Nuclear waste history

Nuclear waste history
Since its birth the nuclear industry seems to have swum in troubled waters. Effort to explain barely reassure the world's population. A recent EU survey shows that 75% of Europeans distrust the nuclear industry. The root of this distrust: the fear of radioactive waste. So let's talk about it. Part of the seabed are littered with gutted radioactive barrels. What exactly did they contain? The most dangerous waste is inside nuclear reactors. To feed a power plant, cells of uranium, a radioactive mineral,  are placed in the reactor core. Uranium is the plant's fuel. Inside the cells, the uranium reacts resulting in nuclear fission. Uranium atoms project particles called neutrons which hit other atoms and break them, releasing extremely high energy. The uranium cells heat up, the reactor boils water and the turbines produce electricity. After a few years, the cells are spent and must be changed. They are removed and placed in pools where they cool down over time. They have become nuclear waste. Inside the cells, new elements appear, like gases and metals, which have strange names: plutonium, caesium, americium, krypton, among others. Their life-cycle lasts from milliseconds to millions of years.Radioactive waste is dangerous and must be isolated. All that enters into contact with it is contaminated. The uranium cell are waste but so is all that touches them: water, liquids, buildings and worker's clothing.

We set off on a world wide quest to find out how the military and industry manage nuclear waste and if it's a risk for people everywhere. It's at the HQ of Greenpeace, the world's biggest anti-nuclear group, that our investigation begins. It was they who filmed the gutted barrels on the seabed. They let us into their treasure trove: the video archive. Mike tomsley is a veteran of every campaign against radioactive waste at sea. We went to a very deep part of the channel called the Casquets Trench, near the Channel Islands, in a fishery and near beaches. Rusty old barrels of nuclear waste. Empty waste barrels! In the empty barrels, marine wildlife had taken up residence. The question is: what happened to the radioactive waste? It's gone into the environment. So you can see what happens. It's hasn't disappeared into a black hole in the seabed. It pollutes the sea, gets into the food chain, and that could bring it back to your dinner plate.

Are the radioactive particles that enter the food chain dangerous? Radioactivity is radiation that can enter the body. Man is constantly exposed to weak, natural radioactivity, for example when taking a plane or walking in granitic areas. Man is more exposed after an atom bomb blast or by standing close to a radioactive source:irradiation. But he could also taken in radioactive food, water, gasses and dust. The irradiating particles become attached to the organs: contamination. Radioactive radiation is like an electron bombardment. They enter the body and break DNA strings. If the radiation is weak, the body can sometimes repair its DNA. But after strong radiation, it cannot. The broken molecules can cause digesttive or cardiovascular diseases, or more seriously cancer and genetic anomalies.

All dumping of radioactive particles in the environment can harm us. Was it common practice? Everybody did it : British, French, Americans, Russians, Japanese...The whole nuclear industry pumped its discharge into the sea. It was a time when everybody had no regard. The sea was thought of as the world's biggest dustbin. Figures from the International Atomic Energy Agency: in under 50 years, nuclear-capacity countries have dumped over 100,000 tons of waste into the seas. Britain alone accounts for 80% of the total. And landlocked Switzerland is second on the list. Faced with radioactive pollution, many nations oppose duping at sea, thus backing environmental groups. The impact helped us win an important battle. But it took another 10 years foe us to win the war. We managed to stop the dumping of radioactive waste at sea from ships.

In 1993, a UN treaty finally put and end to the submerging of nuclear waste. France was the last country to sign the treaty. It was a victory for the protection of the environment. But many grey areas still exist in nuclear waste management. Nuclear was developed by the military and little is known about their waste. Much information is protected by offcial secrets acts. We heard to the first ever nuclear site in search of the first ever nuclear waste. In 1942, during World War 2, the Roosevelt government chose Hanford as its nuclear weapons site and the Manhattan Project. Built deep in the desert, Hanford became a city of barracks and caravans inhibited by 51,000 people. Nine nuclear reactors and five plutonium plants were hastily built. Today historical Hanford is like a wasteland surrounded by barriers. The fuel elements caused a lot of contamination to come into this river. Were local inhabitants aware of this? Of course not. It was a secret covered by the Manhattan Project and by the US Army operation. The bed of the Columbia river contains radioactive sediment that no one knows how to remove as it keeps contaminating the water.

But even more shocking is this people. Those in charge of the Hanford site allowed families to enjoy the river without informing them of the dangers. Alan Boldt lives in Richmond a few kilometers from the site. He was a nuclear engineer. He said "I came to Hanford in 1963. I was 21 and had just graduated college. I was young, believed in my superiors. Then I found out, that after following orders for about twenty years, what they had told me wasn't entirely the truth. Hanford was very not a good site because waste was expelled into the environment. I was rather shocked by the high level of chemical products. In 20 years, they built it and made a mess."

