Investigation into nuclear power in France

Investigation into French nuclear energy

April 25 –
April 30
May 4, 2011
June 12, 2011
May 12, 2011

Earthquake in Spain, lack of foresight regarding the Civaux Nuclear Power Plant
(audio)
On April 18, 2011, France 2 broadcast, just one month after the Fukushima disaster, an excellent investigative report titled "Complément d'Enquête," entitled
"The Disaster That Changes Everything"
As I write these lines, having been able to work from the broadcast available at:
http://www.pluzz.fr/complement-d-enquete-2011-04-18-22h10.html
In case this file is no longer accessible at that address, here are other links provided by my readers:
http://info.france2.fr/complement-denquete
and then, under "Revoir en intégralité" (Watch again in full):

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Fp1Cn9DhM&feature=related
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y9jW1jhBkQ
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fysP9Udo6Ag&feature=related
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcBhnQECPSQ
5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh5hX3k4AQ
6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1EPZXrR5jI
7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQp5vNwqV0g
   http://videos.next-up.org/France2/Complement_Enquete_Fukushima_Lost_in_radiation/24_04_2011.html

Many readers help me very effectively, even just by providing useful information. This is the exception in a sea of passivity.

Status as of April 25, 2011

The journalist begins his investigation with questions posed to Florent Vallier, a young operations manager "of team 1," at the Nogent-sur-Seine reactor. The interview takes place in a room that is an exact replica of the control room, used for staff training and simulations.

Florent Vallier, operations manager of team 1 at the Nogent-sur-Seine nuclear power plant

An exact replica of the control room at the Nogent-sur-Seine nuclear plant

He is responsible for the safety and electricity production of the plant during his shifts.

Journalist Benoit Duquesne conducting this investigation

When Benoit Duquesne asks the young official about his reaction after Fukushima, he responds in terms of "lessons learned" and improving safety. We will hear the same discourse from all personnel in France’s nuclear machine, since France is "the most nuclearized country in the world."

Yet, Duquesne quickly adds that France has experienced serious alerts. On the night of December 27–28, 1999, the Blayais nuclear plant in Gironde was flooded due to a storm that swept across France—a phenomenon entirely unforeseeable.

EDF
showing "an attitude of transparency" Duquesne meets with Etienne Dutheil, the young director of this facility, which includes four reactors each producing 900 megawatts.

Etienne Dutheil, young director of the Blayais nuclear plant in Gironde

Facing the 400,000-volt line that carries the generated electricity

Location of the Blayais nuclear plant at the mouth of the Gironde River

To tour the plant, one must wear dosimeters and change clothes completely.

The young plant director, at the changing room

Equipped for this visit

"Behind a thick door lies the heart: nearly 80 tons of radioactive material undergoing fission."
A door that cannot be crossed when the reactor is operating.

EDF
agrees to allow a tour of its "pool."

• Here you have the pool where spent fuel assemblies are stored.

My comment:

The "pool" of a reactor is a tank filled with ordinary water, a few meters being sufficient to shield against radiation emissions from both new and especially spent fuel assemblies. These elements have a prismatic shape. The fuel rods from Fukushima reactors are four meters long. A French-type reactor core contains &&& of them. The core is a cylindrical steel vessel, 20 cm thick, capped with a removable hemispherical lid and base. When loading a reactor, a rolling crane (orange in the photo above) transports these assemblies, hung like hams, placing them parallel inside the core. They are then submerged in pressurized water at 155 atmospheres. As we will see, this water serves two functions. First, it acts as a "heat transfer fluid," allowing recovery of the heat produced in the core and transporting it to a
heat exchanger.
It circulates at a temperature of 300°C. It will then be used to heat a secondary circuit.

I believe it useful to pause here and present the schematic of operation for French civil "pressurized water reactors." Liquid water is a better conductor of heat than steam. However, steam is a gas that can be
expanded,
whose heat can be converted into velocity, kinetic energy, thus driving a
gas turbine,
which is coupled to an
alternator,
producing electric current at 50 cycles and 4,000 volts. This current then passes through a transformer that raises the voltage to 400,000 volts, thereby reducing the electrical current (which increases with the square of the current, due to Joule's effect) by a factor of one hundred, according to the relation:
P = electric power = V₁I₁ = V₂I₂
The power dissipated due to Joule effect is thus reduced by a factor of 10,000.
This high-voltage transformation allows reduction of losses in transmission lines. At the destination, a transformer reduces the voltage down to the 220 volts used in homes.

For effective heat exchange, after passing through the turbine, the steam is reconverted into liquid water in a
condenser.
To cool this steam and turn it back into liquid water, excess heat must be evacuated. This excess heat, contained in the steam, is transferred to the water of a cooling circuit. The steam circulates in a closed loop. The cooling circuit water forms an open loop. These are the large towers familiar to you. Cooling water falls as rain within an ascending air column. Air enters at the base of the tower and exits at the top. If we were to attempt a comparison, a cloud of droplets and steam forms inside the tower. Rain falls at the base of this cloud. This water is collected. But the rising air column carries away some of the steam. The tower circuits need to be replenished, corresponding to the second blue pipe. The loss amounts to 500 liters per second. The evaporation of this water represents an energy loss. Thus, nuclear power plants operate with a relatively low thermal efficiency, around 30%.

Seventy percent of the energy produced in the core is used to warm small birds.

In this illustration, the primary circuit, water passing through the core, is shown in purple. The secondary circuit is in blue/red. Blue when water is liquid, red when it is vapor. Gray blades of the gas turbine stages are indicated. The "tertiary," semi-closed circuit is light blue. To the left of the circulation pump returning liquid water to the condenser, a second pump draws 500 liters per second from a river or sea, as previously mentioned.

In the core, in red, the prismatic fuel assemblies composing the core. They are made of "rods," also called "cladding," made of zirconium, containing pellets of "nuclear fuel" made of uranium oxide. These pellets have the diameter of an aspirin tablet. This oxide has two components: 97% is uranium-238, non-fissile, and 3% is fissile uranium-235. It is this isotope that, upon decomposition, provides energy with emission of neutrons. The fission products are radioactive and toxic. Among these dangerous, long-lived wastes are cesium-137 and strontium.

Under normal operation, these wastes remain contained within the zirconium rods. When there is "core meltdown," they mix with the cooling water, as occurred at Fukushima, where TEPCO admitted that "partial core meltdowns had occurred" (when the upper parts of the fuel elements ceased being submerged in cooling water, steam being unable to fulfill this function due to its lower thermal conductivity).

After one year of operation, the concentration of uranium-235 in the fuel mixture decreases. When it drops to 1%, the fuel load is no longer used. The reactor must then be "shut down" and "unloaded."

The reactor's operating regime is regulated using "control rods" made of cadmium, shown above the core in black. They absorb neutrons. If fully lowered, fission reactions cease. However, exothermic decay reactions of fission products continue. After lowering the rods, a long wait is required before the core temperature drops enough to open the vessel and replace the "spent" elements (containing 1% U-235) with "new" ones (containing 3% U-235). These spent elements are radioactive due to decay of fission products. They must be stored in these famous pools, where water serves two purposes: it removes heat generated by these elements due to its high thermal conductivity, and it acts as a radiation barrier. This barrier is sufficiently effective that one can safely lean over the surface of these pools. Spent or awaiting loading fuel assemblies are placed in racks. France 2’s documentary shows them:

Racks allowing storage of "assemblies" in the pool,
including MOX assemblies, a mixture of depleted uranium (U-238) and plutonium.

Without this water, not only would personnel be directly exposed to ionizing radiation, but the elements could no longer dissipate heat through air circulation, which is a much poorer conductor of heat than water. The fuel assemblies would be damaged. The zirconium tubes would melt, as happened at Fukushima ("The Disaster That Changes Everything," the title of the broadcast).

Incidentally, why zirconium and not ordinary stainless steel? Because zirconium does not slow down neutrons.

I am obliged to provide these technical details along the way; otherwise, the rest of the documentary would be only partially understandable. Decoding this documentary reveals one thing: if all projects continue in France, it is "because the machine is already in motion," and turning back would jeopardize a heavy policy with an entire technological-scientific apparatus and tens of thousands of jobs.

At Fukushima, the earthquake caused the reactors to shut down. Control rods were inserted into the cores. In Japan, these rods are raised by electric motors. They pass through the 20 cm thick steel reactor vessels.

Fukushima is truly "the unforeseen disaster that calls everything into question."

A side note: Typical dimensions of a reactor vessel: 5 to 6 meters in diameter, 10 to 15 meters high.

Illustration extracted from TEPCO’s official report (I only translated the captions)

In Japan, the rods were raised, but the tsunami flooded the diesel fuel tanks supplying the emergency generators. These tanks were located by the Japanese below the plant floor level (10 meters above sea level). Unfortunately, at this location, the tsunami wave rose over 14 meters. The docks were thus submerged and the diesel fuel tanks flooded...

As we will see in the report conducted in France, the emergency diesel generators, pumps, and fuel tanks are located in underground facilities, therefore "prone to flooding."

At Fukushima, the diesel engines, unable to be fueled, stopped.

In the basement,
these emergency generator sets stopped.
No power meant the circulation pumps, also located underground like at Blayais, stopped too. Water circulation in the reactor vessels ceased. Temperature rose. The same occurred in the pools, where spent fuel elements were no longer covered by water. The zirconium cladding melted. Radioactive waste mixed with the water—both from the pools and the water normally circulating in the cores.

Returning to the Blayais plant: As the report will later tell us, in 1999 a storm, unforeseen and unanticipated, flooded the plant. A storm involves strong winds, but also a
low-pressure system
that travels. This creates a "barometric surge," raising water levels. The wind drives this mass of water toward the coast. In 1999, we narrowly avoided catastrophe, and now you understand why. The emergency diesel generators and pumps,
located underground,
were flooded. Miraculously, two out of four continued to function.

It could have been far worse if the hurricane had struck when the tide was high, at maximum sea level.

The journalist notes that the young plant director does his best to avoid questions about the possibility of water level drop in the pools. Etienne Dutheil’s response:

• Um... um... I can't really make a technical comparison... bla bla bla... bla bla bla...

Thanks to the CD recordings sent by my readers, I was able to more easily rewatch the broadcast frame by frame. The following image is telling. After stating that every effort is made to ensure fuel assemblies remain submerged, Etienne Dutheil walks toward the device shown in the next image.

Not very convincing, this emergency water supply system, considering the pool’s volume...

Here are his own words:

• We have implemented modifications to ensure the pools remain filled with water. Here, you see an additional emergency water supply device, a system enhancing the plant's safety (...).

And the journalist continues:

• Mr. Dutheil shows us an emergency system to refill the pool.

We watched these images with a friend who is a retired engineer and former senior official in civil protection. His reaction:

• This man cannot be the director of the Blayais plant. It's impossible. He’s a puppet, a lackey, a clown. Such an installation couldn’t deliver a liter of water per second. At that rate, calculate it—six weeks would be needed to refill this fuel storage pool containing 4,500 cubic meters of water. This device would barely compensate for evaporation!

And I fully agree with him. Here are the measures taken, twelve years after the events, to "secure" the plant. It’s grotesque, pitiful. This man, barely forty years old, is an incompetent parrot-like manager who repeats only the word "safety," yet seemingly incapable of solving even a basic school-level problem like:
"Given a pool measuring so many by so many meters, calculate its water volume. Considering an emergency water supply capable of delivering one liter per second, estimate how long it would take to..."

At my home, I have an aquagym pool holding 4 cubic meters of water. With my garden hose, it takes me 7 hours to fill it.

I imagine you understand what would happen if water circulation were cut off, and heat generated by fuel elements ceased being evacuated. The water would instantly heat up, then boil and evaporate. When the fuel assemblies—prismatic elements placed in racks as you’ve seen—were left uncovered (as happened at Fukushima when emergency pumps failed), their temperature would rise to the point of melting the zirconium cladding containing the uranium and plutonium oxide pellets.
At around 1,000°C, which is reached quickly, water molecules decompose into hydrogen and oxygen in a stoichiometric ratio—meaning the optimal mix for explosive behavior.
Overheated fuel assemblies supply energy to water, causing it to dissociate. This can take minutes, even tens of minutes. The accumulated gas mixture then explodes upon contact with the slightest spark, releasing energy in a thousandth of a second. It blows apart the building, as happened in Fukushima’s Unit 1 reactor. This explosion creates an updraft that carries radioactive debris from fuel pellets—released by zirconium cladding shattered by heat—when the heat or leakage from a damaged pool left the "assemblies" uncovered. The steam rises and disperses fine particles of... anything: uranium-238, fission products, cesium-137, iodine (if spent assemblies), and whether new or spent, when the reactor is loaded with MOX,
fine particles of plutonium—the most toxic known.

And you imagine that the emergency water supply system shown by
Etienne Dutheil
could possibly counter such a problem by providing "additional water." I have never seen or heard anything more absurd in my life. It’s shocking incompetence. Does this man even realize what he’s saying? I’m not sure. He likely owes his rise to his flawless obedience.

In 1999, the unexpected hurricane crossing France from west to east tore down power pylons and flooded the plant’s basements, where its four emergency pumps were installed. Two engines burned out. Two pumps were disabled.

1999: The nuclear plant flooded after the hurricane passed

Had all four pumps at Blayais been disabled by flooding (instead of just two out of four), the reactor core, continuing to generate heat despite being "shut down," would have started heating up. The primary circuit water would have turned into steam. Technicians would have had to vent some, and with fuel assemblies uncovered, they would have melted. We would have had a Fukushima-bis. Damaged, melted, entangled fuel assemblies would form an unmanageable mass impossible to evacuate (and where? How? Without the crane being reduced to useless scrap by the explosion).

Moreover, operating reactors with plutonium (MOX) is sheer madness!

A technician or engineer then attempts to make a comment, saying "at Fukushima they sprayed the elements," but his superior, Etienne Dutheil, with an idiotic smile, quickly tells him to be silent. The name of the damaged Japanese plant is a taboo word—something the documentary’s creators fully understand.

A technician quickly silenced as soon as he tries to mention Fukushima

On the left, Etienne Dutheil smiles. The technician, pointing at the makeshift setup:

• Um... no... nothing... it's just a setup...

I now make another observation. At one point you heard the narrator say that the Blayais reactor is loaded with MOX, a fuel more dangerous than standard enriched uranium (3% U-235). MOX contains 7% ... plutonium. This requires some explanation. I told you earlier that the cores of "conventional" reactors are loaded with a mixture of two uranium isotopes, U-238 and U-235. Only the latter is fissile. Natural ores contain 99.3% non-fissile U-238 and 0.7% fissile U-235. These ores are enriched in France at a large facility in Tricastin, where natural ore imported from Gabon and Niger undergoes centrifugation. A chemical process produces a gaseous uranium compound (uranium hexafluoride, UF₆).

