Recurring nuclear leakages haunt France
Published 26 August, 2008, 05:42
Residents in the South of France are fearing for their health after a series of leaks at nearby nuclear sites. There have been three incidents in recent weeks and now nuclear safety bodies are calling for more pressure to be put on energy companies to be more responsible and less secretive.
Bar owner Dominique Robert says this summer his hotel and bar in the popular Vaucluse region in the South of France is down 30 per cent in sales. He says it’s a direct result of a uranium leak at a nuclear site down the road.
“It’s difficult because we don’t know what has happened, and I’m not sure we’ll ever really know,” said Dominique. “We’ve received very little information about Tricastin. Today France’s nuclear industry is very secretive.”
The owners of the Tricastin nuclear plant, AREVA, told RT that late on July 7 uranium liquid overflowed from a tank being emptied. It didn’t trigger any alarm until early the next morning when employees noticed liquid leaking through cracks in the tank.
But it was only seven hours later that AREVA first contacted authorities, prompting heavy criticism from safety watchdogs.
“We had to inspect the area and make tests, which was started by 4.30 in the morning,” said Gilles Salgas, spokesman for AREVA. “We then discovered a leak of uranium in our drainage system which is connected to the river and realised this was going to have a definite impact on the environment. That’s when we informed authorities that we had a problem.”
This leak was only one of several recent incidents at Tricastin. In another, a hundred employees were exposed to low doses of radiation, and 60 miles away uranium seeped out of a broken pipe.
After the leak, residents in the region were warned not to drink the tap water or fish in nearby rivers. Authorities have now lifted the ban, much to the dismay of some nuclear officials, who say it’s too soon to tell if the levels of uranium are safe.
Bruno Chareyron and his team, from French nuclear safety watchdog CRIIRAD, have been monitoring France’s nuclear sites since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Although authorities rated the leak at Tricastin a level one on the seven-point scale, Chareyron believes it is a cause for concern.
“Even if doses are small, we are speaking about the effects of low doses of radiation,” he said. “So the effects do exist and we want the operators to operate their facilities in a better way, with less leakages and a better containment of the radioactive waste which is stored within the facilities.”
But the problem doesn’t just stem from the Tricastin plant. The IRSN Nuclear Safety Institute has pinpointed other areas of abnormally high levels of uranium which, the team from CRIIRAD believes, may be linked to military nuclear waste buried underground in the 1960s.
They’re calling for more pressure to be put on nuclear companies to be more responsible and prevent future leaks.
Watchdogs want to make sure nuclear safety is kept a priority in France which has 59 reactors and gets more than 80 per cent of its electricity from atomic power – more than any country in the world.
But safety agencies say these incidents shouldn’t be blown out of proportion.
“It’s something serious but it is not the event of the year or the century. It is a normal event to happen on a nuclear facility,” said Jean-Luc Lachaume, Deputy Director General from the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN).
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