In 1943, in order to store the most dangerous waste, Hanford's engineers built 170 gigantic concrete tanks, each large enough to contain a building. These were then buried to reduce risk. It was supposed to be temporary storage. Sadly, engineers discovered in the 1980s that 60 of the tanks were leaking, contaminating the groundwater. Today there remain 200 million litres of highly radioactive gunge that must be rapidly neutralised. Camera inside the tanks allow us to see it. The task is a huge technological challenge. A factory that will trap the waste in glass is being built. Meanwhile under the tanks, radioactive conamination continues.

Even though we're living in the desert and there's only 15 cm of rainfall per year, So for hundreds and thousands of years, the ground water near the site will remain toxic. There are chemical products from the reactors running into the river. Primary chromium. This will affect salmon breeding grounds. They lay their eggs on the bed, the chromium comes up and surrounds the eggs before mixing into the water. And this is toxic to the baby fish. Alan Boldt's rears are far from imaginary.

In  2002 an official report for the US Department of Energy confirmed the presense of radioactive strontium-90 in Columbia river fish. 13 out of 15 fish caught are contaminated. Eating them regularly raises the chances of cancer. We want a scientific report onthe river pollution. With us is Bruno Chareyron, a nuclear physicist. He works for CRIIRAD, an independent lab for research and information on radioactivity. Also with us is American scientist Norm Buske. He had already studied vegetal contamination in Hanford. This is the most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere. And as you can see, there is no problem. As you say, Tom, they've changed the bank here. They've done some landfill here.The last time Norm came to take samples, the US Department of Energy was far from happy. He was arrested by security guars. The contaminated trees were cut down. The bank was covered with stones. In fact everything is hidden. We're not measuring anything abnormal. The counter is measuring the stones.

Bruno finds a spot where it's still possible to take a soil sample. At the CRIIRAD lab, the scientists analyse the soil and water of the Columbia river. What did they find on the Hanford site in the USA? The 2 samples of the 300 zone show two things. One, tritium contamination of the Columbia river. 13 Eq per liter, where as higher up, it's less than than 2.5 Bq per littre. And two unnaturally high uranium contamination. There's four times more uranium than radium, which is abnormal. So this uranium is tied to the site's operation. And europium-152, an artificial element. The Hanford site admits that the tritium contamination exceeds the fit for drinking limits by an underground water surface of 121 km2. In other words this site continues to permanently leak, to drag radioactive elements in those waters that slowly migrate to the Columbia River. Because for some elements, iodine-129 and technetium-99, there is no working decontamination method.

From 1945, to keep up with the Americans in the arms race, the Soviet Union built a dozen atomic sites. For over 30 years, zero information crossed the Iron Curtain. In 1976, Soviet dissident Jaures Medvedev revealed a past nuclear accident in Urals, a Chernobyl before its time. In 1957, one of the nuclear waste storage tanks exploded. The same as those at Hanford. For 20 years, silence was kept. When Mededev told the story, Western scientists didn't believe him. Why do you think people refuse to believe you? Oh because in 1976, all the countries in the West were faced with the choice to develop nuclear energy. And suddenly we exposed this problem of nuclear waste, explosions and contamination. To answer what we had said, they decided to call it a KGB plot hatched to scare the people of the West. The head of the UK nuclear industry state that our claims were impossible. The CIA knew it was true but it a secret. Probably for the same reason they didn't want to cause problems for the nuclear industry. They'd been advised to say nothing that could harm nuclear power. But the nuclear waste problem still exists. In Japan, in the UK, France, America, Russia, and a few more countries. And how they deal with thier waste, we don't know.

We head to Russia. The 1957 happened in the region of Chelybinsk in the Urals. Details about the explosion are rare, and for good reason. Hidden by the CIA, the Russians and the whole nuclear industry, the accident showed that radioactive waste was not only a pollutants but also explosive. Since 1946, the nuclear site of Mayak has made Russian atomic bombs. It could be Hanford's twin. The town is prohinited to foreigners. For a long time, it was off the map and was given various code names. The tank that exploded in 1957 was close to this secret town. Today it remains inaccessible. To understand the consequences of the disaster, we go to Tatarskaia, a village hit heavily by radioactive fallout. Gulshara Ismagilova was 12 on the day of the accident. On that 29 September 1957, 1500 school children were in the fields helping the workers of the kolkhoz. What were you told at the time? On the 29th the wholw school was in the fields. All of a sudden, around 4 p.m., we heard an explosion. All the old folk who had survived the war thought a new war had started, so much the ground shook. Then near the village of Karabolka, the sky turned black, as if it were dirty. And this blackness covered the entire sky.

