December 2009 Archives

The Federal Program on Nuclear and Radiation Safety in 2008 and through 2015, which was approved by the Russian government in October 2007, calls for decommissioning and cleanout of several research reactors and critical assemblies sites by 2015. As indicated int he notes below, most of the facilities have been shut down some time ago and some sites have been cleaned out already. However, some apparently still contain HEU material.

French Prime Minister François Fillon stated during a speech in Beijing on 21 December 2009 that France and China think about "sustainable nuclear energy and in particular the reprocessing of spent fuel". Fillon claimed that it is in exploring this route that one could turn nuclear power into "a real energy [source] of the future". He added:

France and China have decided from now on to recycle the nuclear materials in fuel for which the EPR has been specifically designed. They have united their forces in order to allow China to put into service a reprocessing and spent fuel recycling plant that is based on French technology that has been proven for more than 25 years and that we have not ceased to perfect.

Prime Minister Fillon stressed his hopes that these agreements will help the two countries to accede to "the first rank of worldwide ecological responsibility".

Earlier China suggested that transfer of the reprocessing technology should be part of the contract to supply French reactors to China.  

The French Nuclear Waste Management Agency ANDRA announced on 11 December 2009 the completion of repair work on the cover of the low- and intermediate-level waste disposal site CSM (Centre de Stockage de la Manche) adjacent to AREVA's spent fuel reprocessing plant at La Hague. The site had been operated between 1969 and 1994.

Less than five years after closure of the site and the finishing of a multi-layer cover, gravel, sand and bitumen cover started sinking in on large surface of about 600 m2. The site, which holds some 527,000 m3 of waste containing an estimated 20,000 tons of lead - the largest lead "mine" in France - one ton of mercury, 200 tons of uranium and about 100 kg of plutonium was originally meant to be "banalized", declared green field, open for any use after a period of 300 years. This timeline has been abandoned in favor of an indefinite monitoring period. In a damning report, released in October 2009, the independent radioactivity monitoring group ACRO provides a stunning account of the CSM's history (in French only).

Just before final closure of the site and just prior to the implementation of much lower plutonium limits for waste delivered to the future disposal site CSA (Centre de Stockage de l'Aube, French nuclear operators, and the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in particular, have stuffed the CSM with plutonium contaminated waste. "In the five month period from January to May 1994, the CSM has received more plutonium-239 in perishable drums without over-pack than the CSA is authorized to collect in its entire [operational] existence!" ACRO considers that this "insider offense extremely shocking because it was the same organization [the CEA] that has elaborated the knowledge base implying the review of procedures" and thus the limits for specific plutonium content.

On Thursday, 10 December, the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) presented Global Fissile Material Report 2009: A Path to Nuclear Disarmament in Washington, DC to Congressional staff, government officials, and nuclear arms control and disarmament groups at an event sponsored by the AAAS Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy and another organized jointly by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and Non-Proliferation and the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

To help inform the Washington policy making process, IPFM members James Acton, Alexander Glaser, Zia Mian and Frank von Hippel presented some of the key technical and policy issues and IPFM recommendations for practical steps toward verified world-wide nuclear disarmament developed in Global Fissile Material Report 2009. The presentation (available here) covered the context of the new disarmament debate, the status of fissile material stockpiles and their implication for a disarming world, how declarations of fissile material stocks could be verified using nuclear archaeology, the verifiable dismantlement of nuclear weapons and the disposition of the roughly 2000 tons of fissile material existing today (both plutonium and highly enriched uranium) that could be used for weapons.

An EU-India joint statement from 6 November 2009 states: "India and the EU share the understanding that the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes should take place in conformity with the highest standards of safety, security, and non-proliferation" and that they "look forward to the early conclusion of the agreement on research and development in the field of peaceful use of nuclear energy". In France the National Assembly adopted a bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement with India that, apparently, explicitly includes reprocessing. The adoption of the detailed 11-page agreement (in French) was signed into law on 4 December 2009.

Article V.3 of the agreement allows for the reprocessing of spent fuel in a "national nuclear facility under IAEA safeguards", without specifying the respective countries. Annex 2.3 details pieces of reprocessing plant equipment that can be transferred under the agreement, including spent fuel decladding machines, dissolvers, extractors, etc.

The French have a long-standing cooperation on plutonium technologies with India, in particular on the fast breeder reactor technology. But some specifically listed items in the shopping list of the Franco-Indian cooperation agreement are particularly remarkable. They include under Annex 2.7.2. plutonium conversion facilities and equipments specifically designed for that purpose:

• Systems specially designed or prepared for the conversion of plutonium nitrate to oxide;
• Systems specially designed or prepared for the production of plutonium metal.