, 2009 “………No country has ever “solved” its nuclear waste problem. France grinds stuff up, releases much of it directly into the North Sea, and stores the rest with no idea of what to do with it. (A tiny fraction is reused, so they call the whole thing “recycling”.) Here in American we just let it sit in scores of deadly sites all over the country.

And the dry storage casks are deteriorating as we speak. Shoddy welds, shoddy alloys, unrealistic expectations…

Meanwhile, the government is already being sued by about a dozen nuclear power companies, asking for permission to stop putting money into the used-reactor-core-storage fund, and to get back some of what they’ve already put in! The rest are watching closely, like a pack of vultures.

New nuclear power plant loan guarantees don’t come with promises to take the spent fuel. And THAT’s the real financial hang-up for new nuclear construction in America.

But the nuclear industry is working HARD to get around that with help from — seriously! — French espionage, infiltration, subversiveness, and other covert and overt actions. That’s right: The French intend to get American suckers (that’s you and me, folks, the American taxpayer) to pay French-government owned and/or managed firms (EdF and/or AREVA) to build and operate expensive NEW reprocessing plants here in America! And open new (and old) uranium mines, new milling operations, and so on. They use agent-provocateurs, subliminal messages in their advertisements, covert lobbying and funding of politicians… and in other countries where these two “corporations” do business, they behave even more illegally!…………..

What reprocessing really would do is cost another hundred (or two hundred) billion dollars and pollute the entire planet, killing people and causing health effects as if we are all expendable, as long as no one can prove for certain where any particular cancer, leukemia, heart disease, birth defects, etc. came from. And burn enormous quantities of fossil fuels in the process, causing thousands more deaths.

Reprocessing of nuclear waste is chemical-intensive, too, and it costs a fortune. But it’s the only thing that could possibly allow a dying industry to keep going. ……………Fraud has always been rampant in nuclear construction and operation, and continues with the new international trade agreements, where even so-called “American” companies such as GE and Westinghouse are really just fronts for, in those cases, Japanese corporations, and where both EdF and AREVA , French corporations owned and operated by the French government, claim in America that they are as American as apple pie, just because the heads of the American divisions are American.

Ace Hoffman’s blog — mostly about nukes: Talley followup: The many financial-failure tsunamis of nuclear power

October 10, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 1, France, secrets,lies and civil liberties | antinuclear, AREVA, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear secrecy, nuclear spin, nuclear wastes, radioactive, wastes