The villagers had no idea that a tank of highly radioactive nuclear waste had just exploded due to the failure of a cooling unit. The explosion was the equivalent to that of 75 tons of TNT. Radio-elements were projected 1 km into the sky, contaminating close to 15,000 km, 200 people were killed by the blast and 270,000 were exposed to radiation. This nuclear accident was the worst ever before Chernobyl, yet it remained a secret. Two day later, the workers brought the children to harvest the field again. They made us line up and told us the Kolkhoz needed us for the harvest. They even asked the first graders to join us. When we arrived, we saw that tractors had dug up ditches. The peasants in charge of the pupils told us, "See that pile of potatoes? Throw the lot in the ditches." And that was it. Our teachers asked why we had buried the harvest. They were told it couldn't be eaten: it was contaminated. But by what no one said. We are unable to find a detailed report on the disaster. Studies exist, but nothing proves their reliability, and there is no public cancer register to show the impact on health. The region is marked by the event. 800 km of contaminated land is closed off.The Mayak site and its activities remain a secret.

Here's some footage filmed by some reporters in the 1990s. The transparency of perestroika gained them access to the site. what they discovered was apocalyptic. Since opening, the plutonium plants of this huge military complex have dumped waste in the lake, transformed into a vast open-air reservior. Lake Karachay is now so dangerous, the authorities decided to fill it ina trick task with commentary by a reporter from ITN. We're taking a load of rocks down to the dump at Lake Karachay. The windows roof and sides of this truck are shielded with 5 tons of lead. Despite this, we've been told that to get to the lake and unload, we only have 12 minutes, because the radiation is so high. Lake Karachay is one of the planet's most radioactive locations. When the crew approaches the liquid, radiation is so strong they must take no more than 3 minutes to unload. Hope we don't break down! Today, Lake Karachay has been filled. To store waste still produced by the complex, engineers have dug even deeper lakes. These are still open-air radioactive reserviors but more diluted.

However we learn that the new lakes are close to sources and are contamination the region's main waterway, the river Techa. It feed numerous villages before flowing into the Ob which crosses all Siberia to Kara Sea. Muslimovo is the first village on the river. To investigate contamination from radioactive waste, we're joined by Christian Corbon, a CRIIRAD scientist. For 20 years, he has measured irradiated zones. We arrive at the river Techa. Christian starts sampling. The level is high here! Right at the foot of the steps we're at 1400 counts/second. Which is pretty high. The detector measures radiation levels. It shows the location is highly contaminated. On the edge here. It's totally rotten there. It's unbelievable! 5000 clicks a second: 50 times the natural radioactivity level. Given the radiometric level, it's very contaminated. We don't know which radioactive elements are in here, nor their type of toxicity. But it's very dangerous. You shouldn't put your fingers in it then lick them or touch your skin. There it went up to 16000. 16000 counts! That's enormous! In terms of site, what is it equivalent to? You mean finding such levels in the environment? Chernobyl. But finding this along a road under a bridge at such high level? No! And it's accessible to all. There are so many footprints. People must come here to cut reeds and fish. It 's very likely that people fish in that water.

The river should be off limits. It's a nuclear dump in the middle of nature with incredibly high radiation levels. To poor guys who built the new bridge. They must have absorbed amazing doses and be well contaminated. By the way, we should leave to limit our own dose. It happen very seldom. The river has been contaminated for 50 years. The government has evacuated many villages. Muslimovo is the last. Homes have fallen into disrepair. A handful of families live among the ruins. There used to be a school up there. Up to 1991 the chrildren of neighbouring villages studied here. It was the only high school in the district. This was their favourite spot. They would rest here, fish, play and lay in the sun. Now it's the most contaminated site off Muslimovo. The grandfathers led their greese here. they would sit on the grass as rasiation came up from the ground. Today all of them are dead. Why did the authorities not inform villagers of the dangers? The school is closed. In 1993, Boris Yeltsin's government decided to tell the truth. It was a time of openness and change. Russia craved transparency, once again forgotten.