It is then possible to move the heavier species toward the outside of the centrifuge; the enriched uranium, being less dense, is collected near the axis (U-235 is lighter than U-238). Enrichment proceeds through successive stages until reaching the required 3% U-235 for civilian reactors.

The operation of these centrifuge banks consumes two-thirds of the electrical energy produced by the four 900 MW pressurized water reactors at Tricastin.

Location of the Tricastin plant near the Rhône River, using water from the Donzère-Mondragon dam

These units were commissioned in 1980—thirty years ago. Initially, the purpose of the Tricastin facility was to supply fissile materials for military use.

A comment on
the aging of nuclear plants.
The reactor vessels (steel, 20 cm thick) are subjected to intense neutron flux, which disrupts the metal’s atomic lattice. Reading about this issue, I found—unless I’m mistaken—that neutron irradiation creates transmutations in the metal, some of whose byproducts are helium. This element cannot form standard chemical bonds through electron sharing. Thus, within a metallic lattice, a helium atom is akin to a "hole," a "deficiency." The introduction of such impurities leads to microcracks. Neutron bombardment increases the
brittleness
of the metal and reduces its resistance to thermal shocks (rapid temperature changes).

In the broadcast, an EDF official says, "The older our plants get, the safer they become." This is false.

The mechanical strength of reactor vessels decreases over time.

It took decades of experimentation to realize that radiation from radioactive decay affects materials meant to contain them. This applies not only to steel reactor vessels but also to concrete, which was initially used to bury waste and has since developed porosity due to a dual aging process—chemical and radiation-induced.

Currently, at the La Hague facility, radioactive waste is buried in resins without sufficient long-term assessment to determine if containment will remain effective. These people don’t care.

But let’s return to the uranium fuel cycle. Reactors were initially loaded with oxides containing 3% uranium-235. After about a year, the U-235 content drops to 1%, and the isotope density is no longer high enough for fission reactions to sustain (the probability of neutrons from fission colliding with U-235 nuclei becomes too low for chain reactions). The energy output from fission reactions then rapidly decreases. The thermal power from the core diminishes. After one year, the assemblies contain uranium-238, 1% U-235, and plutonium-239 produced by neutron capture in uranium-238.

Here, we pause to discuss two types of reactors—thermal neutron reactors and fast neutron reactors.

Fission reactions produce neutrons traveling at 20 km/s. This speed is optimal for their capture by U-238 nuclei to produce plutonium. This element does not exist naturally (except for the famous exception at
Oklo, Gabon), because on geological timescales its half-life is too short. It lasts only 24,000 years.

Thus, plutonium on Earth is primarily a product of human activity.

It is a substance of
maximum radiotoxicity.

If a particle is ingested or inhaled by a human, it emits ionizing radiation that damages surrounding biomolecular structures, affects DNA, and causes cancer. Plutonium has the property of binding permanently to living tissues. Its "biological half-life" is 200 years. If a person inhales 1 milligram of plutonium, death is certain.

Anecdotal note: The way Americans obtained proof of this substance’s toxicity was by injecting it—without consent—into young recruits in the U.S. Army. This experiment was conducted
with written approval from Oppenheimer, the father of the American atomic bomb.

Plutonium is inherently the explosive used to make fission bombs, but not only that—as we’ll see later—because its critical mass is smaller than that of uranium-235. Military-grade plutonium is produced by operating reactors at high power.

How do we regulate a reactor’s operating regime, i.e., the average neutron speed? By using a
moderator,
which slows down neutrons. For uranium-235, fission efficiency is better with slow neutrons moving at only 2 km/s. The best neutron moderator is
heavy water,
water in which hydrogen atoms are deuterium atoms—hydrogen isotopes whose nuclei consist of one proton and one neutron. The effectiveness of heavy water, known even before World War II, led to the "battle for heavy water," produced in Norway.

Using heavy water as a neutron moderator allows reactors to operate with natural ore containing 0.7% uranium-235.

A second moderator widely used in these early "atomic piles" is graphite. The Chernobyl reactors were reactors where uranium rods were inserted into a large graphite block, cooled by ordinary (light) water.

Third moderator: light water. Using water as a moderator offers an advantage exploited by the French with their pressurized water reactors and by Americans with their "boiling water reactors": it can also serve as a heat transfer fluid.

Self-stability of water-cooled reactors

Graphite expands very little with heat. Water does. Expansion increases the distance between water molecules. It is the collisions between these molecules and neutrons emitted by fission that slow down the neutrons. Thus, this property can be used to achieve a certain
self-stability in reactors whose moderator is water.

Indeed, suppose fission reactions increase in number, raising the fission rate. Heat production becomes greater at equal pump flow. The water expands. The water molecules form a less dense medium. A neutron passing through a pipe filled with this water has less chance of being slowed down by colliding with a molecule.

With slower neutrons, the fission rate decreases.

Negative feedback, self-stability.

The Chernobyl reactors lacked this self-stability and were instead highly unstable at low power. See details on Wikipedia:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_de_Tchernobyl

Teratogenic nuclear weapons with delayed effects

Energy is required to enrich uranium extracted from natural ore via
centrifugation.
Thus, an optimum is sought, resulting in the 3% enrichment of U-235. We could achieve a higher percentage of U-235 by continuing centrifugation, but it would consume too much energy—whereas with 3%, reactors function adequately.

Incidentally, when enriching uranium via centrifugation, one obtains on one side a mixture increasingly enriched in U-235 and, as a consequence of this "distillation,"
depleted uranium,
containing less than 0.7% U-235.

Natural uranium is not inherently dangerous. In its native state, it cannot undergo chain reactions leading to fission. Uranium, even at low concentrations of U-235, is harmful to health in its natural form, just like all heavy metals. It has the same toxicity as lead. However, uranium possesses a mechanical property that immediately attracted military interest. While being denser than lead (19.1 g/cm³ compared to 11.35 g/cm³), it is not soft like lead. It is also pyrophoric, igniting spontaneously at high temperatures. Thus, it makes an ideal anti-tank, anti-armor projectile. Once inside a tank, it ignites and kills the crew. But depleted uranium also has teratogenic properties. It affects the testicles of mammals and humans, degrading their offspring (producing monsters), thereby enabling "punishment" of enemies, military or civilian alike (Iraq, Kosovo, and other locations).

The use of depleted uranium munitions constitutes the deployment of delayed-effect nuclear weapons.

Reactor operation using plutonium

Plutonium-producing reactions are favored when neutrons are fast. Military plutonium reactors rely on limited moderation. Fast neutrons then strike a "fertile blanket" made of uranium-238, which transforms into plutonium-239 through neutron capture.

Plutonium-238, like uranium-235, is fissile, and chain reactions within it occur more easily with fast neutrons. One could say that plutonium is meant to be used without moderation.

These reactors cannot use a coolant fluid like water, which itself slows down neutrons. This leads to reactors forced to use a neutron-transparent coolant—neither absorbing nor slowing neutrons—and that fluid is sodium.

Thus, France’s first breeder reactor, Phénix, was born from this brilliant idea. It was connected to the EDF grid in 1974. Before its shutdown, it was the oldest nuclear reactor in France. Its decommissioning is planned, but the estimated cost is one billion euros.

The exorbitant cost of decommissioning

Currently, EDF has not completed the decommissioning of any reactor.

Why is decommissioning so expensive? Because during operation, a nuclear reactor induces radioactivity in all its structures—every pipe, every valve. Everything becomes radioactive. Decommissioning is not merely removing the radioactive fuel load. The entire structure turns into long-lived poison. The plant must be dismantled piece by piece, transformed into waste small enough to be packaged and stored.

A complete, ruinous puzzle.

The extreme danger of fast-neutron breeder reactors

To operate a plutonium reactor and have it produce more of the same substance via bombardment with fast neutrons, water cannot be used as a coolant because it slows down neutrons. Sodium must therefore be used, which is liquid at 550°C and boils at 880°C.

Sodium has a well-known property among chemists: when in direct contact with air, it ignites spontaneously. If sprayed with water, the situation worsens—it explodes. It is simply impossible to extinguish sodium fires exceeding a few hundred kilograms.

Add to this the absolute danger of the plutonium load.

A plutonium reactor contains enough material to kill a million people.

But these fast-neutron reactors can transform uranium-238 and... plutonium-239. Hence the name Phoenix, the bird that rises from its ashes. Later, our nuclear elites designed and built Superphénix, a monster containing 5,000 tons of sodium and one ton of plutonium. Anti-nuclear demonstrators tried to oppose its construction and startup. Police reactions were violent. A demonstrator, Michalon, was killed. "Law enforcement" fired a tear gas grenade—possibly even a defensive one—point-blank into his chest.

But nature imposed its own sanction on the project. The reactor was located in Isère, at Creys-Malville. On a day in 1998, following heavy snowfall, the roof sheltering the turbines and pumps—poorly calculated—collapsed.

The reactor was shut down.

But for EDF and nuclear elites, this was only a temporary setback. Indeed, the breeder reactor fits into a broader plan of energy independence, complemented by the construction of the La Hague reprocessing plant. I told you earlier that when removing the core of a reactor, it contains various elements in oxide form. Uranium is present as its two isotopes, with U-235 enrichment having dropped to 1%. There are also radionuclides from fission, which are radiotoxins. Finally, there is plutonium, formed by neutron capture in uranium-238 nuclei.

At the end of a reactor's operational cycle, the core contains 1% U-235 and 1% Pu-239.

Until the La Hague reprocessing plant was launched—where again, "the French are leaders"—this mixture from reactor discharge was considered waste to be stored. But the French developed techniques allowing separation of fission waste, which is "dissolved in resin." I previously wrote that plutonium was extracted via centrifugation, but a reader pointed out my error.

Plutonium-239 is not an isotope of uranium-238; it is a chemically different substance with different chemical affinities toward other elements.

The uranium nucleus contains 92 protons, so its electron shell consists of 92 electrons. This number increases to 94 for plutonium.

Since the number of electrons in an atom's shell determines its chemical properties, these are two chemically distinct substances.

On plutonium recovery:

http://www.laradioactivite.com/fr/site/pages/InventairePlutonium.htm

Thus, plutonium is extracted chemically—easier and less expensive than extracting U-235 via centrifugation. A reader will provide further details on the method and its cost. This is how plutonium produced in military reactors, within "fertile blankets," was extracted. It is also why plutonium use became dominant for designing atomic bombs (fission bombs) compared to uranium-based ones. Producing plutonium via bombardment in a fertile blanket is cheaper than achieving the required U-235 enrichment (90%) through costly and endless enrichment processes. Because chemical extraction of plutonium is easier and less expensive.

The MOX fuel follows the same logic. It contains 7% plutonium. In uranium-enriched reactors, plutonium could be created by placing a fertile blanket near the core. The plutonium-producing effect of neutrons depends on their speed, determined by the presence of a moderator (heavy water, graphite, light water). Thus, we can geometrically modulate this moderation depending on how the moderator is arranged within the core. In military reactors, conditions are adjusted to achieve fast neutron fluxes striking a fertile blanket placed, for example, on top (facilitating remote handling).

In MOX-fueled reactors, the U-238 diluent constitutes the fertile material, distributed throughout the reactor. MOX rods are cooled. If this cooling uses an effective moderator like water, the plutonium-producing effect remains limited. But if the coolant is replaced with a substance providing no moderation—such as molten sodium—the plutonium-producing effect operates at full strength. From this perspective, MOX is the fuel of choice for fast-neutron breeder reactors.

The shift from weakly to strongly plutonium-producing depends on how we manipulate the moderator's action. This observation illustrates the lack of a clear boundary between civilian and military nuclear programs (essentially plutonium-producing reactors). Documents and testimonies confirm that the deployment of fast-neutron breeder reactors reflected an undisclosed, close link between civilian goals (breeding or fuel regeneration using plutonium) and the simple production of plutonium for military use. From this angle, the EPR reactor is a kind of bridge between these two worlds.

In any case, using plutonium as a fissile element—as "fuel"—dramatically increases the danger of nuclear plant operation.

But it is cheaper and more profitable. Thus, this criterion prevails over safety.

Moreover, this plutonium recovery from spent reactor fuel was designed to work in synergy with the fast-neutron breeder concept. The breeder reactor operated at high power—without a moderator—using sodium as coolant. The plutonium load would undergo fission, while released neutrons would regenerate plutonium from surrounding uranium-238.

On paper, with numbers, this all sounds fascinating. In practice, it amounts to programming suicide or mass extermination. A breeder reactor accident could be a thousand times worse than Chernobyl.

For now, the French project to deploy breeders is frozen. MOX is also a way to keep the La Hague plant operational "until the situation clears and approval is granted for building breeders," now rebranded as "fourth-generation reactors."

Thus, France produces, uses, and exports MOX. Reactor No. 3 at Fukushima was fueled with MOX.

The EPR is designed to operate entirely on MOX.

This mixture has all the drawbacks. The assemblies are five times more radioactive than enriched uranium. The characteristic cooling time for spent assemblies reaches a staggering 50 years! And in case of an accident, it would be absolute horror. You’ve seen the film of the explosion at Fukushima’s Reactor No. 3. Is the containment building damaged? Could this steel pressure vessel have remained intact after such violent explosions that hurled concrete debris hundreds of meters into the air? This explosion is suspicious. In Reactor No. 1, examination of the remains clearly shows the explosion affected only the upper room above the reactor. But what about Reactor No. 3? Is the vessel cracked? TEPCO seems to admit it...

In any case, to prevent explosion, Japanese authorities first cooled the core with seawater, then performed a dispersal cooling of the vessel’s contents—30% of the fuel assemblies having already melted. The cooling water from Reactor No. 3 may contain plutonium!

Continuing the report on the 30-year-old Blayais nuclear plant—the nominal lifespan of such installations. In 1999, an unexpected hurricane swept across France, felling thousands of trees and causing flooding in the plant’s basements.

The journalist asks whether the plant’s life will be extended. For its director, Etienne Dutheil, the question doesn’t even arise:

Etienne Dutheil, Director of Blayais Plant:

• Although 30 years old, the Blayais plant will be extended because it is a safe plant, constantly modernized

(we had an example of modernization and safety race with the plumbing fix shown earlier)

This extension should extend the plant’s life from 30 to 60 years. It will operate on MOX, with a core loaded with 7% plutonium. This type of fuel loading has already been performed.

