My last couple of blog entries have been about illegal dumping of radioactive waste by the Mafia in Italy. I decided to open this discussions to other countries in Europe. Today I am going to blog about illegal dumping in France. French law states clearly that it is not legal to bring nuclear wastes from other countries into French nuclear dump sites.
The Manche Center for Storage is one of Europe's biggest storage sites for radioactive waste. It located in a wetland near the nuclear reprocessing plant at La Hague in Normandy, France. It was commissioned in 1967 and the first waste arrived in 1969. At first, the waste was stored in trenches dug into the ground. Later concrete blocks were placed around the barrels of waste which were then covered by a plastic sheet and buried with dirt.
In the early 1970s, the Center began receiving and storing spent nuclear fuel and other nuclear wastes from French nuclear power plants. In 1976, heavy rainfall, overflow of drainage ditches and a faulty pump caused the contamination of ground water with tritium. In 1984, the concrete walls were added to the containment trenches and other upgrades were made to the site. In 1991, a cover was constructed over the site to prevent water from getting to the waste.
In 1994, the last package of waste was received and the site reached saturation. The site was closed and management of the site was turned over to the National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management (ANDRA). About one and one half million packages of waste are stored at the site.
In 2006, Greenpeace activists demonstrated at Manche. They had come from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan to protest the storage of nuclear waste from their countries at Manche in clear violation of French law. They claimed that there were one hundred and forty thousand containers of nuclear waste at the site that had not originated in France. The protesters were demanding that all the containers at the site including those from France be dug up and repackaged.
Greenpeace provided a study dealing with radioactive contamination of the ground water and the surface streams around the site. In addition to the tritium leak in 1976, an engineer from the Manche site stated that other radioactive materials in the dump including plutonium will eventually leak out of the dump and threaten the dairy farms around the dump. Greenpeace did win a court victory when ANDRA was found guilty in a French court of illegally storing nuclear waste from Australia. Greenpeace has also attacked ANDRA over the reprocessing of Dutch nuclear spent fuel in the nearby reprocessing plant at La Hague.
Unfortunately, the French authorities do not even have a complete record of what is stored at Manche. Documents at the site were destroyed in two floods and substitute fake documents were created to replace them. This nuclear waste site is a time bomb ticking away in the French countryside. It is an illustration of the illegal inclusion of nuclear waste in a major national nuclear dump. Even government agencies cannot be trusted to deal properly with nuclear waste.
Manche Center for Storage:
