nuclear-news

A political and economic embarrassment – France’s accident at nuclear site

France on edge after accident at nuclear site, The Independent By John Lichfield in Paris, 13 September 2011 France was yesterday quick to play down the significance of an explosion in a nuclear waste recycling plant in the south of the country which killed one man and injured four others.  Ministers said the blast, close to the Marcoule nuclear power station, near Avignon, was an “industrial accident” and not an explosion in, or near, a nuclear reactor. There had been no radioactive leak and no need to evacuate workers or local people.

The explosion at the sprawling Marcoule site on the banks of the Rhône – one of the oldest and largest nuclear facilities in France – is nonetheless a political and economic embarrassment to the French government. France is more dependent on nuclear-generated electricity – 79 per cent – than any other country in the world. It also has a powerful nuclear export industry.

Since the calamity at the Fukushima plant in Japan in March, France has been at pains to reassure its citizens, and potential foreign buyers, of the safety of its own nuclear technology. Environmental groups called yesterday on the French government, traditionally secretive on nuclear questions, to allow “total transparency” and an independent investigation of the Marcoule blast

The pressure-group France Nature Environnement (FNE), which has 3,000 member associations, said the accident “underlines the problems with control of nuclear risks in France”. The significance of nuclear accidents has sometimes been obscured by French authorities in the past, FNE pointed out.

Famously, the French government announced in 1986 that the radioactive nuclear cloud from the Chernobyl explosion in the Ukraine had “stopped at the French frontier”…. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-on-edge-after-accident-at-nuclear-site-2353692.html

September 13, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | France, safety