Alexei Yoblokov is a Russian politician. A member of the Science Academy, he advised Yeltsin on ecology. During the Soviet era, the nuclear industry was held secret. The chenobyl disaster of 1996 was one of the reasons behind Gorbachev's Glasnost. the communists realised we could no longer live in a secretive society. It was dangerous: they had to reveal certain secrets, and the nuclear industry started telling the truth. Mayak was a secret site, nobody knew what was going on. Disasters were kept secret. Rumours spread that serious things were being kept secret. The disasters at Mayak affected the lives of tens of thousands. So we started talking about it. Yeltsin came to power on a wave of democratization and was forced to reveal the problems. After a political regime falls, there's a short period when the new regime tells the truth, like in Russua between 91 and 95. After that, it was hushed up again.

Since 1995, information has become to obtain in Russia. In Muslimovo and along the river Techa, Lives a generation sacrificed for the sake of nuclear secrecy. The government is offering a million rubles to leave the village: about 20,000 euros. It's too little for many to leave and they have decided to stay put. They took milk and water for analysis but we didn't get the results. The health authorities checking what we eat. They do it nearly every year. Have you ever had the results? Never. They do them for themselves. We take a sample and send it to the lab. The results are categorical: the milk is contaminated. It contains a significant amount of cesium-137, tritium and strontium-90, a radioactive element that attaches to bones. Regular drinking of this milk is a cancer risk.

Located in nearby Chelyabinsk, is the FIP, a nuclear-specialised hospital, which analyses and performs regular tests on patients. They never find out their results. To our surprise, the FIP agrees to see us. We talk to Mirak Offenko. As head of Epidemiology, she monitors the population's health. Regretfully, our population is very unique as its natural environment was hit by radiation. The result of the first studies were cinfirmed by our present research. They show an obvious linl between radiation dose received and the number of cancers...as well as the mortality rate due to them. We chose a group of individuals living in the villages along the Techa River. The group represents 30,000 people. As of today, we have been following them for 50 years. She admits the people of Muslimovo have been studied since the 1950s. Several generations were willfully left to live on contaminated land. They have no choice but to come here in the vague hope of a cure. Patient said "They are using us a guinea pigs. They built a monument in Kurchatov.  And for us, all that is left are the crosses. Everyday there is a funeral here in Muslimovo. We have 5 or 6 cemeneries that are all full. Go and see them, they're all full. Last year, I lost my son. He would have been 48 on June 21. He died of cancer. They should have warned us a long time ago and evacuated us. We live like guinea pigs. It's probably why they allow us to live here. It's our fate."

After numerous requests, we finally obtain a meeting with a top regional politician, Svetlana Kostina is deputy minister for nuclear safety in Chelyabinsk.
This is a conversation with her.
Q: Can we now live without danger near the river Techa?
Svetlana Kostina : It's no longer dangerous to live near the Techa River. But all a along the river, river water cannot be used for farming. The people who live near the river have been informed. They follow these restrictions.
Q: Shouldn't people be stopped from living there?
Svetlana Kostina : Today, there are no legal reasons linked to radiation levels obliging us to evacuate. I've said so before: the radiation level dropped under the level set by international norms. So there is no legal reason to stop people from living there. So officially, there are no problems.

In Muslimovo, the banks of the Techa are prohibited. But security is weak: people and cattle still use them. It's 75 tomes higher than natural radiation. Before leaving Russia we take advantage of the night for a rather special expedition. Back at the CRIIRAD lab, Chrisitian prepares the samples. The samples go into a counting chain which will measure radioactivity and detect the presence of certain radio-elements. Given the result, there's no doubt about it. A good caesium-137 contamination. It's more than obvious. It's incredible. Several days later, the final redults are in. First of all, the analysis shows that the Teecha River remains heavily contaminated. By tritium which official reports have never mentioned. Secondly the water contamination continues to lead to a major accumulation, notably of caesium-137, in the soil on the banks. Such a concentration of caesium has transformed this soil into redioactive waste. We measured up to 180,000 Bq per kilo in soil taken at the bridge. And of course the doses of radiation for people walking there are high. And since the water and soil are contaminated, there is a transfer to the food chain. We had more than 600 Bq per kilo on contaminated fish in Muslimovo and milk contamination with 24 Bq per kilo of caesium-137. Therefore the population living in muslimovo, through radiation coming up from the ground along the Techa and through the food chain contamination, is exposed to very high doses. That means Muslimovo is contaminated. The most pertinent question is: Why haven't the people of Muslimovo been evacuated?

A few days later complementary analysis shows that sediment from Techa is highly contaminated by the most toxic elements: plutonium-239 and -240. The level is at 2200 Bq per kilo when it should be zero. Plutonium is the explosive used in nuclear bombs. Military or civilian nuclear plants have one thing in common, they all produce radioactive waste often discharged into the environment.

