French authorities ban water use following nuclear leak
French NGO founded after the Chernobyl disaster, estimated Wednesday that the radioactivity caused by the leak is 100 times higher than the annual permissible maximum.
The Tricastin nuclear site where the leak occurred is one of 59 nuclear plants supplying nearly 80 percent of France’s electrical power. French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a strong backer of nuclear energy, recently calling it a “weapon of peace.” His country is cooperating with Saudi Arabia, India, and a number of North African countries to help install nuclear power plants, and the government decided in May to establish a state agency for exporting French atomic technology. Greenpeace’s Marillier said: “This accident just shows that what Sarkozy says is wrong and that this will never be a clean-energy industry. Even though France wants to export nuclear power to the world, it isn’t even able to keep things clean on its own sites.” In the age of climate change concern and skyrocketing oil prices, nuclear power generation is back in fashion in Europe. Countries like Switzerland, Poland and the Baltic states are either in the building or planning stages for new nuclear power plants, and the governments of Italy and Great Britain are pushing for increased reliance on nuclear energy.
In Germany, the issue of nuclear energy is driving a wedge between the main members of the ruling grand coalition. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrat party (CDU) has called nuclear energy “eco-energy” and is hoping to keep Germany’s nuclear power plants in operation past the date some fifteen years from now when Germany is scheduled to complete the phase-out of nuclear energy that was agreed upon by the government of former chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Any changes in the phase-out schedule are strongly opposed by the SPD, which has accused the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, of having turned “into a nuclear sect.” Green Party leader Claudia Roth has strongly argued against the re-emergence of what she calls “dinosaur technology.” The debate in Germany comes amid recent concerns about a nuclear waste dump in Asse, in the northern state of Lower Saxony. A section of the facility is sealed off due to radioactive contamination, and there are fears that brine seeping into it will eventually corrode the rock shell that prevents the release of 89,000 tons of weakly to moderately radioactive waste.
On Wednesday, Michael Müller, Germany’s deputy environment minister and a member of the SPD, warned against underestimating the importance of the French spill. “It’s not a trivial thing when radioactive uranium gets into the ground,” Müller told the AFP. Müller added that the incident just shows that: “When it comes to nuclear power plants, things always continue to happen that nobody had foreseen.”
