PARIS — For more than a year I’ve been giving a speech about
nuclear energy that proclaims, “The French keep all their nuclear
waste from thirty years of producing 80 percent of their
electricity in one room at Le Havre.”
Last week I got to stand in that room. Somehow I had imagined it
was a bit smaller — maybe the size of a modest visitor’s center.
Actually it’s about the size of a basketball gymnasium. Still, it’s
one room. Scattered around the concrete floor are about 40
two-and-a-half-foot manhole covers stenciled with the logo of
Areva, the French nuclear reactor company. The lids are so tightly
sealed, with no visible handles, that I had to wonder whether they
could be removed.
“They’re magnetized,” explained our guide. “There’s an overhead
crane that lifts them off. Beneath them is another set of seals
with screw-tops and handles.” Beneath that, stacked vertically in
small rings to a depth of about 20 feet are two-foot-long canisters
containing fission products, the most intensely radioactive of what
is commonly mislabeled “nuclear waste.”
You’d think people would be interested in this stuff back in
America. While I was touring Areva’s major facilities, the French
company announced a proposed uranium enrichment plant in Idaho
Falls, a $2-billion project that will be an important link in
America’s nuclear revival. Yet the story didn’t even make
Associated Press. A couple of Idaho papers ran the press release
but inevitably paired it with a manifesto from the Snake River
Alliance that such a temple to idolatry will never be built in
their Garden of Eden.
SO IT GOES. I’ve spent almost three years trying to find a
publisher for a book on nuclear power and global warming, called
Terrestrial Energy. Two publishers — one
conservative, one liberal — bought the manuscript and then decided
they just couldn’t publish it — too touchy a subject, too
declasse. Even conservatives have trouble embracing the technology.
Just let Ralph Nader have his way on this one and concentrate on
debunking global warming. Finally, a small progressive house called
Bartleby Press picked it up off this site and will bring it out
next September.
After years of trying to convince New York editors that nuclear
power has a future, touring France’s three-decade-old
infrastructure was like a trip through Narnia. One Areva brochure
begins: “In a gigantic nuclear explosion, nuclear energy made the
curtain rise on the history of the universe. From distant stars to
the earth’s core, it continues its constructive work. Man has
learnt to master one nuclear reaction, fission, taming it into a
clean and inexpensive energy.”
That’s the precise theme of my book. Nuclear energy is a
perfectly natural phenomenon. It heats the center of the earth to
7000o F, hotter than the surface of the sun. We’re just borrowing
it, as we do all things in nature. The crucial difference is that
nuclear energy is so highly concentrated — 2 million times more
powerful than burning coal and 20 million times more powerful than
solar energy — that it leaves virtually no environmental footprint
— just a couple of canisters beneath a concrete floor near
Cherbourg. This is Greek to sophisticates from New York to New
Mexico, all of them wringing their hands about global warming. In
France, however, it’s boilerplate in marketing brochures.
And that’s why the French are sprinting ahead of us in bringing
nuclear energy to the world. Areva is in the process of building
new plants in Finland, China, and the United States. It is
reprocessing all of Japan’s spent fuel. Its most spectacular
success is at the MELOX plant in Avignon, where we toured Monday.
There the French are taking thousands of tons of bomb-grade uranium
that the Russians had stockpiled for weapons and “de-enriching” it
down to reactor grade to be burned in American power plants.
One out of every ten light bulbs in America is now powered by a
former Soviet weapon. You’d think people would be dancing in
the streets. Instead, all we get is press releases from the Sierra
Club announcing how nuclear is a “backward energy policy.”
MAKE NO MISTAKE, nuclear material is powerful and dangerous stuff.
At La Hague, just before we visited the storage gymnasium, we stood
before a foot-thick window watching a 50-foot column of spent
nuclear fuel being lifted through the floor of the receiving room
like some giant benthic organism being raised from the deep.
“Why is the glass so yellow,” I asked our guide in one of those
innocent questions that usually leads somewhere.
“It’s treated with lead so that it filters out most of the
light,” he said. “It’s for radiation protection.”
“What’s the radiation coming out of that thing?” I asked,
staring at what now looked like a sinister sea creature dangling
behind the glass.
He consults for a moment with a nuclear scientist who only
speaks French. “Une million millirads,” the answer comes back.
“About a million millirads.”
Quick calculation. That’s 1,000 rems, about double the exposure
you would have gotten by standing next to the atomic bomb when it
exploded at Hiroshima. “No one has been in that room for fifteen
years and no one will for decades to come,” says our guide. “They
would be killed instantly.”
But we are standing 15 feet away — with the thick walls and
lead-tinted glass between us.
“What happens when something needs repair in there?” I ask.
“Right here,” he demonstrates. Next to the window are a pair of
handles that manipulate two long mechanical arms that stretch
across the room. There are eight windows placed around the
2500-square-foot receiving space so that every remote corner can be
reached. Right beneath us, on the other side of the glass, is a set
of tools fitted for the mechanical arms, including — incongruously
— a paintbrush, apparently used for dusting.
“You should see those guys work the handles,” says our guide.
“It’s amazing what they can do. We should have brought someone down
to show you.”
IN PARIS WE TALKED with Jacques Besnainou, a cheerful vice
president of recycling, who modestly claimed that France is only
moving ahead with what America originally invented. “Glenn Seaborg
[the Nobel Prize winner and one-time head of the Atomic Energy
Commission] discovered the solvent that would extract plutonium
after a long effort in 1944,” Besnainou tells us. “The technology
hasn’t changed much since.”
Still, it’s hard to avoid those cat-that-ate-the-canary smiles.
When I mention Yucca Mountain, they almost turn sympathetic. “Why
would anyone dig a hole in a mountain to bury material that is
valuable for recycling?” asks Besnainou. “You recycle household
garbage. Why not reprocess spent fuel? We’re calling these spent
fuel assemblies ‘the new uranium mines,’ there’s so much fuel
potential in there.”
Face it, the French are now miles ahead of us. Nuclear
electricity is the country’s third largest export, behind only wine
and agricultural products. Natural gas imports are less than half
that of Germany and England. Carbon emissions are 20 percent below
the rest of the continent. Signs in Paris direct you to recharging
stations for electric cars. Nuclear power is keeping the whole
economy afloat.
When the French government was selling nuclear power to the
public in the 1970s, they had a slogan: “We don’t have any oil, but
we have plenty of ideas.” In America for the past thirty years,
we’ve lived by a different slogan: “We may not have any ideas, but
we’ve got plenty of coal.”
