A citizen collective opposes the construction by EDF of a new storage space for radioactive fuels in the Hague reprocessing plant. This project deemed “urgent” by the authorities aims to avoid the saturation of current basins.
Le Monde with AFP
Several hundred demonstrators walked on Saturday June 18 in Cherbourg against the vast nuclear fuel swimming pool project envisaged in La Hague (Manche). “We were a thousand at the height” of the rally, told the agency France Presse (AFP) Marie Tassel, one of the members of the collective “Stop nuclear swimming pool”.
This rally was organized at the forefront of the revival, on Monday, of the consultation on this project carried out by the National Commission of the Public Debate (CNDP). This new phase of consultation must be extended until July 7. “The nuclear trash cans are everyone’s business”, “the trash is full” or even “the radiant ending haggle”, could we read on some of the signs brandished by the demonstrators.
The collective, which refuses to take part in the debate, denounces in particular what it considers as an absence of “transparency” in public consultation launched on this project. “Even by changing the terms of consultation, neutrality and transparency will not be the basic rules and EDF remains the organizer and the leader of the consultation”, writes the collective in a text exposing his position. Launched on November 22, consultation was suspended in early February. The subject of this suspension, explained Chantal Jouanno, the president of the CNDP, was “to rethink the [debate] methods to undoubtedly cover a wider territory”.
a really urgent project “
This swimming pool project, a 7,500 tonnes of fuel. It would be built alongside the current Hague basins where just under 10,000 tonnes of irradiated fuel in French nuclear power plants cool, the equivalent of 100 reactor cores.
This project, costing 1.25 billion euros according to EDF, its initiator, aims to respond to the risk of saturation of current basins. If the basins are full, the reactors must gradually stop, and in June 2020, the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) estimated the launch of the “really urgent” project.
Pillar of the local economy, nuclear is an eminently sensitive subject in North Cotentin. The Cotentin agglomeration community includes the Hague, the EDF nuclear power plant in Flamanville and the Cherbourg nuclear submarines plant on its territory. In a statement at the end of January, elected officials from the agglomeration community, while recalling their “nuclear attachment”, had specified that “this attachment cannot presuppose an acceptance of any new industrial project at any cost and without respect local elected officials and inhabitants “.