How could you expect Etienne Dutheil to have a critical or even objective viewpoint on this issue, when his entire career depends on the stance he adopts? His career imperatives even prevent him from holding a different opinion. If he had criticized "his" plant, he would have been transferred quickly. At best, he convinces himself of his own arguments. And this applies to all "responsible" figures interviewed in this program. The "we are one big family (of privileged ones)" mentality eliminates any critical distance from this "nuclear commitment."

The investigator then visits an ecologist, Patrice Lapouge, who lives near the plant and shares his views on its dangers.

A confrontation between two worlds.

Etienne Dutheil’s world versus Patrice Lapouge’s militant ecological worldview.

Patrice Lapouge, who lives near the plant, explains that it is located without a real funnel directing all the hydrological system of the Aquitaine region:

Vulnerability of the Blayais plant to meteorological accidents

• Those who built this plant in such a vulnerable location refused to face the truth.

We’ll see later Etienne Dutheil’s response, showing the dam erected after the 1999 flood. He adds that this dam could now easily handle the event that occurred that year. But in this statement, one detects

a complete inability to anticipate

(Does this man even look like someone capable of anticipating?). Above, the ecologist speaks of the "maximum disaster"—meaning the simultaneous occurrence of multiple factors.

• Heavy precipitation across the entire hydrological catchment area

• A violent storm, like the one in 1999

• All occurring during a period of "high tides"

(while the 1999 event happened, by luck, during low tide)

In response, Dutheil might say:

• Are you pushing this too far? All these disasters would have to occur simultaneously. And the probability...

The probability: a standard reply from a polytechnician, adherent to the philosophy of "zero risk does not exist."

But who could have imagined that a storm of such violence would occur in 1999?

Still, despite this incident—which could now be well managed—the backup pumps, diesel generators, and fuel tanks remain underground, vulnerable to such events (as happened at Fukushima). Probably, modifying the installations would be too costly. If at Fukushima, the backup system—fuel tanks, diesel, entire generator set—had been placed ten or fifteen meters higher (which would have been logical in a country where the word "tsunami" was invented), and if it had been given maximum seismic resistance, the emergency pumping system would not have been disabled by the tsunami.

• But who could have predicted a tsunami of such magnitude?

• Who could have predicted a storm of such magnitude?

• Who could have predicted that these phenomena (mentioned above) might occur simultaneously?

And so on...

The list of "unlikely events" is not exhaustive. Tsunamis, including a relatively recent one that affected the Portuguese coast just a few years ago, can occur not due to earthquakes but due to underwater landslides. These have occurred in many regions worldwide, often accompanied by monstrous tsunamis. When Claude Allègre, a plate tectonics specialist, said in an interview reproduced by Le Point in a special nuclear issue: "We must stop walking on our heads. There will never be a tsunami in France," he was overreaching. When he claims France is not a seismic region, he is simply lying. See later details regarding Gravelines in Pas-de-Calais.

Tsunamis can travel vast distances, often thousands of kilometers. Historically, impressive tsunamis have been caused not by seismic events but by underwater landslides. These are coastal areas with very gradual seabed slopes that allow a low-amplitude, extremely long-wavelength wave to intensify near the shore. This could very well be the case, as Xavier Lafont pointed out to me, for the Gravelines plant—"with its feet in the water"—designed for electricity production intended for export to England, where

no tsunami protection system was installed

and where it is highly likely that the underground backup systems are... flood-prone.

Governance means foresight.

In appendix: The National Assembly report on the 1999 incident.

Back to the Gravelines plant:

The location of the Gravelines plant in Pas-de-Calais, "with its feet in the water."

The Gravelines plant, Pas-de-Calais, near the beach. Six reactors with no protection whatsoever.

During a recent TV appearance and in an interview in Le Point’s special nuclear issue, former minister Claude Allègre stated that a scenario like Fukushima could never happen in a country like France "where there are no high-seismicity zones."

• We must stop walking on our heads! France is not a high-seismicity country!

Such a statement might reassure us about the risks at the Gravelines site. Yet, a glance in an encyclopedia shows that the region experienced a strong earthquake in 1580. This was reported by my readers.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremblement_de_terre_de_1580

Its magnitude was estimated between 5.3 and 6.9 on the Richter scale. It is interesting to see where the epicenter lies:

The epicenter of the 1580 earthquake coincides with the site of the Gravelines plant!

But perhaps Allègre is unaware of this past event? Or maybe he’s hoping to become minister again? Or both?

The Blayais plant in Gironde was severely affected by a hurricane that swept across France from southwest to northeast. But why not the reverse? Has it been considered that the emergency diesel generators at Gravelines—likely also installed... underground—could be disabled by flooding?

The TV team investigates what happened at Blayais in 1999. EDF asks the staff from that time to "re-enact the storm" on a simulator. The actors in this scene claim they never felt insecure at their control posts.

The team from that time reenacts the 1999 flooding scene on a simulator.

Then, the director and one of his technicians take the TV crew

into the basements of the Blayais plant,

where various devices are located,

including the emergency systems—

namely, diesel generators and pumps designed to maintain water circulation in the reactor cores. In 1999, the storm-induced flooding submerged these basements with several meters of water.

Descent into the Blayais plant’s basement

The commentary on the following image:

• This pump draws fresh water from the Gironde to cool the reactors at rest and prevent meltdown. At the time, it was disabled by flooding.

• Water up to here...

• We had two reserve pumps and two out of service...

Referring to the National Assembly and Senate report, we see that two of the underground pumps were disabled

by submersion of their electric motors.

The journalist then questions Etienne Dutheil, director of the Blayais center:

• Did we narrowly avoid disaster?

.

• No, we did not narrowly avoid disaster, because we did not lose cooling capability.

It was a shutdown managed through normal procedures and normal means.

Etienne Dutheil strives to convey the idea that even back then, this plant was "safe" because it had withstood this totally unforeseen storm. No one at the design level had ever considered for a moment that placing emergency systems underground (as the Japanese did for all their plants) created an

insecurity due to total lack of foresight.

Empty rhetoric...

.

The dike was raised and equipped with anti-wave protection.

In light gray, to its left, one can see the extent of the elevation work: just one meter!

Another view of works intended to make the plant "safer"

• Today, the dike, raised by one meter and equipped with a breakwater, would protect us from an event like that of 1999 with a good safety margin.

In November 1999, a month before the storm, a letter dated the 19th addressed to EDF by the Ministry of Industry reminded them that work to ensure plant safety had been required for a year. The storm occurred on December 29, 1999.

And also, source:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_nucl%C3%A9aire_du_Blayais

A month before the storm...

An emphatic reminder, a month before the hurricane.

If a safety engineer at the plant hadn’t spoken up, calling this journalist from Sud Ouest, the incident would never have been known to French citizens.

Jean-Pierre Deroudille, journalist at Sud Ouest

• A safety engineer from the plant called me, saying, "We had an incident during the storm night.

Something serious happened, and we narrowly avoided core meltdowns."

My comment:

The Complément d'Enquête team’s report produced an important, powerful document. But not all "good questions" were asked. The focus remained on the event itself. Imagine if journalists had said:

• When the unexpected storm hit Blayais plant, emergency systems were underground—thus flood-prone—and they were indeed flooded: two of four pumps were disabled. As Mr. Patrice Lapouge said, luck was on our side—the storm occurred during "low tide," when sea level was minimal. A storm is a moving depression. Thus, the wave causing the flooding resulted from both wind blowing at 190 km/h pushing water toward the coast and the depression raising sea levels (barometric surge). What if this storm had occurred during high tide, when sea level was & meters higher (& information on sea-level rise in this region due to tidal effect, please)? Do you think the plant could have relied on two functioning pumps out of four? What if all four pumps had failed? What were the "normal procedures" in such a scenario? Moreover, the plant’s vulnerability stems essentially from the fact that emergency pumping systems are underground—thus flood-prone. Presumably, diesel fuel tanks and generators were also underground at the time. Are they still there, 12 years after the storm? Could we now visit them? Have you carried out work to raise these critical safety elements above flood level?

The clarification came quickly, from an EDF employee:

No, no work has ever been done to raise the diesel fuel supplying the emergency pumps at Blayais plant. The entire system remains submerged. But "it's planned," since the 1999 disaster—and as I write this, everything remains unchanged for 12 years!!!

These people are incompetent, irresponsible, and fools. They’re just mocking you. This isn’t new and won’t stop. It’s shameful, scandalous.

THE YOUNG PLANT DIRECTOR, WHO ONLY SPEAKS THE WORD "SAFETY," IS PERFECTLY AWARE. THESE PEOPLE ARE FOOLS.

Following a message from a reader:

Hello Mr. Petit,

Out of curiosity, I searched for "tsunami" and "Blayais."

500 years ago, an earthquake on the Lisbon fault triggered the collapse of a village (see comments):

http://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/2011/04/06/01008-20110406ARTFIG00691-depuis-1700-34-tsunamis-sur-les-cotes-francaises.php

This first link provides a map of French tsunamis:

with the following text:

Since 1700, 34 tsunamis along French coasts

At least 34 tsunamis have occurred along metropolitan French coasts since the 18th century—22 in the Mediterranean, 4 in the Atlantic, and 8 in the English Channel. Twenty-eight more are recorded in overseas France. This is the most comprehensive inventory to date, compiled by Jérôme Lambert and Monique Terrier of the Bureau des recherches géologiques et minières (BRGM). "The catalog will continue to grow in the coming years," assures Jérôme Lambert, geophysicist and historian for the occasion.

The website presenting the tsunamis is well-designed, accompanied by documents that helped identify the large waves lapping our coasts. These are mostly newspaper articles or eyewitness accounts that will delight lovers of local history. "It’s an instrument to draw public attention to the tsunami risk that could affect French coasts. Its compilation allowed us to discover previously unknown tsunamis along the Mediterranean coast between Marseille and Perpignan," the two researchers note in the latest issue of the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, where they present their "baby."

From storm surge to tsunami

Research on tsunamis in French territory only began after the 2004 Sumatra tsunami. The deadly wave from Japan on March 11th last year reignited interest. A research project called Maremoti is currently underway on this issue. Indeed, the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) has decided to reassess flood risks for the five EDF plants located on the coast: Blayais (Gironde), Flamanville (Manche), Paluel and Penly (Seine-Maritime), Gravelines (Nord).

The term "tsunami" was only adopted by European scientists in 1960, after the magnitude 9.5 earthquake in Chile that killed over 5,000 people. "Previously, we only spoke of storm surges," explains Jérôme Lambert, who had great difficulty sorting through archives to distinguish true tsunamis from false ones (storms, hurricanes...).

"Metropolitan France has no active volcanoes or major seismic faults. Our coasts are much more exposed to extreme meteorological events," emphasizes Jérôme Lambert.

Every 5,000 years

Things are complex. Several (small) waves were recorded between 1725 and 1850 in Cherbourg harbor, whose origin remains unexplained.

Without earthquakes, France can be exposed to cliff collapses or, worse, submarine slope failures like Storegga, which 8,000 years ago saw nearly 300 km of Norwegian coastline disappear into the sea. "We suspect such major events have occurred and will occur again," they say.

Can we protect ourselves against these events, which occur every five thousand years?" wonders Alexandre Sahal from Paris-I University.

Our so-called "free encyclopedia" discusses it:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremblement_de_terre_de_Lisbonne

(8.5 to 8.7 on the Richter scale)

The tsunami's propagation that destroyed the port of Lisbon (the epicenter was offshore)

A 15-meter wave along the southwest coast of Spain, a 20-meter wave in Morocco, and a 3-meter wave along southern England

The CNRS also discusses it:

http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/thema/750.htm

And a senator has issued a report recommending an early warning system for the Atlantic coast:

http://www.sudouest.fr/2011/03/20/un-systeme-d-alerte-au-tsunami-pour-l-atlantique-347951-5010.php

If the pumps and backup generators at Blayais are still vulnerable to flooding, we have serious concerns—and must find ways to inform our neighbors.

Have a nice day,

Pascall

Claude Allègre, former minister and plate tectonics expert, who claims France is not prone to seismic activity, absolutely needs to educate himself.

Another question:

• The Blayais nuclear plant operates on MOX, correct? This new fuel consists of 93% non-fissile uranium-238 and 7% fissile plutonium.

Therefore, nuclear plants fueled with MOX "run on plutonium" rather than uranium. This is a major change.

Why are we currently making this shift—present in 20% of our reactors—replacing enriched uranium fuel (3% enrichment) with another type containing plutonium? Is it for economic reasons, because the facilities at La Hague are "very efficient" at chemically extracting plutonium via a less expensive process, previously considered either a nuclear explosive or waste? In these MOX-fueled plants, it is the plutonium that produces energy through fission reactions. Since reactor cores are cooled by water, which acts as a moderator and neutron speed reducer, current reactors cannot operate as breeder reactors, producing large quantities of plutonium. Uranium-238, acting as a "diluent" in the mixture, captures neutrons and transforms into plutonium-239.

Does this MOX operation foreshadow a future transition to breeder reactors?

Does this MOX (mixed oxides: mixture of uranium-238 oxide and plutonium-239 oxide) not represent the loading method for future breeder reactors, whose deployment is currently stalled? Before discussing breeder reactors—where the moderator is the extremely dangerous substance sodium, which spontaneously ignites in air and explodes on contact with water—doesn't this MOX formula represent a subtle shift, a preparation for transitioning to the breeder reactor formula?

In short, is EDF seeking to increase "safety," or does it prioritize profitability and satisfying military needs for weapons-grade plutonium at the expense of French citizens' safety?

An investigation by Elise Lucet on hidden radioactive waste scattered across French territory. Broadcast on France 3 in "Pièces à conviction" on February 11, 2009.

To watch or rewatch:

The Scandal of Contaminated France.

http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/33642140

or

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tutm_2hpl3_.html

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tuzj_2hpl3_.html

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tv1f_2hpl3_.html

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tv4d_2hpl3_.html

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tv6c_2hpl3_.html

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tvfz_2hpl3_.html

MOX IS THE KEY

I'm just like you. I discover things gradually and relay information in this saga of stupidity and criminal irresponsibility. And you're going to learn some eye-opening facts.

Since the end of World War II, following de Gaulle’s wishes, French nuclear energy has been under the sign of military applications. France needed "its" bomb, "its" missiles, and "its" nuclear submarines to join the ranks of great nations...

At the following address, you'll find excerpts from a book describing French nuclear policy. The French edition was published in 1988 by l'Harmattan.

http://books.google.fr/books?id=m4u8rHTlp-kC&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=chinon+nucl%C3%A9aire+militaire&source=bl&ots=N3c7lgSm19&sig=fsgxlqZX5hqXXG6aB3rjXxe_gSI&hl=fr&ei=7dq2Tc30Dsqr8AOdjb1R&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEEQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=chinon%20nucl%C3%A9aire%20militaire&f=false

Continuation:

On page 45, it is stated that the fertile blanket of the Marcoule Phoenix breeder reactor produces weapons-grade plutonium. It generates between 75 and 100 kilograms of plutonium per year. The Phoenix breeder reactor was integrated into France’s military program, disguised as a civilian one. Since the end of World War II, the military has been calling the shots, with complete disregard for human lives.