France also has an atomic plant. The La Hague reprocessing plant is the same type as the one in Mayak. Yannick Rousselet of Greenpeace France has studied the plant's impact on the environment for 20 years. Here we are perfectly in line with the radioactive rejection pipe that comes from the Cogema site right behind. This 4.5 km long pipe goes out to sea empires at 1700 meters from the end of the La Hague point. Underneath us, the equivalent of 33 million 200 litre barrels of nuclear waste goes through this pipe every year and is dumped in the sea. If these products were conditioned in barrels, since 1993 it would be strictly forbidden to dump them.

The 1993 international treaty banned dumping waste at the sea. But only from ships. It might seem paradoxical, but discharge by terrestrial conduit remains legal. The pipe at La Hague discharges 400 cubicmeter of radioactive waste daily into the Channel's currents. Some discharged element like iodine-129, can be measured in the Arctic. Greenpeace filmed its divers taking underwaster samples. Results from the CRIIRAD lab show that certain seabeds have become nuclear waste themselves. This pipe discharges caesium, cobalt and other, which then enter the food chain, in seaweeds, crustaceans and shellfish. After our investigation on the pipe and what we demonstrated, we realized there was another agent that is an issue: toxic gases. How could we catch them? The best way to reach the exit of the stack was with large kites. We attatched a small pipe along the rope. We pumped the air and collected the gases from the stacks outside the site. Our results showed very high levels, tens of thousands of Bq per litre of air, in the radioactive waste rejected by La Hague. We were the first to ever measure them.

After finding krypton in the environment, we decided to check what was really going on. For that purpose, we used American software which Cogema also uses to observe the dispersion of this krypton-85. We took the source of krypton that exits through the stack and followed it over Europe. Depending on the winds, within 2 or 3 days, all of Europe was affected by these rejects. Our experiences measured or easily established the reprocessing calendar of La Hague's spent fuels on the roofs of Ghent University and Geneva University. In fact, due t the waste of La Hague, we practically have a permanent accident situation. It's as if we had a problem on a nuclear plant and had a permanent leak. There's a permanent but legal accident situation.

The samples taken from La Hague were analysed by Bruno Chareyron at the CRIIRAD lab. The Greenpeace kite samples show very high krypton activity in the air above La Hague, emissions of 90,000 Bq per cubic meter. These emissions occur every time there is a dissolution which happens during the plant's operating hours. Thus the krypton can reach an average level, also recently measured by Areva, of 1000 Bq per cubic meter permanantly in the villages around La Hague. So the population around La Hague permanantly breaths in radioactive kryton, i.e. radioactive air. La hague has one of the world's highest limit authorisations. If you look at the krypton quantity that was rejected by all the nuclear weapon tests, the 500 atmospheric tests, this is what it represents. You see that the site of La Hague in a single year, let's say 1999, rejected more krypton-85 in the air than all the atomic explosions caused by man for several decades. Since this gas has a 10-year lifespan, it progressively accumulates in the air. This chart shows that from the 60's to the 2000s, the concentration of radioactive krypton in the Northern Hemisphere has increased. That is due to the waste of the reprocessing sites that include La Hague.

Some radioactive elements like tritium and krypton-85 are very difficult and very expensive to trap. But the La Hague plant is permitted to discharge most if not all into the environment. Permission was granted by the Nuclear Safety Authority which oversees all installations. Its CEO is Andre-Claude Lacoste.
Q: How are the discharges from La Hague site determined?
A: It is a process in which the operator, in this case Areva, now writes us to explain what waste they would like to do. First we do a technical study using our technical back-up, the Nuclear Security Protection Institute (IRSN),  to verify if the request is technically reasonable or if the request corresponds to reasonable norms. A second study determines if the waste such as requested will have an impact on the populations of the area. We then try to set a waste authorisation level as low as possible , taking the 2 element into account.
Q: When processing spent fuel, rare gases are released, they include krypton-85. This gas can't be trapped so the norm will be proportional to the site's activity. Is that correct?
A: In such a case, we tell Cogema to reexamine they way they can modify their processes and the way they can trap waste. We then set a deadline for them to show us their research results.
Q: Can we trap krypton-85?
A: Not yet. But we asked Cogema to reduce this type of waste. It isn't easy.

A team from the plant takes samples and monitors its radioactive fallout. We met its leader accompanied by the site's PR director.
Q: Is the site's waste contaminating the environment?
A: I wouldn't say "contamination"  Based on our measures, we detect natural radiation. We are so to speak, in the background of natural radioactivity.
Q: If it isn't contamination, what is it?
A: I would say absense of impact. There are...Let's start over again! (The head of the site's PR intervenes.)
Q: The question is: Is the environment contaminated? It isn't contaminated?
A: No, it isn't.
Q: You find traces in the environment but it's not contaminated?

