French Plan Contradicts Europe's Anti-Nuclear Trend

France is to invest 150 billion dollars in nuclear reactors, a move that distances the country from the renewable energy goals of its neighbors.

PARIS - The French government plans to earmark 150 billion dollars over the next 30 years for nuclear power plants, including the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), despite experts' warnings on technological and environmental problems.

ITER was conceived in the 1980s as a cooperation project for civilian use of nuclear energy, with the participation of the European Union, China, Japan, South Korea, the former Soviet Union and the United States.

Later, France told the EU it would double its contribution to the reactor, whose cost for the next 10 years reach 12 billion dollars, in exchange for building it in Cadarache, in the southern part of the country.

Over the past 18 months, China, Russia and the EU agreed to that proposal, and Paris convinced the European bloc to launch the project even without the participation of the United States or Japan, the latter of which also offered to build the reactor in its territory.

In the context of France's opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the location of ITER turned into a completely political matter.

In late November, the European Commission (the executive arm of the EU) announced that it was willing to finance ITER alone and to build it in Cadarache, and gave the non-European participants until the end of 2004 to decide whether they would remain as partners in the project.

ITER seeks to emulate nuclear fusion of two hydrogen isotopes (deuterium and tritium) that occurs in stars, and produce helium with massive generation of electricity.

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Rafarin said in November 2003 that the project would provide ''the energy of the future, an inexhaustible source and with no significant problems, thanks to the abundance of hydrogen contained in water.''

Scientific data, however, contradict the prime minister's statements.

Deuterium indeed is abundant in nature, but tritium, which is radioactive, is very scarce and unstable.

The French nuclear physicists Sebastien Balibar, Yves Pomeau and Jacques Treiner wrote in the Oct. 25, 2004 edition of Le Monde newspaper that a thermonuclear reactor poses three technical problems of first magnitude: the production of the elements to undergo fusion, their resistance to fusion, and control of this reaction.

However, they say, the ITER project is only interested in the last, ''and ignores the other two, the solution of which, nevertheless, is essential.''

To generate a gigawatt of electricity, a nuclear fusion reactor would have to burn 56 kg of tritium, but ITER does not see a problem in producing that isotope, nor in handling the nuclear waste generated, said the scientists.

Similar doubts are caused by another major French nuclear project: updating the country's 57 nuclear plants, replacing them with pressurized water reactors, or EPR (European Pressurized Reactors).

In late October, Electricité de France (EdF), the state electricity monopoly, announced that it would begin construction in 2007 of the first EPR in Flamanville, on the country's northwest Atlantic coast, and that it is expected to be operational by 2012, at a cost of four to five billion dollars.

France's current nuclear power facilities will be obsolete in 2020, and replacing half of them with EPR before then would cost some 150 billion dollars.

France produces 80 percent of its energy in nuclear power plants, and is second in the world in terms of dependence on atomic energy, after Ukraine.

Currently, the only European countries with plans to build new nuclear plants are France, Finland and some of the former socialist bloc nations.

Belgium, Germany and Sweden are among the European countries, in contrast, that have begun the gradual dismantling of their nuclear reactors. France is one of the few absent from the campaign to achieve 21 percent renewable energy in each EU country by 2010.

The proportion of renewable energy in France today is less than 15 percent and the country ''should already be producing 7,000 megawatts from wind energy, but barely produces 300,'' Hélène Gassin, of Greenpeace-France, told Tierramérica.

Construction of the first EPR ''will contribute to the energy independence of France, and will serve as a window for exporting this (French and German) technology,'' says EdF president Pierre Gadonneix.

But the director of the anti-nuclear association Sortir du Nucléaire, Stephane Lhomme, said in a Tierramérica interview that ''there is practically no EPR operating in the world, and there are only three being built,'' meaning there are no ''objective guarantees of the efficiency of that technology.''

Furthermore, the nuclear plants with EPR would have to operate 60 years without interruption in order to ensure profits, and the authorities have admitted that these facilities were not designed to withstand terrorist attacks or earthquakes, Lhomme said.

* Julio Godoy is an IPS correspondent.