You can still purchase a copy of this book if you still harbor some illusions. But let’s return to the crucial question of MOX. It was stated that MOX is a mixture of uranium oxides and plutonium oxides.

One might have thought this new fuel (Fukushima made us aware of its existence, since Japan’s Unit 3 reactor was fueled with it, manufactured in France) was a variant of conventional fuel based on uranium-235 at x%, "doped" with plutonium.

Not at all. MOX is a mixture of 93% uranium-238 and 7% plutonium-239!

We are confronted with a radical qualitative shift: the operation of "new reactors" using the fission of plutonium-239 rather than uranium-235. Why this pivot?

For two reasons.

• France possesses a large stockpile of plutonium from various sources, produced by its reactors, including weapons-grade plutonium in excessive quantities.

• France has recovered plutonium from spent fuel assemblies originating from its own reactors and from those sent by neighboring countries, arriving by entire trains. This recovery is carried out at the La Hague reprocessing plant.

• The French are "very advanced" in this field of chemical plutonium extraction, as our "friend" AREVA, a private company, explains to us.

The PDF where AREVA presents its impressive MELOX unit for plutonium recovery and conditioning.

And here is this two-page AREVA document:

Zoom in on the second panel. You will read:

"Batch" in English translates to "furnace load." This is... the devil's bakery. Each "little loaf" of plutonium represents 3 kilograms.

With a density of 19 grams per cubic centimeter, this corresponds to a cube measuring 5.4 cm on each side. The critical mass of plutonium was 8 kilograms; with three small loaves, you have enough for an atomic bomb. Each batch yields material for 200 atomic bombs.

The wonderful world of electricity (AREVA document)

Note that in these circuits, there is no room for waste.

April 28, 2011:

After concluding this first part with a joke, let's summarize.

Nuclear energy in France was born from the grandeur dreams of a general whose cynicism and Machiavellianism are no longer in question. Under his iron grip, France acquired nuclear weapons, built nuclear submarines (to deter whom now—extraterrestrials?). All these operations were carried out with complete disregard for civilian populations, both French and foreign, metropolitan, North African, and Polynesian.

Regarding storage, discreetly of byproducts from uranium ore processing available on French territory, refer to—or rewatch—this investigation by journalist Evelyne Lucet:

Contaminated France

http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/33642140

or

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tutm_2hpl3_.html

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tuzj_2hpl3_.html

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tv1f_2hpl3_.html

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tv4d_2hpl3_.html

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tv6c_2hpl3_.html

http://www.wat.tv/video/uranium-scandale-france-contaminee-1tvfz_2hpl3_.html

De Gaulle tested French weapons in the Sahara, and later in Polynesia, utterly destroying this dreamland region. When I have time, I’ll explain all this to you. Initially, since it was simpler to dig into limestone formed by coral accumulation, that’s where the first underground tests were conducted.

One day, a ground collapse detached a massive limestone slab, triggering a tsunami felt across nearby islands. Yet "studies had shown that...".

So engineers built anti-tsunami platforms on which they would stand during tests. I’ll need to scan the book "The Atolls of the Bomb" and upload the PDF; it was lent to me by Christian Nazet, a military engineer and former head of instrumentation at the atoll.

You’ll see the oceans of money spent so that the general could have his little bomb.

I return to this essential question of MOX, which in France has completely gone unnoticed. Do your own investigation. Ask around what MOX is. Most people don’t know. Even I only learned about it during the Fukushima disaster, discovering that Unit 3 would be fueled with a "new fuel" supplied by France. The emphasis in MOX lies in reusing plutonium produced in conventional reactors and recovered from waste imported from abroad into the La Hague reprocessing plant.

Understand one thing clearly:

The La Hague reprocessing plant was not designed to "reprocess waste," but to recover the 1% of plutonium resulting from fission in reactors and the transformation of uranium-238. This recovery process directly stems from military techniques used to extract plutonium for military purposes from the fertile blankets of plutonium-producing reactors.

Civilian operators simply improved upon this technique.

Previously, the military extracted plutonium from a fertile blanket made of uranium-238 subjected to neutron bombardment. The work involved separating "the wheat from the chaff," i.e., plutonium from remaining uranium-238. At worst, with enough patience, nearly all the 238 could transform into plutonium.

At La Hague, "civilian" operators now extract plutonium while simultaneously separating the waste mixture (not present in the fertile blanket system).

A word on the plutonium-producing reaction scheme.

A fast neutron strikes a uranium-238 nucleus and integrates into it.

To the left of the element symbol, two numbers appear. The top number represents the total number of nucleons (protons plus neutrons), and the bottom number the number of protons (which determines its chemical properties, since these depend on the "electron shell," and electrons are equal in number to protons).

Thus, a uranium-238 nucleus contains 238 - 92 = 146 neutrons.

After capture, an isotope of uranium with one more neutron is formed, which is unstable and decays into neptunium via beta-minus radioactivity. The half-life of this uranium-239 is 23 minutes. The reaction is:

The top number hasn't changed. There are still the same number of nucleons. But a neutron has transformed into a proton. Thus, the proton count increases from 92 to 93. This transformation occurs through emission of a negatively charged electron and an "antineutrino" (which we don’t care about since it escapes through anything).

Neptunium is not stable and transforms into plutonium-239 within two days, again via neutron-to-proton conversion in the nucleus and emission of an electron and antineutrino. The reaction is:

The number of nucleons remains unchanged, but the number of protons increases from 93 to 94.

Therefore, the chemical properties of plutonium-239 are

different

from those of uranium-238.

This allows for a

chemical separation

completely different from the separation of uranium isotopes 238 and 235, which had to be achieved by

centrifugation

on uranium hexafluoride compounds (UF6). It couldn’t be done chemically because these two uranium isotopes are

chemically identical.

Similarly, the three forms of hydrogen—light, deuterium, and tritium—though possessing 1, 2, and 3 nucleons respectively, are also

chemically identical.

The boundary between civilian and military nuclear has always been nonexistent. Thus, civilians have developed industrial-scale plutonium recovery techniques—not just from fertile blankets, but from waste willingly provided by neighboring countries, whose composition is:

97% uranium-238

1% non-consumed uranium-235

1% produced plutonium

plus various fission byproducts from uranium nuclei.

By recovering plutonium, AREVA manufactures "fuel" from the "ashes" of neighboring reactors. Using a chemical recovery method, they obtain highly pure plutonium, perfectly suitable for making bombs. But this plutonium is "safely" diluted in depleted uranium-238, derived from isotopic enrichment of ore via centrifugation. Current MOX contains 7% plutonium (the type sold to the Japanese), but future EPRs (European Pressurized Reactors) could contain up to 11%, constituting up to 100% of their fuel load.

First observation:

We have, without realizing it or being informed, transitioned from uranium-fueled reactors to plutonium-fueled reactors—infinitely more dangerous.

Second observation:

This chemical plutonium recovery technique could easily be applied to MOX. By selling MOX to anyone who wants it, France is engaging in a totally irresponsible dissemination of fissile material that could be recovered for bomb production.

We’re making a huge fuss because Iranians are laboriously developing an enrichment-by-centrifugation program. But the French sell nuclear fuel worldwide, whose plutonium can be chemically extracted. There’s indeed a certain expertise—where France is very advanced. But this knowledge will eventually become known to the entire world.

Third observation:

The French genius idea was the fast-neutron breeder reactor (Phoenix, Super Phoenix)—a reactor operating on MOX with a coolant fluid that doesn’t slow down neutrons, allowing the creation of new plutonium from the "diluent" uranium-238 via the above reactions (no longer needing a fertile blanket). To prevent neutron slowing and enable this "breeding," one must abandon light water as coolant (which slows neutrons) and use sodium (spontaneously flammable in air, explosive upon contact with water). This coolant circulates at 550°C, compared to 300°C for pressurized water, a substance that vaporizes at 880°C. Disadvantage.

In all these projects, no one—neither now nor before—has ever seriously considered:

• The intrinsic danger

• Waste issues

• Decommissioning costs

It’s sheer madness.

Fukushima was needed for the danger issue to resurface.

The French, CEA, AREVA, etc., are all disturbed by this unwelcome news. Everything was going so well. Indeed, there are several aspects to this shift toward third- and fourth-generation reactors.

This evolution reflects a deep symbiosis between civil and military sectors, on a foundation of complete irresponsibility.

The plutonium recovery technique at La Hague is merely a civilian adaptation of military techniques.

Along the way, breeder reactors produce weapons-grade plutonium.

With French nuclear energy privatized, the sole concern has become profit and revenue from exports (building reactors abroad, transferring know-how, selling plutonium "temporarily diluted in uranium-238 in the form of MOX").

When countries lack the non-discreet technology of centrifuge enrichment, it was possible to supply them with uranium enriched to 3% uranium-235 so they could play with a "civilian" reactor, promising not to use it as a plutonium-producing reactor. But if we sell them MOX, then the global spread of fissile material usable for military applications becomes inevitable. Thanks to French nuclear commercial policy, we witness the normalization of this spread. This is truly

Suicide, User Manual

Let’s move on to the EPR, the European Pressurized Reactor—the pinnacle of French expertise in pressurized water reactors. These are "new reactors," intended to replace older ones that have reached the end of their 30-year service life. A minor detail: we don’t know how to decommission these reactors, nor will we know how to decommission EPRs. AREVA simply focuses on expected profits. With these monsters (1600 electric megawatts), we could produce 22% more electricity. Cost: 6 billion euros. Waste management: no solution, we’ll see "later." Future decommissioning cost: same excuse, same punishment.

Before asking, "Should we exit nuclear energy?" we might first ask:

• Should we immediately abandon this extremely dangerous operation using plutonium instead of uranium?

Immediate response from irresponsible nuclear elites:

• Impossible. What would we do with our La Hague plant? Previously, we bought uranium ore from Africans and enriched it at Tricastin. But Tricastin is nearing the end of its life. We found this clever trick: using La Hague to make our fuel by recovering plutonium from other countries’ waste.

• But this leads to operating on plutonium. It becomes infinitely more dangerous, and involves uncontrolled dissemination of fissile material that could become bombs?

• Yes, but it’s more profitable. Otherwise, what? Close down La Hague? Then what about the employees? Also, you don’t want us to deploy breeders, despite the danger posed by sodium and the ton of plutonium beneath them. Yet we could reprocess fuel from our vast stockpile of depleted uranium, accumulated over 50 years of ore enrichment, which we don’t know what to do with—except for shells, which is limited. An intermediate solution is building EPRs.

• What’s the difference from classic pressurized water reactors?

• They are larger and more powerful. We gain in electricity output due to scale effects. And we’ve added an extra containment structure and a corium recovery system beneath, in case the core melts through the vessel, to avoid the "Chinese syndrome."

• That doesn’t sound reassuring, your thing? And it’s still feet in water, as usual.

• But it creates jobs, and we can export them, building them abroad. For instance, it was barely averted that we sold them to Gaddafi when he came to the Elysée. And we sell MOX. It’s a very promising market. It improves our balance of payments, right?

• In all this, what do we do with the old reactors at the end of their life?

• Well...

• And what about the waste from these new reactors?

• We’ll handle it the same way as previous reactors.

• You mean we’ll... store them?

• We’ll find a solution. Studies have shown that clay...

• But these new reactors, the EPRs, we’ll eventually have to decommission them too. Have you estimated how much that could cost?

• We’ll leave this debt to the next generation.

I return to the DCNS idea—the naval and submarine construction arm—of selling nuclear reactors for submarines, packaged as gifts, submerged 100 meters deep near a coast. The setup could power 100,000 households in a small coastal town. A sector where studies show demand for 200 units. So another promising market.

Transport of a Flexblue unit

This is the type of vessel designed to tow offshore oil platforms.

The same, submerged near a coastline

Those opposing the project are told by DCNS:

• The French naval construction sector, both military and civilian, is in crisis. Foreign, especially Asian, competition is too strong. Here, with these Flexblue units, we’d be leading and competitive. We could export massively.

• But isn’t this a bit dangerous?

• There’s no zero risk. And if we don’t start this project, we’ll have to lay off workers.

Will citizens eventually realize that the atomic world, globally and especially in France, is now nothing but a suicidal race, pushing costs onto the next generation, who will inherit unmanageable waste?

This is total irresponsibility.

Don’t believe those steering these projects are thinking or manipulated by some terrible, Machiavellian secret society.

Profit-driven individuals simply have an extraordinary ability to convince themselves their actions serve the general interest.

April 30, 2011:

I’ve added to the Fukushima disaster page what happened on April 28, 2011, in Alabama, devastated by a tornado (1 km wide, winds exceeding 300 km/h, 220 dead, 1,700 injured).

The electrical power supply for the pumping systems at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant was destroyed. The system had to switch to backup generators.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Browns_Ferry_hit_by_major_storms_2804112.html

As a reader, Frédéric Requin, pointed out, this tornado once again raises the danger of nuclear installations facing natural disasters.

At Blayais: unexpected hurricane. At Fukushima: tsunami of "unforeseen" intensity. Imagine an "unexpected" tornado—like one Obama said we’d never seen—passing directly through a nuclear plant, ripping off the ceiling of a pool room, sucking in water and fuel assemblies, scattering them across hundreds of square kilometers after pulverizing them...

At La Hague: 60 tons of plutonium in pools covered only by simple corrugated roofs (audio)

The Japanese, AREVA partners. Meeting client needs. Presentation of Reactor III plus

AREVA is able to offer

this new reactor

ATEMA1 to potential clients

Our range of high-safety, competitive, flexible reactor models

Plus: ATEMA1 has a corium recovery system in case of core meltdown

Stefan Von Scheidt speaks:

Listen to him. It sounds like a car salesman at an auto show.

http://www.areva.com/FR/notreoffre-418/atmea1-un-reacteur-a-eau-sous-pression-pour-tous-reseaux.html

A nuclear reactor brought down to the level of a car. When will we have "the reactor salon"?

Well, back to analyzing the "Complément d'Enquête" broadcast. You’ll see there’s still much to extract from this document.

In the next segment, the team visits a kind woman whose late husband worked at the plant. Full of energy, she starts by showing she keeps the brochure detailing behavior during a major nuclear incident within reach.

