The departure of High Level Waste: the sooner and the shorter the better.
According to Cogema, the vitrified waste represents 3 % of the spent fuel mass, and 99 % of its radioactivity. For the safety of the crew and to reduce the risks of sea pollution by sinking or by collision, the route must be as short as possible, passing through the Panama Canal.
Panama has accepted the transit of ships carrying spent fuel to Cherbourg for fifteen years. Today the “protests” against sending back the nuclear waste to Japan come essentially from countries who accommodate convenience flags and who put sailors, ports and oceans throughout the world in constant danger by authorizing the navigation of sub-standard ships run by inorganized crews often reduced to slavery. Thus the Philippines, St. Vincent and Grenadines, Antigua, Barbuda and Honduras share and relay the concerns of three organisations hostile towards returning the waste to Japan : Citizen’s Nuclear Information Center (Tokyo), Nuclear Control Institute (Washington) and Greenpeace.
Returning the waste to Japan: the sooner the better
Cherbourg,
The contracts for spent fuel to be reprocessed in France, exported by Germany, Japan, Switzerland and Belgium stipulate that the waste must be sent back to the country of origin by the 31st December 1995.
In December 1990, in the report on the management of HLW compiled by the Parliamentary Office of evaluation of scientific and technological options, Mr. Mandil, General Manager of Energy and Raw Materials at the Ministry of Industry said in response to a question posed by a Robin des Bois representative “The contracts state very clearly the return of the waste to the countries of origin : this means that the return is not dependent on the eventual setting up of an underground storage in these countries of origin. They must deal with the waste which should start to be returned in 1994”.
