The formidable Anne Lauvergeon, the CEO of French nuclear giant AREVA, has been doing interviews. She’s always worth paying attention to, as much for what she doesn’t say as what she does.
Take this for example, from her interview with the UK’s Financial Times…
What is the smartest business idea you have ever had?
Setting up Areva and creating the ‘CO2-free’ strategy.
Really? Considering Anne’s ‘CO2-free strategy’ (and it’s proper that the term is in quotation marks because AREVA’s ‘CO2-free strategy’ is anything but) is currently eating the company’s profits thanks to the botched construction of the Olkiluoto-3 EPR reactor in Finland, we’re not sure we’d describe it as the ‘smartest’ business idea.
How about…
What do you like most about your job?
Delivering.
Delivering? Tell that to the people of Finland who are still waiting for their new nuclear reactor whose construction is currently running four years late and 3 billion euros over budget.
Over at Bloomberg Businessweek, Anne has been talking to Charlie Rose. The talk turns to nuclear safety and waste:
Two issues always come up. One is the possibility of another Chernobyl, some kind of accident. People look at what happened in the Gulf and they say, "Aha!" Big accidents can happen. Plus, what do you do with the waste? And what about that plutonium that comes from the waste?
The new generation [of nuclear plants] answers your questions. You have no waste. And, of course, we have taken lessons from Chernobyl. It was a Soviet accident with a Soviet design. Our designs are much better. We have taken the lessons of Three Mile Island, and we have taken the lessons of September 11. Safety, security first.
Which new generation of nuclear plants does Anne mean here? The Third Generation of reactors like the EPR being built in Finland do produce waste. In fact, the waste the EPR produces is even more dangerous than that produced by other reactors. And how do we know if this new reactor is safe? ‘Safety, security first’? We’re still waiting to see the design for the control systems about which various nuclear regulators have concerns.
Or is Anne maybe talking about the Fourth Generation of reactors? These are the so-called ‘breeder’ reactors designed to produce more nuclear fuel than they consume. Unfortunately, despite what Anne says, these reactors do produce waste. Also, they are still very much on the drawing board with commercial construction not expected to begin until at least 2030.
Anne’s grasp of the facts about nuclear waste is a little shaky…
What are you doing with the nuclear waste?
First, you put a very small quantity of uranium into the plant. So at the end you have a very small quantity of nuclear waste. What to do with it? We are recycling 96 percent of this waste.
Very small quantities nuclear waste? In France, close to 890,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste had been produced by the end of 2004. This total does not account for any of the so-called ’reusable materials’ currently in stock – thousands of tonnes of spent nuclear fuels, separated plutonium and uranium, stored at La Hague.
It’s not just about the quantities involved either: even small amounts of nuclear waste are deadly. As for 96 percent of waste being ‘recycled’ (watch out for that greenwash), if that’s the case why, of the 33,000 tons uranium waste sent to Russia between 2006 and 2010, has only 3,090 been returned?
In the end, it’s the misdirection that you have to watch for. ‘To depend on Middle East countries for oil, that is impossible for France,’ says Anne. What that neglects to mention is that it’s possible for France to exploit developing nations like Niger for the uranium on which it very much depends.