April 30, 2011

We move into rural France. The team visits Madame Beuzin, retired, former municipal employee in Brault-Saint Louis, the town nearest the plant. "She loves this plant." Her husband, deceased, worked there. She knows the procedures. Immediately she announces she always keeps her brochure handy in case of a plant accident:

• Here’s my little booklet, always at hand!

She enters her living room holding the colorful brochure issued by the Blayais plant’s communications department.

The famous brochure giving instructions to follow in case of a nuclear accident at the plant.

And Madame Beuzin adds:

• And here are the tablets that everyone should have at home.

The journalist asks her to check their expiration date.

• Their expiration date? Wait... uh... 2009...

• But do you think this would protect us? Me, no way! If it ever explodes, we’re all dead—don’t dream. You too, in Paris. Die today or die tomorrow—it’s the same.

• But better to die rich than poor.

Madame Beuzin is like millions of French people. She has no idea of the consequences a major nuclear accident could have. After irradiation, death doesn’t come immediately but after an agonizing ordeal. There’s a film titled "The Sacrifice," made in 2003 by director Valeri Tcherkof, retracing the lives of Chernobyl liquidators.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xeerd0_le-sacrifice-1-2_news

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xeernw_le-sacrifice-2-2_news

or:

http://www.cite-sciences.fr/francais/ala_cite/science_actualites/sitesactu/question_actu.php?langue=fr&id_article=6003&id_theme=4&prov=index

or:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xopal_tchernobyl_news

In this film, we follow their pitiful fate.

What did liquidator Anatoli Saragovietz say a few months before dying at age 39, thirteen years after the disaster?

• In November I lost sensation in my left hand, then my left arm, then my left side, then my legs became paralyzed. Doctors didn’t know what to do but denied it could be due to radiation.

I went to work. I drove the trolleybus and said nothing, because I had to feed my family. I drove with one hand and one foot. Until the day I lost consciousness and was brought home. Now I can’t walk; my legs don’t work anymore. At home I hold onto the wall.

I kept falling, and falling. My wife said: "Get into a wheelchair." I did, and here I am. A nightmare. The man is ruined—nothing left but resignation. I’m still young, 38. One could even say 60. What difference? Before, I was a man. Before, I walked. Before, I drove a car. But now I can do nothing. Since those years of Chernobyl, I’ve resigned myself.

Vodolajsky died. Migorok Klimovitch died. Lionka Zaturanov died. In short, only Kolka Verbytsky and I remained. Of the five of us, I’m left as a white crow.

Anatoli Saragovetz married in 1983. He had two children, a boy and a girl. In 1986 he was already at Chernobyl. Thirteen years later he died.

His widow recounts:

• He lay bedridden for six months, after which he began to decompose while still alive. All his tissues started to break down, to the point where his iliac bones were visible. I cared for him myself, following the doctor's instructions. Until the moment his heart stopped.

Everything was gone. His entire back was exposed, the bones bare. The femur joint could be touched with my hand. I'd insert my gloved hand and disinfect the bone. I extracted fragments of decaying, rotten bone debris. We consulted everyone we could question. They said: "We don't know this illness. We can only help reduce the suffering." Faced with the complete decomposition of the bone marrow, they were speechless. They couldn't help.

He begged to die quickly, so these sufferings would end. He said it hurt terribly. When I turned him from side to side, sometimes he gritted his teeth, other times he groaned. In reality, he didn’t scream—he endured. He had great willpower.

Anatoli Saragovetz

His widow and son

Anatoli lost his job when his health no longer allowed him to work. Not only was his sacrifice completely unrecognized, like that of tens of thousands of men, but he and his family had to go on a hunger strike just to obtain an apartment. The illnesses he suffered, which ultimately led to his death at age 38, were not recognized as qualifying for a pension.

Anatoli’s comrades, seen in the video, all died the same way—more or less quickly, decomposing while still alive. Including, according to his wife, a colonel who had arrived by helicopter in the days following the disaster and died very fast "in exactly the same way."

Nightmare...

Will Madame Beuzin watch this video?

4 a.m.

. This text has taken my sleep away. Here is the reaction of a reader:

Mr. PETIT

I’ve just read the supplementary information: the horrific end of this Russian man irradiated at Chernobyl... it’s heart-wrenching, deeply moving... I’d already read and seen so much about it...

How can we make your website known to all French people?

More is within us

Dominique DUTOUR

A simple excerpt from television archives:

The statements by Giscard d'Estaing, the great promoter of French independence through nuclear energy, at the time the Chernobyl cloud arrived:

• We must hurry to reassure the French...

Video (2 minutes)

Hulot had mentioned consulting the French people via referendum to find out whether they supported or opposed nuclear energy. At this point, we can have no illusions about Madame Beuzin’s response. Nuclear power in the region has created jobs and brought wealth.

Thanks to the plant, "she will die rich."

How would she react if she were made to read these lines? Probably with immediate mental censorship. She’d laugh foolishly, then push these images from her mind. Because "her plant, she loves it." After all, her husband worked his whole life inside it. There are limits to an individual’s capacity for self-questioning. How many engineers, technicians, workers have been in the nuclear industry, or still are? How can we imagine these lines reaching them and beyond prompting a complete reevaluation of their entire lives, their present or past careers?

Fukushima serves as a shock, a wake-up call. Paradoxically, Japan is closer to us than Ukraine.

Madame Beuzin has lived the history of nuclear power in her own way, bringing her comfort and ease at her level ("better to die rich than poor"). And I know countless people who have lived similar experiences, at different scales and levels. I think of Christian Nazet, a retired military engineer responsible for instrumentation at Mururoa, who once wrote to me: "If I had to do it again, I’d do it again." Patriotism? No. How could one even identify participation in France’s nuclear deterrent with patriotism today? Possessing nuclear weapons to defend the homeland? Who still believes in that bad fairy tale?

In the next part of this report, you’ll see how the octopus of the atom has taken root in the hexagon by buying consciences, lives, souls.

I return to a phrase I’ve already written on my pages:

If you continue to behave like calves,
you’ll end up at the slaughterhouse!

May 1st, 2011, 4 a.m.

I check my email.

"What do you think about free energy? Cold fusion? Machines with over-unity efficiency?"

I’m annoyed by these idle internet fantasies of amateur futurists. The solutions lie elsewhere—urgently. And when I’ve finished this desperate attempt to awaken people, I’ll move on to the second phase of my plan, with the help of my team of... retirees.

It’s simple. Solutions exist.

They’re right before our eyes.

Only, they require a fantastic leap backward in terms of science and technology, along with enormous investments equivalent to those spent during a war. A war against stupidity, greed, and incompetence. It’s not about "saving money" or "only saving money," or "living closer to nature" by eating vegetables from your garden (which you’d need to have first) and riding bicycles. We must completely change our socioeconomic system,
get out of the profit-driven logic.

I’ve heard François Hollande’s pitiful speech—another political puppet, no better than his ex-wife. This follows recent statements by Strauss-Kahn, director of the International Monetary Fund, "left-wing" but extremely wealthy, who recently praised Ben Ali for the rigor of his management...

Liberalism consists in saying:

• If private enterprises thrive, then the population must inevitably benefit. Let these private companies act freely, and we’ll move toward general well-being. Of course, these private companies follow a profit logic. But that must be so, because it’s what ensures their dynamism. Business leaders are only effective when they can enrich themselves. Otherwise, they become bureaucrats. Without this logic, countries sink into inefficient bureaucracy. This free-for-all, market conquest with its "flexibility," is a vibrant phenomenon. That’s where the future lies.

The Chinese eventually adopted this policy after half a century of Maoism and "leaps forward" that ended in famines. Remember that nonsense about "village metallurgies"? Deng Xiaoping is famous for saying: "It doesn’t matter what color the cat is, as long as it catches the mouse." We find a similar phrase by Adolphe Thiers, I believe, from the 19th century: "Get rich!"

So, in a logic of acquiring powerful, fast, and efficient energy production means, the Chinese are planning to launch dozens of nuclear reactors. I know China—not by having traveled there, but because my wife is Chinese. Yesterday she told me:

• The Chinese are incapable of developing a safe nuclear industry. Because in this country, corruption and bribery are everywhere, at every level. It’s an integral part of our economic rise and culture. We’ve just seen it with the construction of the high-speed trains, where corruption reached even the top of the pyramid—proven by the fact that the transport minister was involved. When I return to China, I’ll avoid taking a high-speed train because I’ll be scared.

Remember the film "The Chinese Syndrome." A 1979 movie by director James Bridges, starring Jack Lemon and Jane Fonda.

These trailer images will remind you of something. Fukushima was announced 32 years in advance.

The journalist who discovers she’s paid to smile, not to tell the truth

The diagram on the right of the image—doesn’t it ring a bell?

It’s the "boiling water reactor" from General Electric.

The same type that equips the six units at Fukushima.

The engineer Jack Godel, discovering unsettling vibrations in the cooling system without the control room

...

His investigation reveals that the plant was built against common sense.

The same thing happens daily in France.

The danger posed by nuclear energy is so great that for every metallic component of the plant, radiographs are taken of tubes and beams to detect even the slightest casting defect. By comparing radiographs of dozens of tubes coupled to pumps, Godel discovers that the supplier, in order to make substantial savings, took only one radiograph and duplicated it for the entire batch. Above is the dialogue between the engineer and the industrialist:

• Jack, we’ve always done it this way, and it’s always held. You’re not going to ruin everything, are you?

I can tell you one thing, and my wife fully agrees: in Chinese nuclear plants, that’s exactly how it will be. Among the thirty planned, there will always be one where someone will falsify safety controls just to pocket money. Just as, when an earthquake strikes, schools collapse on children because a developer used substandard materials.

The Chinese develop food technology? Periodically scandals erupt because a manufacturer replaced a component in baby formula with who knows what—plaster...

In coal mines, private operators force miners to work under unimaginable unsafe conditions—to produce and get rich. "Overall, the country’s health is improving. People live better." These new billionaires buy the most luxurious cars at Beijing’s annual auto show, cash on the barrelhead. Occasionally, when an accident occurs, some prefer to blow up tunnels to trap miners, so they don’t have to pay accident compensation.

Get rich...

A few children crushed or poisoned? That’s manageable. Miners suffocating to death? That gets forgotten, ignored if done well. At best, a few heads roll... until the next time. A "detail," as Le Pen might say, in a country with over a billion people. Statistically, we could say it’s normal. Just as it’s statistically normal, in any country, for mentally ill people to commit rapes and serial murders, X times a year, and that this can feed the crime sections of our "media."

But for nuclear energy, my friends, it’s a whole different story. It won’t be enough to cry in front of TV cameras like TEPCO’s CEO did, then bow 90 degrees in apology and resign. What happens when a "Chinese-style" nuclear plant—meaning automatically the largest in the world—goes live, as could have happened in France at Blayais in Gironde during the 1999 storm, if the hurricane had hit during high tide, when water levels were higher, and the four backup pumps had been drowned?

A Chinese leader might reply:

• Yes, but what else can we do? We have a vital need for electricity to develop and lift our people out of miserable underdevelopment?

My answer would be:

• You have vast deserts in the north. Install solar thermal power plants there, inspired by Spain’s Andasol project (which is fully operational, with heat storage in molten salts). You won’t need hundreds of hectares—you’ll need tens or even hundreds of thousands, "Chinese-style." Develop intelligent wind energy with systems lasting far beyond 20 years. It’s feasible. You know your Gobi Desert is a goldmine for wind power. Explore your geothermal resources. You know electricity can be transmitted over thousands of kilometers via direct current with only 3% loss per thousand kilometers. You know this better than anyone, since that’s how you’ll transmit power from the Three Gorges Dam to your coastal cities. Siemens is completing this for you, transmitting 5400 megawatts—just to begin.

• But... it will cost a fortune!

A few years ago, I was invited to Dubai due to my expertise in... submarines. Everyone knows these people swim in money. I went there not to help design private submarines for emirs—something I couldn’t care less about—but to try to tell these descendants of goat herders:

• Do you want to enter history, become the first country in the world able to do without oil? You live against a vast desert, which is an energy mine. You could desalinate seawater and grow tomatoes in the middle of the desert.

They stared wide-eyed and continued building their absurd 880-meter tower—the world’s biggest penis—by enslaving Pakistani or Chinese workers.

Hic jacet lepus: "Here lies the hare." Yes, we must spend massively—tens of billions of dollars, euros, roubles, yen, yuan, etc.—everywhere. Launch massive, low-tech projects on a global scale, benefiting even technologically underdeveloped countries. A policy that would erase unemployment problems and eliminate dependence on scientific and technical expertise. But a policy that would make short-term profits problematic, and thus could only be driven by state powers through a constellation of nationalized companies.

The cost? Equivalent to a third world war on a planetary scale.

But we must choose. Right now, humanity is playing its future—and that of its children.

The Chernobyl warning wasn’t enough. Here’s Fukushima’s warning. Will this suffice? It’s not impossible. The Americans continued their atmospheric nuclear tests until they found cesium-137 in their salads. Then they switched to underground tests. Now they’re finding it in California, "made in Japan." And given TEPCO’s incompetence and stinginess, there’s little chance it will stop.

We move on to the "horn of plenty" sequence.

Nuclear power plants are necessarily located in towns. The Blayais plant received approval from the commune of Braus & Saint Louis, with 1,400 inhabitants. At that time, in 1973, its mayor—himself a tavern keeper—said only 2% of households had sanitation. Now the municipality doesn’t know what to do with its money. EDF transfers 60 million euros to neighboring communes through the professional tax.

That’s 1,500 euros per resident for Braud Saint Louis, enough to hire sixty municipal employees.

• All this, these sports facilities—thanks to the plant

• The stadium, the three tennis courts...

• The swimming pool...

• With salaries, this pool runs a deficit of 1,000 euros per day.

• The skate park was paid for by the plant? That’s cool!

As a result, the municipal council decided to include the plant on the town’s coat of arms, to the left of the asparagus.

As can be seen, the report by the Complément d'Enquête team unfolds before our eyes the core of the problems. There remains to be addressed: the dismantling of aging plants and waste management. In both cases, we’ll see that nuclear elites have no viable solutions.

Next sequence: director Benoît Duquesne interviews Dominique Minière, head of all French nuclear power.

Dominique Minière, Director of Nuclear Power Production at EDF

Investment in plant construction, not including studies: 58 x 5 = 290 billion euros

Among the figures presented by Duquesne, one of the most significant is the average age of French nuclear plants: 25 years. Regarding nuclear energy, France must "abandon or double down." The exchange between Duquesne and Minière is interesting. It’s no longer a third knife like Etienne Dutheil, who seems perpetually to wonder, "Did I give the right answers that will please my bosses?"—a concern that has dominated his entire career, explaining his docility and rise.

