BURE, France — Half a kilometer underground in floodlit tunnels, a French government lab is testing the safety of a site intended to hold 80,000 cubic meters of deadly radioactive waste.
Crews drill barrel-sized openings into the sides of the shafts, dug deep into the earth not far from the small town of Bure, in northeastern France. The containers will have to be retrievable for a century, in case better technologies for dealing with radioactive materials are developed. Barring such a discovery, the idea is for the waste to spend the next 100,000 years underground.
The technical hurdles will be the easy bit. Far more difficult for France’s radioactive waste management agency, Andra, will be overcoming political opposition to the construction of the site — of any site — intended to serve as the final resting place for tons of radioactive waste.
Six decades after the construction of the first wave of nuclear power plants, no country has opened a permanent storage site. Spent nuclear fuel and other contaminated material — deadly byproducts of electricity generation — remain stockpiled in temporary locations around Europe and the world, sometimes alongside the reactors where they were used.
The problem is only getting more urgent as power plants across the world near the end of their lives and Western Europe cuts back on nuclear electricity generation.
In the EU alone, more than 50 of the 129 reactors currently in operation could shut down by 2025, Energy and Climate Action Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete said recently. “These reactors will need to be decommissioned, and the radioactive waste generated in this process will need to be safely managed.”
The stakes are less technical than political. The dispute goes to the heart of a running debate over the sustainability of nuclear power. Failing to resolve it would leave the industry vulnerable to its critics, who argue that the technology is so inherently risky — and dirty — that it cannot be relied on to generate electricity, even to combat climate change.
The European Commission is keen to hurry countries along. On July 13, it escalated an infringement procedure against Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Italy and Portugal, pushing them to fully comply with the bloc’s radioactive waste rules and inform Brussels of their national nuclear waste management programs, which were originally due by August 23, 2015. Only Finland, set to open the world’s first final repository early in the next decade, has a plan it can implement.
Experts agree that today’s stop-gap solutions are unsustainable — and more dangerous than building long-term depositories deep underground where radioactive material can spend tens of thousands of years decaying, protected from natural disasters and out of reach of criminals and terrorists.
But try telling that to anti-nuclear campaigners and the communities living near where such a site might be constructed.
Protest camp
In a copse of oak and beech trees, far above the proposed storage site in Bure, a small group of demonstrators have built a protest camp. The area, known as Bois Lejuc, is supposed to eventually host exhaust pipes for the underground repository, which authorities intend to be operational for a pilot test by 2027.
The demonstrators intend to prevent that from happening. “As long as people will be needed, I will be here,” said Judas — campaigners don’t use their real names — sporting hipster wooden glasses and dirty hands and cooking potatoes for lunch a few meters away from the yurt where he spent the night. “This is really meant to be a lasting fight.”
A local court ruled in late April that the protesters were illegally occupying the woods and should be expelled. But protesters plan to stand and fight if police make any attempt to remove them. They maintain that public consultations held in 2005 and 2013 didn’t provide them with enough of an opportunity to oppose the site. NGOs boycotted the final consultation.
“We won’t give up,” 69-year-old Michel Labat, born and raised in the neighboring village of Mandres-en-Barrois, said as he walked the trail circling the forest.
So far, the pinprick protests around Bure, where a demonstration in late May drew several hundred, haven’t caught fire on a national scale. Proponents of the project dismiss them as a staged campaign by anti-nuclear activists. “There is no real local opposition to the project,” said Dominique Minière, executive director in charge of the nuclear fleet for France’s utility company EDF. “We are in front of professional opponents.”
The demonstrators, for their part, are hoping to replicate the protest movement against a new airport near Nantes, in western France. There, opposition steadily built until the prime minister was forced to intervene. If the police expel protesters in Bure, “there could be people coming from all over France,” said Charlotte Mijeon, a spokeswoman for the anti-nuclear organization Sortir du Nucléaire.
The issue is a headache for Nicolas Hulot, France’s new environment minister and a former green campaigner, who is part of the government that will have to give the final approval for the site. France is scaling back nuclear from 75 percent of power production to 50 percent by 2025, but it will still need to find a permanent storage site for the waste its plants produce.
Hulot expressed concerns about the site in Bure in 2016. “We can’t impose [such a project] on a local population just because they live in a remote area, without consulting them, without transparency,” he said on French TV.
