SOULAINES-DHUYS, France – Deep in a French oak, birch and pine forest, a steady stream of trucks carries a silent reminder of the often invisible cost of nuclear energy: canisters of radioactive waste that will be stored for the next 300 years.
While the negotiators at the climate talks in Scotland are planning how to supply the world with energy and reduce CO2 emissions at the same time, nuclear energy is a key sticking point. Critics criticize the mammoth price, the disproportionate damage caused by nuclear accidents and the radioactive remains that remain fatal for thousands of years.
But increasingly louder and more influential proponents – including some climate scientists and environmental experts – argue that nuclear power is the world’s best hope of keeping climate change under control, pointing out that it emits so few planet-damaging emissions and is, on average, safer than almost any other other source of energy. Nuclear accidents are frightening but extremely rare – while pollution from coal and other fossil fuels leads to death and disease on a daily basis, scientists say.
“The extent of what human civilization is trying to do (to fight climate change) over the next 30 years is staggering,” said Matt Bowen of Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy. “It will be a lot more frightening if we shut out new nuclear power plants – or even more frightening if we decide to close all nuclear power plants completely.”
Many governments are pushing for nuclear energy to be anchored in the climate plans being hatched at the Glasgow conference known as COP26. The European Union, meanwhile, is debating whether to officially label nuclear energy as “green” – a decision that will steer billions of euros in investment over the coming years. This has global implications as EU policies could set a standard that other economies will follow.
But what about all that junk? Reactors around the world produce thousands of tons of highly radioactive detritus each year, in addition to what is already left over from decades of using the atom to electrify homes and factories around the world.
Germany leads the group of countries, mainly within the EU, and is firmly against labeling nuclear power as “green”. Meanwhile, the Biden government is backing nuclear power, China has a dozen reactors under construction – and even Japan is backing up nuclear power at its Fukushima power plant 10 years after the disaster.
But nowhere in the world is it so dependent on nuclear reactors as France, which is at the forefront of promoting nuclear power on a European and global level. And it is among the leading players in the nuclear waste industry, recycling or reprocessing of materials from all over the world.
South of the WWI battlefields at Verdun, trucks with radioactivity warning stickers drive to a garbage dump near the village of Soulaines-Dhuys. They are repeatedly checked, wiped down and scanned for leaks. Their cargo – waste compacted in concrete or steel bottles – is stacked by robotic cranes in warehouses, which are then filled with gravel and sealed with more concrete.
The agency that manages the trash, Andra, knows it scares people. “I can’t fight people’s fears. It is our job to ensure the safety of people and the environment as well as the workers on the construction site, ”said spokesman Thierry Pochot.
The storage units contain 90% of France’s low to intermediate level radioactive waste, including tools, clothing and other material related to reactor operation and maintenance. The location is designed for a service life of at least 300 years after the arrival of the last delivery, if the radioactivity of its content is not expected to be higher than the naturally occurring values.
For more durable waste – mainly used nuclear fuel that remains potentially fatal for tens of thousands of years – France is laying the foundation for a permanent deep repository under corn and wheat fields outside the nearby stone house hamlet of Bure.
About 500 meters (yards) below the surface, workers run tests on clay and granite, dig tunnels, and try to prove that the long-term storage plan is the safest solution for future generations. Similar websites are also being developed or researched in other countries.
If the repository gets French approval, it would contain approximately 85,000 tonnes (94,000 tonnes) of the most radioactive waste produced “from the beginning of the nuclear age to the end of existing nuclear facilities,” said Audrey Guillemenet, geologist and spokeswoman for the underground laboratory.
“We cannot leave this waste in storage facilities on the surface,” she said. “That is safe, but not sustainable.”
The 25 billion cost. But that’s only part of the huge cost of building and running nuclear power plants, and one of the reasons there’s so much opposition.
Around Bure, street signs are being replaced with graffiti that read “Nuclear is Over” and activists are camping at the city’s main intersection.
Greenpeace accuses the French nuclear industry of dumping other countries with waste and of covering up problems in nuclear facilities, which industry representatives deny. Activists protested at the port of Dunkirk last week when recycled uranium was being loaded onto a ship bound for St. Petersburg, calling for an end to nuclear energy and more research into solutions to the existing waste.
“Nuclear waste … needs to be disposed of,” Bowen said. But “fossil fuels pump the waste into our atmosphere, which threatens us from the risks of climate change and the effects of air pollution on public health.”
Some prominent scientists are now professing nuclear power. They argue that nuclear power plants have avoided an estimated 60 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions by providing energy that would otherwise have been obtained from fossil fuels.
US Climate Ambassador John Kerry says he changed his initial opposition to nuclear power because of the greater need to cut emissions.
“People are beginning to understand the consequences of not switching to nuclear weapons,” said Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science at MIT. Amid “growing awareness of the increase in climate risks around the world, people are starting to say, ‘this is a little bit scarier than nuclear power plants” “.
Some activists want to end nuclear energy today, others want it to be phased out soon. But Emanuel cited examples of countries or states that shut down nuclear power plants before renewables were ready to fill the void – and had to return to coal or other energy sources that were suffocating the planet.
The current energy crisis provides the proponents of nuclear energy with another argument. With oil and gas costs driving an energy price crisis across Europe and beyond, French President Emmanuel Macron has proclaimed “European renewable energies and of course European nuclear power”.
Meanwhile, the garbage doesn’t go away.
In order to make the residents of radioactive waste dumps less worrying, Andra organizes school visits; One side even houses an escape game. Waste storage researchers are prepared for all sorts of future threats – revolution, extreme weather, even the next ice age, Guillemenet said.
Whatever happens in Glasgow, “whether we choose to go ahead with nuclear energy or not,” she said, “we have to find a solution to dispose of this nuclear waste” that mankind has already produced.
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Associate press writers Frank Jordans and Ellen Knickmeyer in Glasgow, Scotland contributed to this.
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Follow AP’s climate reporting at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.
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