The Reprocessing Race

France says: Give us your tired, your spent atomic fuel

With its aim of freeing the country "rom 75% of its imported energy requirements by 1985, the French government's nuclear power program is mighty ambitious--much too much so, many Frenchmen complain. Socialist Party Chief Franc,ois Mitterrand, who clearly plans to make the atom an issue in next March's elections, charges that the policy of headlong nuclear expansion was reckless, "launched like a railroad engine at 400 kilometers an hour." In August, some 30,000 protesters tried to slow the train down by staging a noisy demonstration at Super Phenix, the big French plutonium breeder reactor east of Lyon. Now there is concern about a new element in the government's aggressive program. It is a plan to help pay for the country's nuclear expansion by making France a major dealer in that growing international commodity, "spent" atomic fuel.

Since July, salesmen for a firm owned by France's Atomic Energy Commission have been busily signing up foreign power companies for the "reprocessing" of their nuclear wastes by still-to-be-built French facilities. Essentially, these wastes are used-up nuclear fuel in the form of long, needle-like rods encased in zircaloy metal sheaths. Once these rods have been used in a conventional reactor, the utilities normally keep them in large storage tanks that resemble swimming pools. But in reprocessing, the spent fuel is removed from the sheaths; usable quantities of plutonium and uranium are then separated from the waste and prepared as reactor fuel. Reprocessing thus not only allows utility companies to get more energy out of their nuclear fuel but also provides them with a way out of an increasingly difficult waste-storage problem.

Power companies are willing to pay a great deal for this service: the cost of the reprocessing of a single kilogram (2.25 lbs.) of uranium currently ranges between $350 and $450. Lately the French have signed cost-plus contracts with ten Japanese utilities to handle 1,600 tons of nuclear fuel over a ten-year period beginning in 1983; at current prices, that deal alone is worth at least $600 million.

The French government plans over the next ten years to add two more plants to its reprocessing center at Cap de la Hague, near Cherbourg, and thus bring the country's total capacity to 2,400 tons a year. Officials insist that the program will not turn France into an international nuclear trash heap. The French plants will dispose of light radioactive and liquid wastes in containers buried either at sea or underground. But the more potent solid radioactive garbage will be shipped back to the countries that produced it. As for the plutonium produced from the waste, it will legally belong to the country that owns the fuel; whether the plutonium is also returned depends on international treaties yet to be worked out.

In theory, there is no reason why the French could not handle this trash-processing job efficiently. But in reality, the project is a gamble. The Cap de la Hague facility is the largest and longest-functioning plant that treats oxide fuels (which are five to ten times more radioactive than the graphite-gas fuels used in earlier reactors employed by France and some other countries). In Britain, a similar center at Windscale on the Irish Sea coast shut down its oxide operations in 1973 after an accident in which 35 workers were contaminated.

The French reprocessing offers have thus come as a godsend to governments that have big nuclear energy programs but nowhere to recycle the resulting wastes. "What they really want to know," says Claude Ayc,oberry, operations chief at Cap de la Hague, "is that they're going to be able to get rid of the irradiated combustibles and not have to close down their plants because the waste is piling up."

French critics of the program have doubts about government claims that their scientists have mastered the technology needed to handle such deadly refuse. Employees at the ten-year-old plant have complained that safety standards there have deteriorated. Many areas have become so radioactive that personnel must wear protective suits; faulty design has made it difficult to isolate areas that become contaminated.

Plutonium traces have been found along the Normandy coast hundreds of miles away, and fishermen reported last year that crabs in the area had begun to show strange marks and lesions. The radiation level in crabs surged to eight times its normal level two years ago before returning to normal last year. However, government scientists insist that no connection has been proved between such danger symptoms and the Cap de la Hague plant and that the radiation levels are far from dangerous to human beings.

While the French have never hesitated in their determination to build more reprocessing facilities, the British in late 1976 decided to submit a similar plan to full-scale inquiry. The results are due this month, and those who have followed the inquiry believe the odds are that Britain will expand its reprocessing facilities; these facilities may also take nuclear waste from abroad.

It is unclear whether opponents of reprocessing can take comfort in the alternative offered by the U.S. to power companies stuck with nuclear waste on their hands. In October, Jimmy Carter announced that the U.S. would undertake to dispose of atomic wastes from any country that agreed to use U.S. uranium--an offer meant to make it easier for other countries to avoid turning to plutonium fuel and breeder reactors, both of which Carter wants to stamp out. Some nations have expressed interest, but as yet Washington has not figured out how, given the environmental laws and other considerations, the U.S. can go about making good on Carter's offer.

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