“Cold” nuclear tests at Moronvilliers near Paris
June 1, 2005
Six months ago, I had the opportunity to discuss matters with an engineer from the CEA. At a reception, he took me to task regarding the positions I took in 2003 concerning the possibility that France had conducted, and still conducts, underground nuclear tests on its own territory. Recall that this whole affair originated from confidences shared with me by Antoine Giudicelli, former director of the Marcoule Center and former deputy director of military applications at the CEA. Subsequently, he sued me for defamation; the lawsuit was dismissed at first instance, but I was convicted on appeal.
At the time, I received strong support from my patrons, who helped cover the substantial sum that the court ordered me to pay as damages for the “moral harm” inflicted upon Antoine Giudicelli. But on that occasion, I also witnessed the utter cowardice of the press. Completely alone, I found myself on the defendants’ bench in Nîmes during the appeal trial. Journalist Jean-Yves Casgha, organizer of the annual “Sciences Frontières” event and a reporter for Radio France International, deemed it wiser not to attend either the first-instance trial or the appeal, even though it was he who had put us on “the trail of the Gardanne mine,” where there remains doubt as to whether a hundred low-yield underground nuclear tests could have been conducted over a ten-year period, both before and after the closure of the Mururoa site. But this case will never be fully clarified. After I mentioned this possibility in a book I published at the beginning of 2003, the mine was very quickly closed and... flooded (simply by stopping the pumping). But flooding a mine is irreversible. If such tests really did take place in that mine—and I believe the probability is high, since this technique of covert firing in mines, using methods such as seismic signals that can be mistaken for ordinary mining activity (signals of magnitude 3), allows for such tests—then water will dissolve the limestone, and eventually the nuclear waste, carried by groundwater, will spread throughout the entire Mediterranean. The Calanques of Marseille are riddled with underground river resurgences, such as “the Port-Miou hole.” It’s a peculiar situation for a place intended to become a nature park—a place where one might someday have to swim while holding a Geiger counter in hand.
But I’m overcome with despair at the cowardice of journalists, the incompetence of politicians, and the passivity of local residents. From time to time, I receive anxious messages from people who “feel strange tremors” or worry about “abnormal radiation levels.” Now, I reply to them:
- Those who ruin your living environment, irresponsibly poison your surroundings, endanger your lives, and gravely compromise the living conditions of future generations have won, across the board. Action should have been taken earlier. Now, fend for yourselves or... write to your MP.
When my CEA interlocutor brought up these issues, he told me “that there was absolutely no need, to test new nuclear weapons, to conduct firings using fissile material; ‘cold firings,’ in which the plutonium in the initiator is replaced by a material with similar mechanical properties but which is non-fissile, were quite sufficient.” Our man is unaware that France, like many other countries, has embarked on developing electromagnetic weapons (EMP weapons) whose primary energy source is delivered by “a small A-bomb.” To develop such devices, firings using fissile charges are indispensable. Where are they conducted now, since the country no longer has the “playground” of Mururoa?
Vaujours is a CEA center that has been closed. Even though it’s a site quite close to Paris and could thus be used for real estate development, it seems odd that these places are “cursed,” permanently prohibited to construction, guarded by watchmen who deny access. Why?
We can count on our brave journalists to tackle these issues.
Thus, here is a new dossier, forwarded to me by my friend Andréas Guest.
The Moronvilliers site of the DAM (Directorate of Military Applications)
Officially, at the Moronvilliers military base, in the commune of Pontfaverger (51), the CEA, the Atomic Energy Commission, according to information given to elected officials, only conducts “optical operations” aimed at mechanically improving our strike capability. The costly Airix system (Induction Radiographic Accelerator for X-ray Imaging) seems to serve other purposes. Stop-Essais asserts that last November (2004), an explosion blew off the lid of a supposedly leak-proof experimental tank, causing panic among military personnel. Stop-Essais believes that fissile materials might have been used in these tests, which normally involve no nuclear charges.
After reading this information in Silence, we wanted to learn more about what’s happening at Moronvilliers. We went online to do research and consulted our archives. First surprise: we found a decree dated June 20, 2003, establishing a temporary restricted zone above the Moronvilliers industrial site, published in Official Journal No. 192 on August 21, 2003. In the annex, one can read: “For purposes related to air safety missions, a temporary restricted zone (Zone P) is hereby created. It is located above the Moronvilliers industrial site (Marne). Lateral limits: a circle with a radius of 5 kilometers, centered on point 49° 14’00” N – 004° 19’00” E. Vertical limits: from the surface up to 4,100 feet above mean sea level (1,000 meters). Nature of the zone: Temporary restricted zone within which may operate only: aircraft from defense, gendarmerie, police, customs, health, civil security, and surveillance when their mission does not allow them to circumvent this zone; IFR aircraft that have received clearance from an ATS authority; aircraft that have obtained authorization with 48 hours’ notice. Activation dates and times (UTC): From June 30, 2003, at 00:00 until a date to be communicated to air users via aeronautical information.”
