Where the Atom Is Admired

France presses nuclear power and a waste-treatment idea

In most ways, Malville is a tunelessly idyllic French village. Chickens wander the lanes that link the stone farmhouses, while cows graze alongside the clear Rhone River. Yet the hamlet (pop. 50), located about 30 miles east of Lyon, has a strikingly modern feature. Within a large fenced-off area, tall construction cranes hover over a huge concrete cylinder that will contain the world's most advanced nuclear power plant, a fast-breeder reactor christened Super Phenix.

When it begins operating in late 1983, the plant will become the flagship of a program that by the mid-1980s will make France the second largest producer of nuclear power, behind only the U.S. and ahead of West Germany, Japan and the U.S.S.R. France's progress runs counter to the trend in other Western nations, where opponents of atom power and rising costs have impeded its development just as the need for alternatives to oil has become most acute. Only the Soviet Union is developing nuclear energy as assiduously as France.

France now has 16 nuclear power stations in operation (vs. 72 in the U.S.). Over the next five years it is scheduled to switch on new facilities at a rate of one every two months. By mid-decade, when 52 plants will be running, the country will be getting 55% of its electricity and a fifth of its total energy from the atom; in the U.S., atomic plants now account for 11.5% of electricity production and less than 4% of total energy needs.

Why has France largely been spared the opposition from environmentalists and others that has blocked nuclear programs elsewhere? President Valery Giscard d'Estaing credits "the common sense, the intelligence of Frenchmen who have understood perfectly well that we have no important energy resources of our own and that to work, to have jobs, to heat ourselves and to be productive we had to have energy." No major party, including the Communists, is antinuclear. At the same time, France is a highly centralized state that, for better or worse, lacks the legal and administrative checks that allow small pressure groups to halt billion dollar projects. So confident is Giscard of his ability to press a needed program that the week after the accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island last March, he boldly announced a speedup in nuclear-plant construction.

After the oil crisis began in 1973, the French government decided on a crash nuclear program and signed a licensing agreement to build pressurized water reactors adapted from a Westinghouse design. Already the country's nuclear-generated electricity is proving to be 45% cheaper than power from oil-fired plants. By 1985 France expects to reduce its oil-import bill by 28%; at today's prices that means cutting $7 billion from the $25 billion cost.

In the Rhone Valley town of Tricastin, engineers have begun operating a uranium enrichment plant that is designed to diminish European reliance on the U.S. for enriched reactor fuel. To increase the amount of energy they can get from a given amount of uranium, the French also operate one of the world's largest plants for reprocessing spent fuel rods to extract unused uranium 235 and plutonium. But retreating nuclear fuel this way also produces highly radioactive liquid wastes that must be stored indefinitely. The French now refrigerate the waste and store it in double stainless-steel tanks, sheathed in reinforced concrete then hermetically sealed in a reinforced concrete vault, and buried several meters below ground.

At a plant in Marcoule, near Avignon, scientists are using a simpler system called vitrification. The waste is allowed to cool off for five years, then mixed with borosilicate glass and hardened into a black, solid glass cylinder. Storage is easier because this cylinder occupies only one-sixth the volume of the waste in liquid form. French scientists reckon that if all the nuclear waste that the country generates in the next 20 years were formed into a solid glass cube, each side would measure 53 ft. in length. This glass is expected to resist corrosion and prevent seepage. Creating a waste-treatment industry, France is also reprocessing spent fuel from Japan, West Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland. The waste is to be returned to the country of origin, probably in the form of glass cylinders.

Most striking of all is the French commitment to fast-breeder reactors like Super Phenix, which produce or "breed" more fuel than they consume. That is because breeders, which are fueled by plutonium and uranium 238, generate more plutonium than is "burned" during the nuclear cycle. The danger is that plutonium, if it winds up in the wrong hands, can also be used to make nuclear weapons. For this reason President Carter is opposed to the construction of the experimental fast-breeder on the bank of the Clinch River in Tenn. Skeptics argue that Super Phenix, which will cost $1.5 billion--a conventional reactor costs $1 billion--is too expensive. But the plant's builders, a French-Italian-West German consortium, counter that the fast-breeder's electricity will be competitive with oil-generated power. The bonus, says Giscard, is that "if uranium from French soil is used in fast-breeder reactors, we in France will have potential energy reserves comparable to those of Saudi Arabia."

Though there is some opposition to nuclear development--two weeks ago, 20,000 marchers and 15 sheep descended on Plogoff in western Brittany to symbolize the resistance of local farmers to plans for a reactor there--the pro-nuke momentum will be hard to break. A Harris poll conducted after the Three Mile Island accident indicated that 57% of Frenchmen supported their government's nuclear program. Still, Giscard is taking no chances that people might forget the advantages of the atom. Last month he announced a 15% electricity discount to anyone living near a nuclear plant.

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