The Hague: Suicide, how to do it
The Hague: Suicide, how to do it
May 5, 2011
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The Hague plant
There is a page on Wikipedia that gives some information about the site of The Hague, "a reprocessing center located in the Cotentin".
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_de_retraitement_de_la_Hague
You will learn that this plant, the most polluting in the world regarding nuclear discharges, was put into service in 1961, half a century ago (...). It is managed by the private company AREVA.
The Hague plant has been recovering, for decades, the "waste" from various power plants, both French and foreign, and "reprocessing" them.
In fact, this reprocessing is entirely focused on the chemical extraction of the 1% of plutonium produced by fission in uranium reactors, through the capture of fast neutrons by the non-fissile Uranium 238 nuclei. This pure plutonium is then packaged in small containers and shipped to the MELOX plant, in Marcoule, in the Gard. There, it is diluted by 7% in Uranium 238 and this mixture constitutes a new "nuclear fuel", called MOX (Mixed Oxides).
This MELOX chemical process can be used, in consumer countries, to extract plutonium for military purposes. Why create problems, like the Iranians do, by laboriously enriching uranium ore through centrifugation, when it is enough to buy MOX and chemically extract the plutonium 239, the explosive type of fission bombs?
This MELOX process is considered by Americans as "proliferating".
That is to say, this technique will eventually allow all countries in the world to possess their atomic bombs.
This fuel is currently used in 20 of the 58 active reactors in France. The construction of EPR reactors will generalize its use (they were designed for it).
What has been ignored for a long time is that this introduction of MOX represented a subtle shift from the fission of Uranium 235 to a functioning by the fission of Plutonium 238.
Everyone is now beginning to know the extreme danger of this substance, which has a strong tendency to settle in human tissues, after inhalation or ingestion of dust. The human body is then unable to eliminate them, the characteristic time of their rejection by human tissues being 50 years. These particles are 100% carcinogenic.
It is not an irradiation, but a contamination, undetectable by a measuring instrument. This contamination could occur in the case of a nuclear accident, with the release of debris from fuel assemblies. This has already happened and continues, since the explosion of reactor number 3 of Fukushima, which was loaded with MOX. Plutonium dust has been found in the United States. This dispersion will affect the entire planet and some specialists estimate it will be the cause of a million cancers.
To stop this dispersion coming from reactor number 3, it would be necessary to be able to extract its fuel rods and, at least, immerse them in a specially designed pool. However, access to these elements remains impossible, and it is not clear when this access could become possible, in the near or distant future.
It is necessary to continue cooling the fuel elements of this "shut down" reactor, whose core, largely melted, emits several tens of megawatts of thermal energy. A closed circuit water circulation, coupled with a heat exchanger, could allow the evacuation of this heat. However, the state of deterioration of the reactor makes this impossible. The Japanese are therefore forced to implement an "open circuit" cooling, by injection or spraying of fresh water. This water, circulating in the damaged core, becomes charged with debris from the fuel elements that have escaped from the zirconium tubes that contained them and have melted.
This water is therefore charged with plutonium particles and a whole range of highly toxic radionuclides. It is partially transformed into vapor, which escapes into the atmosphere. The rest flows, through a whole set of cracks, impossible to locate and seal, due to the earthquake, into the galleries located in the reactor's basement. The company TEPCO then pumps this water, which has so far been sent to tanks. When these tanks were full, TEPCO simply poured this highly radioactive water into the nearby ocean, apologizing to the locals and fishermen.
This will continue as long as a closed circuit cooling cannot be implemented. It is not clear how this could be done, as the reactors, otherwise very damaged, remain inaccessible due to the high radioactivity in the vicinity.
Two companies are directly responsible for this deadly dispersion:
- The Japanese company TEPCO
- The French company AREVA, which produces and sells this new plutonium fuel in its MELOX plant.
The apologies of the TEPCO managers. When will those of the AREVA executives come?
But there is much more serious.
Over the course of five decades of operation, this center in The Hague, which is not a "reprocessing center", a sort of high-tech waste disposal site, but, apart from the packaging carried out in Marcoule at its MELOX plant, a center for the extraction and sale of plutonium fuel. At The Hague, Areva has accumulated a stock that defies imagination, and the importance of which is not specified on the Wikipedia page.
Sixty tonnes of plutonium
The elements containing plutonium are currently stored in four pools located at The Hague, housed in buildings whose roofs are not armored, but made of a thin sheet metal covering (...)
The Devil's kitchen
Plutonium is an element denser than lead (19 kg per liter). Do the calculations. These sixty tonnes of plutonium correspond to 3.15 cubic meters, which could fit in a cube of 1.46 meters on each side.
The Hague plant presents itself as a reprocessing center, recovering the most dangerous and toxic material in the world. Considering what is happening at Fukushima, a logical reaction would be to stop the production of MOX fuel, to close the MELOX plant in Marcoule and to stop recovering this devil's ash at the Hague plant.
The Hague is not a treatment center, comparable to a waste disposal site, a "nuclear trash can".
It is a safe
I propose to you the following small problem, at the level of a certificate of studies.
An industrialist has a stock of 60 tonnes of plutonium. A barrel of oil has a capacity of 160 liters.
Oil barrel
A gram of plutonium...