We understand the awkwardness of these Areva employees. Since the plant opened, their PR task is impossible. They must recognise the plant discharges radioactive waste, but without using the word "contamination" There are just "trace". There is radioactive waste in the environment but the nuclear industry says: This waste isn't dangerous since it's below health norms. There is a problem when Areva says they are below the norms. The question should be: "Which norms apply?" These norms are based on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki model with populations exposed to intense yet very short external radiation. La Hague is different. People living nearby permanently breathe and eat weakly contaminated elements in the air or food chain. They absorb very low levels but continuous doses of radiation inside the body: "internal contamination" which is chronic and at low levels. It isn't the same system or same model. Take Chernobyl, for example. By using the Hiroshima/Nagasaki model, scientists said: "Near Chernobyl, we'll never see an increase in cancer." 5 year later, they realised there was an epidemic of thyroid cancer among the young. They then had to admit that the model was wrong.

This issue is same around nuclear sites. A risk model is applied yet it isn't representative. Around La Hague there is the impact of environmental contamination. And it will certainly lead to a health impact. Using this model to perdict the number of cancers near La Hague is scientific absurdity. Exposure to low doses of radiation increase the risk of cancer. This has been confirmed by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. The commission considers that, using all existing studies on man and animals, the no-threshold risk model is the most realistic one. A model considering that any dose, even low, increases the risk of cancer, is the model that best reflects a reality.

Reprocessing plants discharge 80% of Europe's radioactivity. Environmentalists and some policians are questioning their necessity. Why reprocess waste? We begin compiling a detailed report on a technology presented as "recycling". Areva show the nuclear fuel cycle as a closed circle. There's no mention of waste. When bottle is recycled 100% of the matter is used.What about nuclear waste? Avera plays at transparency and lets us visit the La Hague site with its directior Eric Blanc. We put on nuclear workers' gear: Areva boiler suit, Cogema socks and a safety kit. Spent fuels from 58 plants in France and certain foreign countries reach La Hague by road and train. These are unloaded in totally sealed bays by robots. Any contact with the fuel would be fatal.

We are near the unloading cell itself. It's the cell we see through the security porthole. We see the unloading dock. The pincers are descending to the spent fuel element. We'll see the spent fuel element being lifted. After unloading, the fuels are placed in a pool to await reprocessing. They must cool down more and become inactive. This is one of 4 intermediatly storage pools of spent fuel elements. In this pool, the water is 9 meters deep, 4 meters of which are above the baskets and fully protect us from the radiation. The water itself is contaminated by the particles from the reactors. The water is permanently filtered by the pumps along the pool. How long are the spent fuel elements stored here? On an average, they stay here for 5 years. France has treated waste from Europe and Japan. Today, it mainly reprocesses the 1400 tons of French fuel that arrive here each year. The cells leave the pool, are cut and placed in a nitric acid bath. This process seperates the different elements present. In the end, there is left: 95% uranium, 1% plunium, and 4% stabilised waste. Our visit illustrates that reprocessing does not neutralise radioactivity as many think, but concentrates it in stabilished waste. Which is extremely dangerous as it contains 99% of the radioactivity. It's poured into molten glass containers, then stored in ventilated pits. We are allowed to visit them. Foe example, if we use a 1000-megawatt reactor, it will annually produce 20 tons of spent fuels. usind these 20 tons, we will produce 15 to 20 glass containers. In other words a reactor will produce high-activity waste amounting to this surface on the ground. If we were to convert this into total French production, all that France consumes in nuclear electricity, which is 80%, will annually generate only this surface in terms of high-activity waste. The surface of the vitrified containers is weak. But some of this high-activity waste will be dangerous for several hundred thousand years!

Stabilised waste cannot be used, but plutonium can. It contains a huge amount of energy. Mixed with uranium, in forms a new type of fuel: MOX. MOX is indeed used again,  partly powering about 20 plants in france. But the large majority or matter captured by reprocessing is uranium: 99% of the waste. We were to  film the Pierrelatte site where the uranium is stored. On the eve of the shoot, Areva cancelled. Yet our only question was a simple one: If reprocessing truly is recycling, how is uranium reused? We're no longer allowed on nuclear sites, but Jacques Emmanuel Saulnier, Areva spokesman, agrees to see us.