Therefore, if aircraft are prohibited from flying over this zone, we can infer that something dubious is going on—especially since each year, only eighty invited guests are allowed to penetrate the mystery of Moronvilliers’ “test range.” Armed men guard the entrance. Gendarmes from the nearby Pontfaverger brigade are tasked with preventing any access to the site.
THERE ARE ONLY TWO “SUPERPOWERFUL” X-RAY GENERATORS IN THE WORLD. ONE IS AT LOS ALAMOS IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE OTHER IS AT MORONVILLIERS.
In June 1957, the Moronvilliers Test Range (PEM), located on a 500-hectare military site, was attached to the Vaujours Studies Center of the Directorate of Military Applications (Dam) of the CEA (Atomic Energy Commission). It was at Moronvilliers that the first non-nuclear test for the atomic bomb program was conducted in 1958. “One might have thought that experiments conducted in France concerned only chemical explosives associated with nuclear warheads. In reality, nuclear materials are also the subject of detonation experiments: for bomb technicians, it’s a matter of analyzing how materials contained in nuclear weapons—especially metals such as uranium and beryllium—react during an explosion. No ‘nuclear mushroom cloud,’ then, on national territory, but dispersion of nuclear materials during the ‘explosive’ activities at the Vaujours-Moronvilliers Center. These are the ‘cold tests,’ as French bomb technicians call them. [...] At Moronvilliers, uranium-based explosive firings were conducted outdoors and, apparently, in tanks. [...] Obviously, the results of controls and analyses are not in the public domain,” wrote Mary Davis & Bruno Barrillot in an article “Explosive Pollutions by the DAM at Moronvilliers,” published in Damoclès No. 60, first quarter 1994. In 2000, 110 m³ of waste “slightly contaminated with depleted uranium, mainly from tests” (400 MBq) and 350 m³ of “TFA waste from rehabilitation efforts” (1.9 GBq) were stored on site [Andra Report 2000, p. 274].
After nuclear tests were halted in 1996, the government announced the imminent closure of the Vaujours Center, which took effect on December 31, 1997. The Moronvilliers site was then attached to the Dam-Ile de France Center of the Directorate of Military Applications (Dam) of the CEA. The Dam-Ile de France Center, in Bruyères le Châtel south of Paris, was formerly known as the Bruyères le Châtel Studies Center or B-III. The CEA does not describe the activities at the Moronvilliers Center in detail, but we know that sometimes chemical explosives for nuclear warheads were tested on replicas made of materials similar to those used in actual nuclear weapons, notably depleted uranium. To analyze these reactions properly, special machines were used to radiograph the explosions. The Airix machine, put into service at the end of 1999, is merely a modernization or development of earlier machines, such as the GREC (Flash Radiography Generator), which operated from 1976 to 1999. According to its technical description, Airix is actually a linear electron accelerator producing 4 MeV of energy via a pulsed diode. Electrons are accelerated to 20 MeV by eight blocks of four induction accelerator cells, then focused onto a target made of heavy material. “During cold tests, nuclear materials are replaced by inert materials with very similar mechanical and thermal behavior: ignition causes their densification in a few millionths of a second. Airix will make it possible to control and characterize these phenomena (images of material compression, density distribution, etc.) by radiographing them with great spatial and temporal precision.” The first explosion examined by Airix took place on December 2, 1999, and its official inauguration by the Defense Minister occurred on September 28, 2000. Airix is housed in a 74-meter-long concrete building. Further developments are planned: a second aiming axis was supposed to be launched in 2005, but this project was delayed by three years and began in 2008, with commissioning in 2011. The cost of Airix is estimated at 2.3 billion euros. Along with Moronvilliers, the CEA invests 5.5 million euros each year in Champagne-Ardenne, in addition to the 3 million euros in payroll costs.
Sources: Stop-Essais – 114, rue de Vaugirard 75006 Paris – 01-69-07-78-37;
L’Union, July 19, 2003; Damoclès No. 60, first quarter 1994;
Official Journal No. 192 of August 21, 2003. See also links:
http://www.obsarm.org http://www.francenuc.org http://www-dam.cea.fr