The decree authorizing creation of the EPR nuclear reactor in Flamanville in Normandy is, to put it simply, ludicrous. It was given without consideration of the public inquiry about releasing at sea liquid effluents of the new reactor. This public inquiry ended on March 17, 2007. The Enquiry Commissioner has not yet given his report and the EPR is already licensed! The current government says that all the information was presented and discussed in the frame of a preliminary public debate. This is false! The public debate of great mediocrity went from March 2005 to April 2006 in the alone department of Manche and attracted fewer people than the debate on the extension of a pleasure port.
Let us remember that the first part of the EPR public inquiry, from June 15 to July 31, 2006, did not respond to many fundamental safety and environmental questions: no concern for the rising sea temperature due to global warming mixed with the release of hot cooling waters, the life expectancy of the EPR being 60 years; no information on the shareholding of EPR by private companies, foreign brokerages or electrical producers; no explanations about the fate of radioactive waste generated by the electricity reserved for foreign countries like Italy; nothing on the possible evacuation and abandonment measures of land and homes around the Flamanville nuclear site after a major accident; and also nothing on the difficulty of the first round of construction in Finland, or the capacity of the central dome and devices to resist the crash of an airbus A 380 or of an equivalent airplane as well as the vibrations, this scenario having been retained in Finland.
The decision to authorize the EPR only days before the presidential election reveals the anxiety and improvisation of its promoters. Nuclear power will never change despite the verbal desire for transparency. To assure its reproduction, what matters most is the negotiations, the collusion between ministers and political parties, industrialists and State services and the subservience, rather than a controlled, organized, loyal and eventually convincing information.
This manipulation looks a lot like the intrigue seen in the extension of the capacity of the reprocessing nuclear waste plant in The Hague peninsula, a few kilometers from Flamanville as a crow flies.
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