Q: What happens to EDF's reprocessed uranium?
A: The reprocessed uranium is kept at the Pierrelatte site. The client can reuse it whenever he wants. It's a sort of built-up reserve in energy and raw materials. The specificity of nuclear energy is that it can be recycled. When the client asks us, we send it to another site, in the Netherlands or in Russia, where it will undergo a new enriching process. The Areva group doesn't have those technologies now. So this retreated uranium is sent to retreating sites in Europe or Russia,  thus re-injected in the cycle.
Q: So we send retreated uranium that is re-enriched. What comes back?
A: You must ask the clients. We move to the chosen site, at their request, the materials that will be re-enriched and then transformed into fuels. It's their property. You should ask them what their usage rate is and how they plan on using it.

The client in question: EDF. French uranium goes to Russia. But we could find out no more, either from Areva or EDF. What happens to uranium from reprocessing in France. We decide to return to Russia. In Moscow, we meet Vladimir Chouporov of Greenpeace Russia. He is investigating Russo-European uranium trafficking. French uranium actually heads for Tomsk in the middle of siberia. Vladimir accompanies us. We fully grasp the uranium's amazing journey after reprocessing in France. From Pierrelatte in the south of France, 900 km Le Havre by rail, 3500 km by sea to St Petersburg, then another 3200 km by rail into deepest Siberia.

Once in Tomsk, this dangerous substance has travelled almost 8000 km. Alexei is Vladimir's contact in Tomsk. He gives him info on what's happening in the region. They transport uranium and radioactive materials to Severk. The uranium doesn't stop in Tomsk. It crosses the town and continues a few kilometers to yhe nuclear complex Tomsk-7. Like all Russian atomic plants, Tomsk-7 is off-limits to foreigners. So that's the secret town of Tomsk-7. Yes. It's also called Seversk. Seversk and the nuclear complex are surrounded by barbed wire. The land around the plant also has additional protection. Behind these barriers, French uranium is enriched, but we cannot see it. Russia agreed to do this job in the 1990s. Enriching produces new fuels for power station. At the time, Russia could not afford to maintain its nuclear installations nor to pay their employees. The state and the nuclear industry thus offered to import the irradiated fuels of other countries. The trade in radioactive waste and nuclear substances gave rise to fierce opposition.

Alexandre Deev is the Tomsk representative in the Douma.
Q: What is the politicians' power regarding importing waste?
A: We can only talk about it without taking decisions. I'm a member of the government, and even for us, everyhing is secret. Our only info is in press releases from the regional authorities.
Q: What's your opinion of that?
A: It isn't normal. I believe it's this situation that is responsible, in large part, for the fear and mistrust of the population. They are againdt the collaboration between Russia and France. Many Tomsk residents are convinced that France sends all its radioactive waste to be buried here. Naturally, the residents of Tomsk aren't happy about this. Employees of the government and the nuclear industry must be paid enormous amounts to import this radioactive waste. It's a major mistake. Russia should not sign such contracts.

Since 1990, about 120 tons of retreated French uranium have ridden these tracks every year. Containers of uranium hexafluoride stored on Siberian soil. As you can see, each spot is one container. All 10 meter long. That why they're visible via satellite. This field full of containers is impressive. They're unprotected in the open air. We want to make sure it is uranium and obtain details on the plant's business. Yuri Zubkov will answer our questions. He's head of safety and radiological monitoring in Tomsk.

Q: As we've no authorisation to go to Tomsk-7, can you look at these photos and explain to us what we see?
A: This is Seversk. Those are the storage lots. That's the uranium hexafluoride storage lot.
Q: Isn't it a dangerous way to store it?
A: There's no danger. If it needed a roof, they'd have built it.
Q: So there are no environmental or health risks?
A: No, because there are no leaks. These containers are airtight. The only risk is a plane crash. Then we would have a cloud of contamination. But it's far from inhabited areas. We have such a huge territory, it doesn't bother me if a few hectares are accupied by containers.
Q: What happens to the French uranium once it arrives here?
A: Here, we transform it. We decant it from the transportation containers into local containers. Then we enrich it with uranium-235 to make fuel elements for nuclear plants. These fuel elements are then sent back to France in the shape of enriched gas.
Q: So all uranium coming from France returns there?
A: No, not all of ot. 80% maybe a little more. I don't have the exact figure. Rough 80% of the depleted uranium stays here, stored on our site.

