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The huge pools of the Hague (Channel), where the spent fuel burns in French nuclear power plants, approach a saturation that can gradually block all French reactors, warns the Institute of Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) .
"With 5 to 7% maximum available space, we are on the verge of intestinal obstruction" in Orano swimming pools of La Hague, says Greenpeace France's nuclear affairs officer Yannick Rousselet told AFP. In these basins, about 10,000 tons of spent fuel to make electricity, cool before, for the most part, to be retired on site.
If these facilities, which are aging, "stop for a technical problem, we are six months of saturation," says Rousselet, highlighting the multiplication of hazards.
"In case of sudden stop of the Hague and if really neither of the two factories restart, in one to two years the pools are filled", nuance on his side the director general of the IRSN Thierry Charles, questioned by AFP but from then on, "in very few years", the whole of the French reactors progressively stops, for lack of place to evacuate spent fuel.
The situation is "overall very tense" in the pools of La Hague and those of the power plants where the fuels are first plunged before being sent to the pools of Orano, summarizes the IRSN, which is the technical arm of the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), in a report made public in October.
The percentage of space available in the pools is crossed out. According to a draft report that AFP had a copy, this rate was 7.4% on January 1, 2016, far from the 30% posted today by Orano. According to concordant sources, the company has free space occupied by scrap that it plans to empty.
Anyway, a "progressive saturation" threatens the pools: the amount of fuel increases by a "hundred hundred tons" per year because EDF sends more fuel to the Hague Orano retreat, says M Charles.
The swimming pools of La Hague will be full at the latest "shortly after 2030", according to the IRSN. EDF "is currently working on the design of an additional" swimming pool, 5,000 tons, operational "around 2030", according to the company. According to Greenpeace, this basin would be considered in Belleville-sur-Loire (Cher).
But what does the industrialist expect in the event of "delay"?, ASN questioned in an opinion on 18 October.
– the track of a "dry storage" –
Especially since the EDF project "does not allow to incorporate margin to deal with potential hazards" while the "aging" factories "could challenge (…) the sustainability of facilities" , according to the IRSN.
More rapid corrosion than expected of 8 meters high evaporators, made public in 2016, the replacement announced mid November November of a piece too worn 3.6 tons, pbading a strike of a month and a half: the Hague is already subject to hazards. Orano has reprocessed and thus released pools less fuel than expected in 2017 and 2018.
Beyond this, the risk of saturation of swimming pools complicates the reduction of nuclear energy from 75% to 50% in French electricity production. Because for now, only old reactors, capable of being stopped, operate with MOX, this fuel manufactured by Orano from the plutonium extracted from spent fuels. But if we close the "moxé" reactors, Orano extracts less fuel from its pools to manufacture the MOX that feeds them, explains the IRSN.
"Concerned" by the question, LREM MP Barbara Pompili, questioned by AFP, asks to examine the track of a "dry storage" of spent fuel, widespread in foreign countries, which do not practice reprocessing, French exception.
IRSN estimates that only about five years have elapsed since this device was put in place. But EDF says it has "not (have) opted for this solution" for reasons of "safety". Nearly 5,000 people work at La Hague, the site that concentrates the most radioactivity in Europe.
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