AREVA France leak renews nuke safety concerns 

When it was reported last week that an AREVA-owned nuclear plant in the south of France was ordered to close temporarily after about 7,925 gallons of unenriched uranium spilled onto the site and into two rivers, it added fuel to concerns around the world that nuclear energy may be riskier than it’s worth. But AREVA spokesman Jarret Adams stated Idahoans needn’t worry about similar leaks at the $2 billion enrichment facility being planned by the company in the Idaho Falls area.

“At the enrichment facilities the amount of liquids that are produced are minimal and, essentially, the small amount of liquids will be filtered and dried, the remainder will be dried and shipped off to a containment facility elsewhere,” he said. “There will not be any contaminated liquid that can possibly leak into the groundwater.”

The spill – which occurred in Bollene, France, near Avignon on June 8 – came less than a week after U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, returned from a fact-finding trip in the country to get an idea of what kind of facility AREVA was planning for the Idaho Falls area.

Adams said the Tricastin plant is very different from the one proposed in Idaho Falls – in addition to an enrichment facility, the Tricastin plant includes a uranium conversion facility, a site for blending and sampling uranium hexafluoride waste, R & D facilities and four reactors. The Idaho Falls plant would only include an enrichment facility.

He added that the Tricastin spill didn’t involve the enrichment plant and was minor in scale.

“It’s an extremely minor event,” he said. “Because the nuclear industry is so highly regulated and so safety conscious, even when a minor event occurs it’s documented and communicated in a very careful manner.”

That doesn’t convince Andrea Shipley, executive director of the Snake River Alliance, an Idaho nuclear watchdog group.

“The credibility and integrity of AREVA is being put into question by them spilling uranium into the water in France,” she said. “It further goes to show that nuclear energy isn’t the best option. It’s risky. These sorts of wastes have a half-life of hundreds-of-thousands of years, and Idaho really needs to be thoughtful as it thinks about the kind of economic and energy development we want to bring into this state.”

Adams said while accidents are not unheard of at nuclear plants, the benefit outstrips the risk.

“In terms of industrial activities, nuclear energy is still one of the safest industrial activities that we use today; it has one of the lowest accident rates, and compared with the amount of electricity we supply, the relative risks of the activity are extremely low,” he said.

AREVA’s Idaho Falls project would employ 250 full-time workers and require about 1,000 people for construction, which could begin as early as 2011.

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