There are those who seek a position. Once achieved, all energy is mobilized to stay in place (or climb higher if possible). Just as Etienne Dutheil’s mind holds no room for reflection, neither does Minière’s.

When men reach a certain level of power, one might be tempted—like Einstein speaking of military men—to wonder whether such individuals still need a brain, or if a cerebellum, the motor of reflex actions, wouldn’t suffice.

Trying to make Dutheil question the validity of nuclear energy is like trying to make a country priest reflect on the universality of his religious beliefs. (It reminds me of a conversation I had on a train with a young seminarian full of faith, whom I bluntly asked: "In your opinion, was Christ genetically compatible with the human species?"—a question that unsettled this good man.)

But destabilizing Minière is impossible. This man is a concrete block, a single crystal of ambition. He’s succeeded in building a thought system where his personal interest is conflated with the general interest. The fusion is total. For him, it’s not the heart that has melted—but the brain (or... both).

Duquesne questions him in the courtyard of a nuclear plant—i.e., in one of the cathedrals of the atom, like questioning a bishop in his domain. Duquesne’s questions leave Minière as cold as a marble or concrete block. He thinks: "Why did these stupid Japanese come and mess things up with their stupid disaster? Our business was going so well."

This will be the only time Fukushima is mentioned during the broadcast. Minière evades the question by uttering a falsehood:

• At Fukushima, the main cause of the disaster was the tsunami.

False. Look at this photo taken near the dock.

Visible surface crack near Unit 2 at Fukushima

Imagine the power of an earthquake that mocks all human "solid" constructions. Only flexible structures, capable of absorbing and dissipating energy non-destructively, can survive. And there, the Japanese are far ahead (especially regarding recent buildings). They manage to prevent 35-story buildings from collapsing during earthquakes by mounting them on rubber bearings similar to "cylinder blocks." This is the lesson from the Kobe earthquake in 1995, magnitude 7.2—80 times less powerful than Fukushima’s (magnitude 9).

Location of Kobe, far from tectonic plate boundaries

Effect of the Kobe earthquake on a building without seismic protection

It’s as if Japanese nuclear elites (who are also plutocrats) considered earthquakes to affect only residential buildings, which are therefore now designed to rest on flexible structures (otherwise buyers wouldn’t accept apartments).

Another hypothesis: the Japanese, having purchased American General Electric reactors, followed the plans exactly, without asking a single question. Indeed, when consulting the long technical manual for these U.S.-made boiling water reactors, among possible incidents, there is nowhere mentioned "in case of earthquake."

In Japanese nuclear power, they’ve remained stuck with the old rigid structure—the most vulnerable in an earthquake. We heard a French ASN (Nuclear Safety Authority) official say:

• We must not forget that Fukushima’s reactors rest on 8-meter-thick concrete slabs.

He wanted to reassure people about the possibility of "melted corium" penetrating the slab and reaching the groundwater.

This man is an idiot.

When a surface crack appears after an earthquake, it’s only the tip of a fissure that extends kilometers or tens of kilometers underground. It seems as if a "earthquake" box is missing from this ASN official’s mind. When earthquakes occur, it doesn’t matter whether slabs are 2, 8, or 25 meters thick.

It cracks...

There were earthquake-related damages at Fukushima in the form of cracks. Perhaps, in Minière’s mind, the "earthquake" box is also absent. These elements were likely missing from the curriculum of the prestigious school he attended.

This was also true in the minds of the Japanese who designed all the Japanese nuclear plants based on concrete, including the famous pools for storing fresh or spent fuel assemblies. If today the Japanese are continuously watering these open-air pools, it’s because they’re continuously leaking along cracks that are impossible to locate and seal. This spreads unlimited quantities of highly contaminated water into basements, which is then pumped out and stored in containers, waiting for...

Here’s the image of TEPCO workers:

TEPCO workers at work at the Fukushima site

When analyzing Minière’s speech, we find another statement where he says: "TEPCO people didn’t react quickly enough." Duquesne lacked presence of mind. He should have seized the opportunity and asked: "What should they have done, according to you?"

I went to the Reuters agency’s page to check the precise timeline of events.

On Friday, March 11, at 2:46 p.m., the magnitude 9 earthquake struck.

Immediately, all control rods in all reactors rose and inserted into their cores, stopping the fission reactions.

This is an automatic, programmed response triggered by a hydraulic system activated by seismographic sensors—no manual intervention required. This maneuver may have been carried out using backup batteries, as the earthquake damaged pylons and immediately cut off electrical power. This happened before the tsunami arrived. There remain the backup pumps, installed underground, as is standard in all nuclear reactors—including at Nogent-sur-Seine, where Duquesne interviews Minière.

Why underground? To be as close as possible to the reactor, minimizing pipe length.

TEPCO workers knew a mega-tsunami was coming within minutes. Before the wave hit the plant, were the backup pumps running? It’s uncertain. In fact, it appears that at Fukushima, nothing was designed to withstand an earthquake. Otherwise, those very pylons that collapsed and caused the power outage would have been mounted on elastic supports—a very simple precaution for any earthquake intensity.

What bends doesn’t break.

Earlier, we saw a TEPCO technician showing a crack running toward a kind of well. The next photo shows the inside of this well, where electrical conductors—damaged by a falling concrete block—are visible.

In this cracked well, electrical conductors damaged by a falling concrete block

Did the plant designers consider the vulnerability of the "nervous system" of the plant? Not likely.

Even before the tsunami hit, it’s possible that control rooms were plunged into darkness and generators failed to start—simply due to earthquake damage.

Minière says: "They should have reacted faster." How? A few dozen minutes after the quake, seawater flooded the diesel generator hall and drowned fuel tanks through their open air vents. Just as seawater had flooded the basements of the Gironde Blayais plant, drowning electrical motors, bending isolation doors, and flooding fuel tanks.

At Fukushima, seawater didn’t recede immediately but over several hours, giving it ample time to submerge everything below the plant’s floor level (the plant is located 10 meters above sea level).

Excerpt from TEPCO’s official report

When consulting the timeline of events reported by Reuters, we see that the first explosion (at reactor number 1) occurred twenty-four hours after the earthquake and flooding.

On Saturday, March 12, at 5:47 p.m. local time, an explosion occurred in the control room of reactor number 1.

On Sunday, March 13, midday, reactor number 3 exploded.

On Tuesday, March 15, reactors number 2 and 4 followed suit.

(Later, TEPCO technicians made holes in the ceilings of units 5 and 6 to prevent accumulation of explosive gas mixtures)

On Thursday, March 17: timid attempts to water the site with military helicopters (perhaps inspired by Russians at Chernobyl). Then the Japanese began using water from fire hoses on riot control vehicles brought to the site.

Returning to the question Duquesne could have asked Minière: "And you, what would you have done?"

Even when a reactor is "shut down," it continues to generate 6% of its thermal power. The power levels of the affected reactors at Fukushima ranged between 450 and 740 megawatts. When these units are shut down, the decay of fission products in the core still releases between 27 and 44 megawatts, heating the water inside the reactor, which has stopped circulating.

Steam pressure rises. All technicians can do is open valves to let the steam escape, flooding the maintenance room above the reactor.

But in the reactor vessel, water level drops. The parts of the fuel assemblies—prismatic elements 4 meters long—no longer covered by water, which can evacuate heat, are now exposed to steam, which conducts heat much less effectively. These elements heat up rapidly.

At a few hundred degrees, and quickly, zirconium cladding decomposes water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

By the time TEPCO technicians open the valves, this stage is already reached. It’s not just steam flooding the maintenance room—a closed space above the reactor containment—but an explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.

On Saturday, March 12: explosion in the control room of reactor 1

On Sunday, March 13:

The next day, reactors 2 and 3 did the same. With a big question mark over the exact nature of the explosion at unit 3.

When the temperature of the zirconium cladding reaches 2500°C, it releases its contents: fuel pellets, radioactive fission products, and plutonium in the case of unit 3, which was loaded with the dangerous MOX fuel.

• Mr. Minière, if you were in those people’s shoes, what would you have done?

The question was not asked. Too bad. But one can’t think of everything. One could have also said to this "nuclear policy" advocate:

• Let’s transpose this to the Blayais story. Imagine the consequences of the hurricane had been worse, and all four backup pumps had been flooded. What would you have done in those circumstances?

Higher up, Dutheil immediately dismissed the question. Minière would have done the same, because if you reach that point, catastrophe is assured—the Fukushima II. And this sword of Damocles hangs over 1,480 reactors worldwide:

• Shutdown of pumping units, including backup systems – Rising water temperature in reactors – Necessity to release steam to prevent explosion

• Declining water levels in reactors, exposing the upper part of the core (70% in unit 3 at Fukushima)

• Production of explosive hydrogen-oxygen mixtures through the decomposition of water molecules in contact with zirconium tubes heated above 1000°C

• At 2500°C, cladding rupture, release of contents.

The same scenario occurs in spent fuel pools, where used fuel elements also generate heat and where cooling water must circulate without fail. Moreover, these pools can hold 10 to 30 times the amount of material contained in a reactor core (accumulated over decades of operation).

Dusquesne is right to ask Minière, "Isn't this playing with the devil?"—a question all the more pertinent since Minière responds, "There is no such thing as zero risk."

We would then hear this high-level nuclear technocrat utter things that would make your jaw drop:

• The older the reactors get, the safer they become.

He even goes so far as to claim that the Fessenheim reactor, one of the oldest, is one of the safest,

because advances in calculation codes allow better assessment of how this unit would respond to an earthquake.

He forgets to mention that reactor cores lose their structural integrity due to neutron bombardment, which degrades their steel (the same applies to concrete, which becomes... porous, as we’ll see later). But perhaps this parameter had been overlooked in the calculation codes used by "the authors of sophisticated studies." And who knows the exact resistance of the Fessenheim reactor vessels under pressure (the vessel of reactor number 3 had indeed "cracked").

But Minière displays an unshakable confidence. He talks about creating a kind of nuclear task force—groups supposedly ready to intervene in case of a crisis, composed of "experts in the unpredictable." You know the motto:

• If it’s possible, we do it right away.

• For the impossible, we ask for a delay.

Translating this to nuclear energy, one could write:

• Facing the foreseeable, we react immediately.

• For the unforeseeable, we ask for a delay.

Earlier, I reproduced an animation showing the Fukushima reactors pumping water. Let’s note in passing that no progress has been made in the strategy adopted (as of May 2, 2011—fifty-two days after the disaster). Although authorities claim "the situation is under control," they are still spraying water everywhere (now using powerful concrete pumps), and this water, carrying massive amounts of radionuclides from fission, has become highly radioactive, flowing everywhere, flooding basements, which are then pumped and sent to storage tanks.

We remain in a state of provisional measures.

As Michio Kaku pointed out in a recent interview, on-site there are about a hundred TEPCO technicians. Whatever they do, these people accumulate the effects of ambient radiation. Kaku says it would be smarter to bring in the army (100,000 men) and rotate teams as soon as they’ve absorbed their maximum dose—100 millisieverts.

But the Japanese government has found a solution. It has raised the maximum allowable dose to 250 millisieverts.

No one asked, or will ask Minière, the question:

• What should have been done at Blayais if the four backup pumps had been disabled by flooding?

His implicit answer is that "this is unthinkable." Throughout the interview, he insists on the positive aspects of incidents and accidents, which "always allow progress toward greater safety."

Minière is the French nuclear Shadock.

Dominique Minière, Director of Electronuclear Production at EDF

Articles on seismicity are generally better written in the English Wikipedia

(but many articles on the French side are actually just translations of English ones)

P-waves

(surface waves, propagating either linearly or radially from an epicenter)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-wave

S-waves

(torsional waves)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-wave

Rayleigh waves

(comparable to ocean waves)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_wave

Love waves

(same, with "discrete" propagation along fault lines)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_wave

These pages contain very illustrative animations.

It would be naive to think that earthquakes only occur at the friction points of large tectonic plates, as was the case with the magnitude 9 quake that originated 240 km off the coast of Fukushima.

The Kobe earthquake

, magnitude 7, had its epicenter at shallow depth... beneath the port of Kobe.

The epicenter of the 1995 Kobe earthquake (6,500 dead):

far from any tectonic plate boundary

Geologically, this quake occurred on a relatively young fault line that had never shown significant seismic activity. Thus, the Kobe region was considered safe compared to other parts of Japan.

The damage to buildings was due to the fact that this quake produced strong vertical amplitudes (up to one meter).

The 55 nuclear reactors installed in Japan over the past three decades are a true sword of Damocles. One could consider that, compared to what could happen if an earthquake had its epicenter closer to reactors (especially those loaded with MOX fuel, thus containing plutonium!), the Fukushima episode was "a kind of free warning" about what could happen in an unpredictable future. The radiological consequences of this disaster have not yet been fully assessed.

TEPCO sincerely apologizes

Given the consequences of a major nuclear accident, it was a grave inconsistency for Japanese decision-makers to opt for a nuclear electricity policy (before the disaster, 68% of Japanese people supported nuclear energy, which had been presented as "clean energy"). A complete reversal of course and accelerated development of renewable energy sources are now imperative.

Building nuclear reactors in a country subject to chronic seismic activity is like placing glass bottles filled with highly toxic substances on a shelf.

The April 16, 2011 episode of Complément d'Enquête continues with the question of radioactive waste storage.

A good episode of "C'est pas Sorcier," where toxicity of elements and various waste types and storage systems are well explained:

1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SOWCy9N8o4&feature=related
2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGCgqecxBUQ&feature=related
3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNxAuntjsow&feature=related

In passing, here is a map

of French sites, nuclear plants, and storage facilities.

58 reactors in total. 12 reactors offline, 2 currently being dismantled (...).

In France, in a forest in Aube, at Soulaines (map), work has begun on a site that will consist of 500 hollow concrete blocks, 8 meters high and 50 cm thick.

Like you, I discover the world’s largest nuclear necropolis, at Soulaines in the Aude

A slideshow on Le Monde’s website


The nuclear cemetery

Here, I’d like to reverse the order of presentation. A preliminary question is: "Why do we have nuclear waste, and in what quantities?"

Imagine the scale of nuclear power plants. There’s the reactor vessel containing the core—six meters in diameter, fifteen to twenty meters high, twenty centimeters thick, made of steel. First, you might think of fuel elements as waste. Then all the components that make up the "ash" of this modern steam machine. Poisonous ash, highly radioactive. But all this constitutes only a tiny fraction of what we inherit when we want to dismantle and deconstruct a power plant.

Here, we plunge into complete absurdity.

Indeed, only two percent of the components of such a plant will be recoverable... recyclable.