That's the information we wanted. France dumps tons of depleted uranium in deepest Siberia. It's low in radioactivity, but must be observed and stored in the best conditions. Back in France, we approach EDF once again. They finally confirm our information from Russia. The uranium "tails", the leftovers after enriching, is left in Siberia and becomes Russia property. It accounts for 90% of the subtance. This new data changes the recycling pie-chart. In enriching uranium, 90% of it not reused. The sums show that retreating waste enables only 10% of the substance to be reused: much lower than the 96% claimed by Areva who use the figure to present nuclear as a renewable energy. The low rate of recycling requires dangerous transport, pollution and discharges of waste. Reprocessing is thus debatable. Only 3 countries have adopted it: France, the UK and Japan. But the others have yet to solve the problem or waste. In the US, spent fuel is placed in reinforced containers and stored in the plant grounds.Many scientists think it's the best practice, as it avoids handling and transport. But the cheapest and most widespread technique is to leave spent fuel in large pools, while awaiting a solution.

Bob Alvarez worked in the Senate in Washington as a nuclear site inspector. A former energy adviser to Bill Clinton, he has studied the risks of storing in pool. My colleagues and I filed a report in 2003 for which we studied documents from the past 25 years on the safety of spent fuel. We took it to the extreme and imagined a terrorist act scenario. The major problem is, this spent fuel is stored in pools. If the pool drains, the spent fuel heats up and catches fire. The fire would then release huge amounts of radiation into the air. A spent fuel fire causes more contamination than Chernobyl by maybe four times. And in terms of forbidden territory, the entire population would have to leave their homes in an area four times that of Chernobyl. We were, of course, denounced and attacked by the nuclear industry and government. But the National Academy of Sciences was asked by Congress to study it. And in 2005, the Acadamy said that we were correct and that we had to look at this problem much more seriously.

Spent fuel pools were recognised by German and Switzerland as an unacceptable risk from air crashes and notably terrorist attack. German placed its waste in dry storage areas. These concrete storage containers are put into hillsides. And if this isn't possible, they surround them in thick concrete buildings. So if an airplane crashes, it would avoid destruction or collapse. Our government refuses to do this, mainly because it costs money. The French, as you know at La Hague, have lots of spent fuel in pools. In case of attack,  you have anti-aircraft weapons. We don't have that here in the United States.

At least 450 pools storing radioactive waste are spread across nuclear-capable countries. Every power station and reprocessing plant has at least one. So many ultra-sensitive locations to keep watch over! The dangers of nuclear waste appear to be worsening. The industry has improved protection during transport, but terrorism puts us at a risk we had never imagined before. The problem of nuclear waste is increasing. Corinne Lepage was French Environment Minister. Her post gave her an enlightened view of nuclear energy? We adopted this technology based on a gamble: knowing how to treat waste. This gamble was made in the 70's and 2010 is close. 40 years on, the gamble hasn't paid off: we've no solution for waste. Treating the waste could be done by massive reuse of nuclear waste not the case with MOX or it could be an instrument to incinerate nuclear waste, but that doesn't exist, so for now, we are stuck with it. That's why it isn't a sustainable area in terms of what sustainable should mean today. Nuclear energy is almost like a religion, particularly in France, shared by all political parties from right to left, and fed by the issue of climate change, which has us believe nuclear energy will save us. So it's almost religious, and thus a tricky subject. I repeat that I'm not fundamentally antinuclear. I'm not against nuclear technology. It creates many problems. I'm not sure it is worth it economically. I am sure, however, that it is at the root of many ills in French society because the system chose to act in secret opacity that spread to other fields since the fact that it was for nuclear was hidden. Secondly, It's the cause of some of our present financial difficulties. As we set everything on nuclear energy, we didn't develop renewable energies, efficient energy, new materials and so on. French industry is lagging benind.

Although nuclear energy is a subject of debate, citizens are not involved. It was imposed on them from the start. But who decides what a whole country must follow for decades? Who controls nuclear power in France? Mycle Schneider is an international energy and nuclear analyst. French energy policy was invented and developed by mining civil servants, not by politicians. Who are they? Then cream of the French engineering universities. The top dozen from the Ecole Polytechnique, plus one star from the Ecole Normale Superieure, or other top universities. But under twenty a year. These pepple fill all the positions which are most important for the application of energy policy. They are the heads of all the key ministries: Industry, Research, the Environment. They are also at the top of politics: Prime Minister, the President. Plus there's industry: the head of Areva, the French Atomic Energy Commission, the top positions in EDF. These positions belong, dare I say, to the Corps des Mines. Politicians have nothing to do with this sector. It's the realm of the Corps des Mines. So politicians' knowledge of nuclear is an absolute disaster! The presidential candidate debate between Segolene Royale and Mr Sarkozy was a phenomenal example of this problem: two people who were running for the highest office in France, debating a subject about which they hadn't the sloghtest idea. That showed how much politics had completely given over.