We are in absolute non-recyclability, ultra-polluting. Simply because practically everything inside a nuclear plant is subjected to neutron bombardment and acquires

induced radioactivity.

Radiation creates, within the smallest pipe, the smallest beam, the smallest valve, through transmutation, nuclei that did not exist in their original components and turn out to be radioactive. In the documentary, you’ll hear a young woman talking about "short-lived radioactive waste," and you’ll learn then that she’s referring to elements that will remain radioactive and dangerous for "only three hundred years."

There are wastes that will remain radioactive for much longer periods—hundreds of thousands of years!

What objects?

EDF has been working on decommissioning a power plant for twenty years, and during that time, only 50% of its components have been "processed."

Processed how?

Look at these images. Two technicians are busy cutting a long, heavy steel beam into 50-centimeter sections.

Here’s a heavy I-beam being sawed through by two workers.

And here’s the same image, with labels.

Here, a worker grabs the cut section of the beam. On the right, the saw has tipped over.

Two workers take hold of the cut section

and place it into a container, along with other similar pieces.

The commentary tells us that decommissioning a power plant is extremely long and can stretch over... 35 years, or even more. The plant where this team took the images was shut down in 1991, and since then, the "deconstruction" work (presented by EDF as a model) has never stopped. In twenty years, half the work has been completed. And this is one of France’s smaller plants—next to which the EPRs we plan to build would seem like monsters.

Here, you see workers handling metal fragments with their bare hands. These fragments are only slightly radioactive, but too much to release into nature or recycle. It’s impossible to reuse this metal in a foundry.

Other wastes are far more emissive, and those managing them cannot approach them for long. Here, you see a heavy steam exchanger where, during the reactor’s entire lifetime, radioactive water circulated to extract heat.

This exchanger must be decontaminated (a task taking months).

• This exchanger contains contaminated water.

Then it will be cut up (...). Beyond that, everything you see in the image must also be "deconstructed," cut into small pieces—everything in the background, including the heavy crane that was used to place this exchanger.

A little further in the Complément d'Enquête dossier, we visit the Breton plant of Brennilis, shut down for 25 years. For a quarter of a century, they’ve been trying to dismantle it.

The dismantling of the fuel storage center and a few auxiliary buildings has already cost half a billion euros.

The reactor building itself remains intact. No one knows how to begin tackling it.

In three decades, EDF has not managed to dismantle a single one of its reactors, yet it wants to build dozens more!

The dismantling of France’s 58 reactors represents 100,000 tons of waste to be stored "somewhere," or an average of 2,000 tons per reactor.

Long-term radioactive waste (lasting hundreds of thousands of years) amounts to 482 tons.

Producing electricity with nuclear energy means spending 5 billion euros per reactor built. Then, thirty years later, dismantling each of these units is equivalent to cutting a medium-sized warship into pieces small enough to fit into 200-liter drums. Afterward, one must handle these dangerous wastes—whose toxicity exceeds the lifespan of the human species—transport them, store them, and ensure their monitoring over an absolutely unlimited duration.

At Brennilis, a start to dismantling has already cost half a billion euros.

How much will it cost to dismantle Fessenheim, Super Phénix? And how?

French power plants have an average age of 25 years. Many are nearing the end of their lives and will need to be dismantled. Has anyone estimated the cost of such an operation for the 58 reactors currently in existence?

When we talk about the "low cost of nuclear electricity production," are we accounting for the cost of dismantling, waste storage, and long-term monitoring?

I haven’t seen these figures.

The atomic barons are ready to deploy EPRs, fourth-generation reactors, waiting for the next ones. But who will pay for the "deconstruction" of all this? Our descendants, I suppose. A fine inheritance.

It’s time to build a large-scale alternative project to escape this madness!

In the section on waste management, you’ll discover the continuation of this widespread irresponsibility.

Waste is placed in concrete, and the whole thing is called a "package." Unfortunately, over time, this concrete becomes... porous and lets small molecules escape, such as tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, a link in a decay process. Originally planned to produce zero nuclear pollution, the legislation is now forced to backtrack and decide that this waste site must not release radionuclides at a rate that could endanger public health.

The best concrete qualities cannot last more than 120 years. No painted steel can ensure indefinite containment and eventually oxidizes. All containers dumped into the sea from 1950 to 1980 have oxidized, degraded, and released their contents into the ocean. Absorbed by microorganisms and fish, these eventually end up... on our plates.

Soulaines: you’d think you’re in a psychiatric hospital. But no, you’re in France. In the necropolis of the third millennium, barrels are stacked. One layer of barrels, one layer of concrete.

The report will take you to other sites where underground storage is being considered for long-lived waste—hundreds of thousands of years. All at 450 meters depth, in a clay seam, where tunnels will be dug and a robot will push, one by one, the deadly barrels, forming the devil’s vintage.

Indeed, tons of spent fuel or waste from "reprocessing" are waiting in large pools in various locations, including at La Hague in the Cotentin.

Under clear water, the venom

Bure, located on the border between Meuse and Haute-Marne.

Tunnels dug 490 meters deep,

in a 60-meter-thick clay layer

Jacques Delay, champion of "geological storage"

• All our studies have shown this so far...

• Radioactive packages will be pushed into this casing, carved into the clay seam.

Expensive drilling, new studies. Sophisticated equipment.

For nuclear energy, nothing is too beautiful, nothing is too expensive.

One might think the choice of this storage site stems from meticulous geological studies. But another criterion comes into play: regional depopulation. It’s expected that in a sparsely populated area with high unemployment, acceptance of the site’s installation will be easier to obtain.

A way to counter this policy, involving heavy investments, would be to demand the construction of solar thermal power plants in regions where hectares lie unused. These plants (1 megawatt per hectare in sunny regions, with energy storage in molten salt) would provide energy and jobs, reviving regions on the brink of complete desertification.

Simple observation:

Converting the Cararache site (1,625 hectares) into a solar power plant could produce 1,625 megawatts of solar-thermal energy—enough to power a large part of the region. Plus, the existing personnel and equipment could be reused.

The commentator adds, returning to the Bure site:

• This laboratory, intended solely for experimentation, has already cost one billion euros. An additional thirty-five billion would be needed to dig a site capable of housing all French waste for 100,000 years, and we’re asked to believe everything is under control. We’re facing engineers who think the Earth will never move. But before them, their German nuclear colleagues believed they had found the ultimate solution, storing 130,000 barrels of radioactive waste in the 1970s in the Hasse salt mine.

Geologists assured them the region had been stable for millions of years and that salt was the best insulator.

But this storage has become a real disaster, a time bomb.

• Look: the mountain is working. The pillars are twisting under pressure. The mine has shifted six meters and threatens to collapse. The salt has cracked. Movement reaches ten centimeters per year. Water is seeping in. This water, now radioactive, accumulates in pools. The barrels are no longer airtight. In the end, their contents will pollute the groundwater. These barrels will have to be removed.

May 5, 2011: I had promised myself to add this, even though it wasn’t mentioned in the Complément d'Enquête broadcast.

It’s interesting to look back at the issue of waste. We know the story of the bomb, beautifully told in a film where Paul Newman plays General Groves, the organizer of the Manhattan Project. A film titled The Shadow Makers

(the masters of the shadows)

At sites like Hanford, on the edge of the Columbia River, deep in the desert, several plutonium-producing reactors were built, their cores cooled by river water. At the time, considering both ignorance of radiation effects and the urgency of war, Americans simply drew water, used it to cool the cores, then dumped it back into the Columbia, near where the many secret facility workers swam to escape the scorching heat.

Later, it became necessary to manage massive amounts of radioactive waste. Huge concrete ellipsoidal containers were built. But decades later, these thick enclosures became leaky. Work had to be undertaken to extract their poisoned contents. The riverbanks and bed, where salmon spawn and are later consumed, are irreversibly polluted.

May 4, 2011: The face-to-face between Benoît Duquesne and Dame Kusciusko-Morizet

The program continues with a face-to-face between Duquesne and Dame Kusciusko-Morizet, Minister of Ecology, Sustainable Development, Transport, and Housing (what a range of responsibilities packed into such a small head!). ...

This interview will be quite brief. The minister won’t appear particularly brilliant.

Duquesne and Dame Kusciusko-Morizet, not quite at ease.

Minister of Ecology, Sustainable Development, Transport, and Housing

Video sequence (2 minutes)

Duquesne mentions attempts at decommissioning, such as at the Brennilis plant, noting that the initial estimate was 25 million euros, but after 25 years it had risen to 500 million euros, and that only one to two percent of the 2,000 tons of waste from a decommissioned plant can be recovered, "recycled."

A well-rehearsed response from the minister.

• These are the first plants. Technologies and methods are still developing.

You’ve seen the images above, showing two hardworking workers laboriously sawing a massive steel beam. How can one imagine that "more refined methods and techniques" could reduce the cost of these "dismantlings" by a factor of twenty? Sawing these beams with lasers? This woman is clearly playing us for fools. She responds with words. The most elegant expression is:

• There needs to be greater transparency in this chain.

That’s quite a line. Anyway, when politicians are caught red-handed in absurdity and waste, they invariably reply that these things weren’t explained well enough to the French people.

The Blablatron is now in motion.

Decades ago, the late Escarpit, linguist and humorist, published a delightful book titled "Le Litteratron." When he wrote it, computing was still in its infancy. The theme was that a computer, fed enough data, could generate language effortlessly (just as, later,

my Logotron

could create tens of thousands of neologisms).

I regret that I can no longer find (unless it exists and I’m unaware) versions of the software created in the 1970s called "Eliza." This program simulated a non-directive behavior (like a psychoanalyst) by always reflecting your questions back at you, like a tennis wall returning balls. If it no longer exists, someone should create a JavaScript version of it.

There’s a program to write—a POLITOTRON. If I had time, I’d write it.

Let’s summarize.

The software was designed so that the user would believe they were interacting with a real human being.

May 5, 2011:

I’m told versions of this software exist in French. But they’re less effective than the original 1970s version. This needs improvement. You can still check:

http://eliza.levillage.org/index.html

Apart from that, my readers point out:

A random generator of philosophical texts:

http://www.charabia.net/gen/gendisp.php?gen=1

A presidential speech generator:

http://www.presidentielle-2007.net/generateur-de-langue-de-bois.php

Example of a "dialogue" with Eliza (according to the 1970s program):

User:

Hello, I’d like to talk to Henri.

Eliza:

Why are you particularly interested in talking to Henri?

User:

Because I want him to return the video cassettes I lent him.

Eliza:

But in this request, aren’t you showing your sense of ownership?

User:

But of course, it’s only natural that I want to get back what’s mine!

Eliza:

Calm down. Why do you consider this action normal?

User:

What kind of behavior is this? Pass me Henri, for heaven’s sake!

How can a simple computer program generate responses that create the illusion of a real interlocutor?

Eliza was a very primitive program, running on a basic Apple II (clocked at 2 megahertz, with 48 KB of RAM). In fact, the program only recognized sequences, or "strings," of characters. It extracted other strings and returned them to you. Re-examine this dialogue and imagine changing the questions (typed on the keyboard):

User:

Hello,

I’d like

RSDFHYU.

Eliza:

Why are you particularly interested in

RSDFHYU?

The computer recognizes the character string "I’d like" and returns... whatever follows, namely the string RSDFHYU.

Let’s continue.

User:

Because

I’d like him to return

NHDCOP

that I lent him.

Again, the program recognizes the blue text and formulates a pre-programmed response:

Eliza:

But in this request, aren’t you showing your sense of ownership?

User:

But of course,

it’s only natural that

KMFEDSXB!

The program detects that the sentence ends with an exclamation mark, interpreting it as a sign of nervousness from the interlocutor.

Hence the first part of the response:

Eliza:

Calm down.

Then, after detecting the character string "it’s only natural that":

the program displays:

Eliza:

Why do you consider it normal that

KMFEDSXB?

User:

What kind of behavior is this

stupid

. Pass me Henri,

for heaven’s sake!

The underlined character strings suggest the interlocutor, enraged, has made some linguistic slips. Hence the following reprimand:

Eliza:

If you can’t keep your cool and remain polite, let’s end this conversation.

With today’s computer capabilities, multiplied by millions, it would be possible to create a program far more sophisticated than Eliza, capable of recognizing a greater number of character strings, language segments, and delivering responses that would make the deception harder to detect. Re-examine the exchange between Duquesne and this woman, and transpose it:

Duquesne:

I’d like to cite some figures. The WXCVBGY, initially budgeted at 25 million, saw its budget explode to 500 million.

Dame Kosciusko-Morizet:

I must admit that the issue of WXCVBGY is a major concern. But we’re still at the beginning. Methods and techniques will improve.

Duquesne:

Don’t you think the government is making a mistake by persisting in this PMKGTFD sector?

Dame Kosciusko-Morizet:

Above all, there’s a communication problem. The government hasn’t communicated enough about PMKGTFD. What matters is greater transparency in this PMKGTFD sector.

Robotics have made great progress. Duquesne was caught off guard. He wasn’t facing the minister, but a robot—or, in other words, a woman whose brain was disconnected. Only the brainstem was functioning.

This is also true for many current political figures. Moreover, sometimes wires touch, and they make slips that betray programming bugs or echoes of earlier programming, like "fellatio," "dildo," or "shit gas."

From today onward, you will listen more attentively to political speeches in order to detect the underlying programmatic elements.

Eliza had ready-made phrases whenever the program encountered a question it was unable to analyze. Among these standard sequences, one was particularly successful:

• Tell me about your mother....

Transposed into the political world, this would become:

• This is a good question, and I thank you for asking it....

The French people were in stitches when they discovered the content of François Hollande's first electoral speech, unknowingly echoing the same themes used by Nicolas Sarkozy during his campaign. But perhaps the Socialist Party's first secretary had used the same automated speech generation program?

Programmers, to your keyboards. Create software for automatically generating political speeches. You'll be surprised at how easy it is, how rudimentary the underlying computer structures are—within reach of any high school student (if readers create such software in JavaScript, I will feature them on my website as a demonstration of feasibility, under the theme "Become a politician. You'll see how easy it is. Anyone can do politics," just like cooking, as Master Gustot said in the animated film Ratatouille).

In his book, Escarpit had even imagined the first entirely computer-generated electoral speech.

I submit my personal attempt:

-Frenchmen, Frenchwomen. At a time when purchasing power is eroding, when gloom is settling in, when despair seems to be gaining ground among some, bewildered and tempted by abstentionism, I say to you: this is not the time for surrender, quite the opposite. The French have always, throughout their history, drawn upon inner resources that enabled them to rebound from situations we have known—situations that seemed infinitely more desperate than they are today. I therefore invite the French to rebound with me. Together, let us rebound, focus our energies to build a world our children can be proud of. Let us invent a new future. Everything remains to be done, to be imagined. Join the party of rebound.

Readers immediately sent me links to several existing generators that concretely realize Escarpit's idea from 40 years ago:

http://www.presidentielle-2007.net/generateur-de-langue-de-bois.php

There are also generators for scientific articles, complete with graphs, references, etc.

You enter your name as author and click "Generate."

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

Here is a generator of political jargon:

http://narcissique-corp.fr/generateurs/langue-de-bois/

It seems these language machines could be improved to the point where one could no longer distinguish their output from Sarkozy's speeches.

If you re-listen to Madame Kosciusko-Morizet’s speech, you’ll find some outright absurdities.

For example, she claims that dismantling nuclear power plants is an insoluble problem, then brings up the energy required to produce photovoltaic sensors and the issue of... dismantling solar farms.

This is truly utter nonsense.

When she speaks about solar energy, it seems she only knows about photovoltaic cells and is completely unaware of large-scale solar thermal energy (Andasol). The two are by no means mutually exclusive—let us hasten to add.

Urgently, we must produce a complete description of vast French regions, on the verge of desertification, equipped with solar thermal power plants (which would put an end to the argument about importing photovoltaic cells from Asia), capable of producing hundreds or even thousands of megawatts, storing energy in buried, insulated volumes made of molten salts heated to 400°C, equipped with heat exchangers, gas turbines, alternators, and current rectifiers, to enable long-distance transmission via direct current (and underground, thus no longer damaging the landscape as do the 250,000 existing high-voltage pylons). This in no way excludes wind power (slightly rethought), marine current energy, or geothermal energy.

Did you know, for example, that Iceland could infinitely exploit its geothermal potential by exporting electricity to northern England via a continuous, high-voltage underwater conductor?

The Red Gold, so to speak. Before Iceland exhausts its geothermal resources, we will have to wait a very long time.

Such installations, if implemented on French territory, should be considered part of the country's infrastructure, just like hydroelectric dams—and there will be no need to "dismantle" them.

Clearly, here is an "ecology minister" who is doing exactly the opposite of what her role demands.

She defends the most polluting enterprise imaginable: nuclear energy, clinging to fallacious arguments and, like Allègre, flaunting ignorance and incompetence.

That said, panic reigns in these high circles. Recently, Madame Kosciusko-Morizet had "specialists," "experts," and "official services" draw up a map of seismicity in France. Here it is, updated:

Updated seismicity map of France, requested by Madame Kosciusko-Morizet.

At the top: Gravelines, epicenter of a strong earthquake in 1580. Standing on this historic site, President Sarkozy recently, at the beginning of May 2011, delivered this historic phrase:

• No to seismicity!

It appears to be a map of "macro-seismicity," which does not account for events occurring or likely to occur on a smaller scale. Pertuis, where I live, is just a few cables away from the village of Lambesc, completely destroyed by a magnitude 6.2 earthquake in 1909.

The Lambesc earthquake, 1909 (46 dead)

"France is not a country subject to seismicity" (Claude Allègre, April 2011)

Damage spread to neighboring towns, such as Salon de Provence (today with 40,000 inhabitants).

Damage in the neighboring town of Salon de Provence

"Regional micro-seismicity"

My own home had to be seriously repaired (chaining) following this memorable event.

By watching the rest of the video, you will confront the government’s policy of restraint regarding solar and wind energy, which will only intensify in the current situation. We must urgently rescue the nuclear industry.

Journalist Benoît Duquesne now investigates the photovoltaic sector. In 2009, President Sarkozy made firm statements indicating government support for this sector.

Sarkozy during his 2009 visit, followed by a recorded declaration:

• France decides to invest in photovoltaics, long-term and sustainably.

Video sequence

Many companies invested heavily in this sector. Business owners took on massive debt.

"Solar farm"

To encourage development, the state announced it would buy back generated electricity at a price higher than market value. The sector therefore grew rapidly. But in December 2010, a sudden brake. The state reversed its commitments. By early 2011, the photovoltaic sector was simply collapsing, in silence and general indifference.

Business owners driven to bankruptcy, heavily indebted, who had believed in these promises

Useless protest letters to the minister, citing the noble declarations of the Grenelle de l'environnement.

We are not "governed by elites," but by oligarchies and incompetent politicians who lie daily and serve above all the powers of money and dominant lobbies.

Benoît Duquesne then questions Cécile Duflot, who confirms that this measure is indeed intended to protect the nuclear sector, which has received 98% of research funding in energy over recent years, compared to only 2% for renewable energies.

The argument advanced by Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet—about the cost of photovoltaic cells, materials, and their lifespan—can easily be circumvented by mentioning "solar thermal" energy, as developed in Spain at the Andasol installation, where energy is captured simply by metal mirrors.

The Andasol site in Andalusia: 50 megawatts

Mirrors at Andasol

Such an installation is not "experimental" but fully functional. Its mirrors produce a fluid heated to 400°C, which powers a turbine and alternator system identical in all respects to those powering a nuclear reactor core.

At the center of the installation: tanks of molten salts permanently storing 30% of the produced energy to meet nighttime demand, capable of sustaining full production for seven hours when skies are overcast. The alternators generate high-voltage current injected directly into the grid.

We plan to visit this installation to assess the design and cost of expanding such a solar plant to 1500 megawatts—producing as much as a nuclear power plant. In depopulated regions, space is not lacking anywhere.

Well, that concludes this analysis of the excellent "Complément d'Enquête" broadcast on April 16, 2011. We will now move on to developing a program we might call

Europe - Energy - Ecology

"The Three E's" (That sounds good, doesn't it?)

Then all that would be missing is a candidate—or a candidate—for the presidential election.

Hulot? No. He had already alienated pro-nuclear polytechnicians like Jean-Marc Jancovici after being booed in Strasbourg at the end of April 2011.

The carbon tax no longer seems to be a selling point.

May 10, 2011:

Bernard Bigot (Administrator of the CEA):

Nuclear energy relies on trust...

Radioactivité sans Frontières

Solar thermal energy

June 12, 2011:

Before writing anything, I want to reproduce this image, which alone sums up the entire distress of the Japanese people in Fukushima:

It's going badly there. We're starting to realize. I lack time to expand on this current issue, completely obscured by official French media. The TEPCO company is slowly revealing its lies. We now know that reactor cores entered meltdown within hours after the emergency systems were flooded—stupidly installed underground (as in France's Blayais nuclear plant in Gironde. See above). It would have sufficed to position diesel generators and power units a few tens of meters higher, on the nearby hill, as engineers at TEPCO and all other plants did when installing their reactors: right at water level.

Stupidity, incompetence, greed.

The demonstration is no longer needed. What should be done now? No one knows, and three months have passed without any measure commensurate with the situation being taken.

I've mentioned possible actions—deploying remotely controlled heavy-duty pontoon cranes (50 meters) to clear debris blocking access, especially to pools exposed to the open air. This would require billions of euros or dollars. But no one is doing it, nor will they. Not the private sector, nor corrupt government officials in this puppet regime, subservient to financial powers. And here you touch upon the philosophy of this globalized liberalism.

These people are there only to collect dividends.

But when things turn catastrophic, they all flee, leaving the bill to taxpayers.

A heavy operation could have been attempted, very costly, aimed at extracting at least the contents of these pools—transporting them elsewhere and submerging them in large storage basins big enough that active cooling would not be necessary. Instead, TEPCO workers have been spraying water for three months. This water becomes contaminated upon contact with radionuclides released by the melted fuel assemblies, and is now flooding the plant’s basements. Because reactors and pools have turned into the mythical Danaïdes’ barrels. This water also seeps through cracks in the eight-meter-thick concrete foundation—very likely fractured in many places by the earthquake—and slowly, insidiously, irreversibly contaminates the Pacific Ocean.

Should we block the entrance to the port of Fukushima, then pump seawater from this small bay to allow sealing and concreting the coastline at that point?

But would that be enough? No one knows what lies beneath the reactors. Remember, at Chernobyl, engineers and technicians from the Kurtchatov Institute approached the molten core of reactor No. 4 by tunneling from the adjacent unit. There, they drilled through the graphite and reached the central part, creating an opening with a plasma torch. It was there they measured the scale of the disaster: the temperature of the corium, highly concentrated and thus critical, was so high that nothing could resist it, and very soon, after penetrating the concrete slabs, it would come into contact with accumulated water in the plant's basements.

Another decision was then made: to sacrifice firefighters who went in to drain this water. Then to dig at a frantic pace, in 50°C heat, a tunnel to position themselves under the reactor and pour a thick 30x30 meter concrete slab, upon which the corium, as it flowed, would see its criticality drop.

Pumping water and stopping the corium's descent aimed to prevent a monstrous explosion when the corium came into contact with water—first in the basements, then in the groundwater located just tens of meters below the reactor—something that would have rendered Ukraine and Belarus uninhabitable, contaminated the Dniepr and the Black Sea.

We don’t know what the future holds for Fukushima. A process like this may be underway in a region of very high population density. The slab is very likely cracked. Nothing can withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake—let alone one of magnitude 8, 20, or 30 meters of concrete.

It seems that TEPCO technicians, continuing to spray water and consulting their malfunctioning screens and instruments for months, are now waiting only... for a miracle.

We’ve reached this point...

Here I want to comment on the latest images from this "Complément d'Enquête" report. The journalists accompanied a Japanese woman whose parents live near Sandaï, who visited the site despite her French husband’s warnings. He could have accompanied her out of solidarity—or even simple love. But perhaps his business kept him in France.

On-site, this 50-year-old Japanese woman collected various samples and took measurements. Upon returning, these samples were analyzed and confirmed what everyone already suspected: the values communicated to the Japanese public are far below reality. But what strikes me most are her conclusions. Her parents, of course, will not leave the land where they have lived, even if it means dying there. And this Japanese woman concludes: "If my parents decide to stay, then I will stay with them."

Another important statement comes from a phone conversation between a Canadian journalist and a Belgian journalist living in Tokyo. The recording is recent, from early June. Two things emerge. A group of retired technicians and engineers, aged over 65, have declared themselves ready to sacrifice their lives, believing that any cancers they develop would take longer to manifest than their remaining lifespans. Here, it's all about dosage. Some doses lead to significantly faster progression. The Chernobyl case stands as proof.

The second statement comes from a 62-year-old technician who spent his entire career at the Fukushima plant, saying: "This plant has sustained me for 40 years. It is only natural that I now come to its aid."

The Japanese employee’s attachment to the "mother-company," the company-patrie.

At no point do any of them criticize the criminal stupidity and irresponsible greed of the very designers of this plant. Nor do they seem capable of rebelling against the company's leaders or government officials who allowed this to happen for decades, possibly even accepting bribes.

It seems that within Japanese society, any revolt against the established order—against the prevailing regime—is an unbearable act, which many prefer to accept passively and silently, disguised as courage, "to rebuild Japan from this terrible ordeal." Anti-nuclear protests remain timid and few.

I think of Clint Eastwood’s film Letters from Iwo Jima. If this island falls into American hands, Japan will be within reach of American bombs. The Japanese soldiers will therefore fight with desperate energy. The senior officer in charge of defense tries to act as intelligently and efficiently as possible with the limited resources at his disposal—without any air cover.

One can understand the patriotism of men resolved to give their lives for their motherland. In this nightmare situation, the commander’s attitude seems very human, condemning brutality toward those who break down.

But at the end of the film, what does he do? He rallies the surviving soldiers, telling them all will make a final charge with bayonets, since no ammunition remains. To... find a glorious death rather than the shame of surrender.

And that’s exactly what happens. They go out and are brutally mowed down by American machine guns. Where is the glory in such a suicidal gesture, akin to those who blow themselves up with their last grenade?

This is where we touch upon the utterly incomprehensible, opaque nature of Japanese mentality. At no moment do these men—or this man, educated and aware—dare question the absurd political choices that plunged Japan into war. Choices preceded by a Machiavellian plan devised as early as the 1930s during the invasion of Manchuria: developing biological weapons to exterminate and terrify the American population. Strains of anthrax and plague contained in bombs, dropped by suicide aircraft launched from the largest submarines ever built, carried in sealed containers. Aircraft catapulted from the submarine’s deck.

This was not improvised amid the chaos of a war’s end, but coldly plotted by military personnel suffering from serious mental illnesses.

I’m not saying this to condemn the Japanese people. This attitude exists everywhere—for example, among Nazis who committed suicide when Hitler decided to end his life in his bunker. See the film Downfall. We witness not only the suicides of high-ranking military officers, likely guilty of what are called "war crimes," but also members of Hitler’s youth. At no moment do these young people question their leader’s image, their Fuhrer, who led Germany into chaos. The same applies to these Japanese at the end of World War II, who continued to revere their emperor Hirohito with religious devotion—though we now know he was far more than a puppet in the hands of the Japanese high command, having personally approved in writing the inhumane, ethnically genocidal project of General Hishi, builder of Unit 731 in Manchuria, where hundreds of thousands of Chinese served as test subjects for biological weapons.

When Italy was liberated by the Allies from Mussolini’s rule, he tried to flee with his mistress, Clara Petacci. They were discovered, executed, and then hung upside down from butcher hooks. The crowd lynched the man who, like Hitler, had led his country into chaos.

Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci hung from butcher hooks

The Japanese could enlist TEPCO leaders and make them participate in operations on-site. Or even tie them near reactor buildings until they die. After all, it was their greed and corruption that created this avoidable situation.

May the sacrifice of these hundreds of thousands of Japanese men and women not be in vain, and may it awaken humanity to the fact that nuclear energy—military or civilian—is nothing but

Suicide: User Manual

And nothing else. And that the solution lies in fully committing, and very quickly, to renewable energies.

June 12, 2011:

Must-see:

http://fukushima.over-blog.fr/ext/http://envoye-special.france2.fr/les-reportages-en-video/nucleaire-faut-il-avoir-peur-de-nos-centrales-9-juin-2011-3530.html

This investigation reveals that the containment structures of certain power plants—including Fessenheim—built with poor-quality sand concrete are... porous. EDF has patched cracks using resin patches. Internal EDF reports, leaked by employees, show that under a nuclear accident scenario, these patches would not hold due to intense radiation, and their added tightness would rapidly degrade to zero. No technical solution currently exists.

EDF’s solution: increase the maximum allowable leak rate from 1.5% to 3%

Furthermore, EDF has falsified some installations by sanding down structures to hide early signs of cracking—"otherwise, the inspection results would have been catastrophic."

In short, we are no better than Japanese operators in this regard. Everything is managed with complete disregard for human lives and the risks faced by populations. We are swimming in total irresponsibility over petty financial interests!

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