On June 2, anti-nuclear campaigners wrote an open letter to Hulot asking him to stop the project. Since taking office, he has mostly kept quiet about the subject, but in a recent interview with Ouest-France, a regional newspaper, he vowed to ensure the waste will be stored with “absolute safety.”
The project still faces serious safety challenges, including fire risks, the French nuclear safety authority concluded in a recent assessment. On July 17, Andra pushed back a self-imposed deadline to submit a formal authorization request for the project by a year, to mid-2019.
Outreach
The government has responded to the protest with careful — and very public — safety tests, and an emphasis on its economic benefits for the region. “The project relies on 20 years of research,” said David Mazoyer, the site’s director. “Every scenario is studied with maximum security margins.” Some tests even involve releasing radioactive particles to track their movement in the surrounding clay.
The government has also splashed cash around — €30 million a year as “accompanying measures” for each of the two districts neighboring the site. “People don’t support the project for free,” said Gérard Longuet, a senator from the region and a key project supporter. “They support it because it boosts the area.”
So far, the effect of the outreach is, at best, mixed.
A 2016 poll commissioned by Andra found that 59 percent of local residents said they trust the agency to manage the site. But 63 percent expressed concerns over safety issues, and 76 percent said they think the project is dangerous for the environment.
“When you are listening to Andra, everything is all fine and rosy,” said Jean-Francois Bodenreider, an anti-nuclear campaigner and local resident. But, “they have no control over this,” said his wife Marie-Eve Bodenreider. An anti-nuclear sign hangs outside their physiotherapy practice in Gondrecourt-le-Château.
The site currently employs 370 people, with construction work foreseen to employ more than 2,000. But opponents say the jobs have yet to materialize. “The only jobs here are for security guards,” said Labat, the local resident and demonstrator. “They are everywhere!”
Birth of a movement
If German history is any guide, the French government will not have an easy time at the Bois Lejuc.
In 1977, an underground salt dome near the German town of Gorleben was designated as a final destination for the country’s highly radioactive nuclear waste. The decision sparked widespread popular anger, and birthed the German anti-nuclear movement.
“A social chain reaction kicked off,” said Rebecca Harms, a German Green MEP who started her political activism as an anti-nuclear campaigner in the Gorleben area. “The time was ripe for a new political movement.”
Shipments of highly radioactive material to an interim storage facility at the site needed tens of thousands of police officers to hold back demonstrators. The protests became an annual media event and helped fuel the rise of political movements like the Greens.
Bruised by decades of protests, the government gave way and in 2013 halted underground exploration work at Gorleben. It also launched a new national search for the location of a final waste repository.
“We finally draw a line under … Gorleben,” Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said earlier this year when the German parliament approved the rules for the new search — a process that’s meant to be concluded by 2031.
Hendricks said every part of Germany will be considered, so that “no one can cop out of their responsibility.”
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‘Still a problem’
Part of the government’s answer is on display at Schacht Konrad, in Salzgitter, planned as Germany’s first repository for low- and intermediate-level waste, where an industrial elevator plunges a kilometer underground.
Jeeps and trucks drive through the dark corridors. Their powerful lights cut through the hot air, flashing on workers, machinery, tables, fridges, and bins — an underground world being readied for hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of low to medium radioactive waste — contaminated material, be it parts of decommissioned reactors or by-products of nuclear fuel reprocessing.
The site was chosen decades ago with little public involvement, and Salzgitter is also in a densely populated area — both factors that would likely make the site’s selection a no-no under today’s tougher rules.
That’s also why Schacht Konrad is keen for locals to come underground and take a look. The former iron mine is supposed to start operations in early 2020.
And while it won’t hold the highly radioactive — and politically inflammatory — spent nuclear fuel that has driven the protest movement, the project has nonetheless met local resistance.
“It’s still a problem,” said a local from nearby Braunschweig, who didn’t give his name. “Demonstrations continue. Nobody wants to have the waste, but everyone wants energy.”
Steffen Kanitz, a German MP from the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU),who sat on the government’s final search commission launched in 2014 to prepare the ground for the new rules, said the key to taking the sting out of the issue is informing the public: “The trick in the next years will be getting the average person involved.”
‘Back on the streets’
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision, after Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster, to shutter the country’s last reactor by 2022 has taken some of the wind out of the opposition’s sails.
The challenge facing the anti-nuclear movement now will be “whether you can switch gears from blockade mode to having a constructive argument about how to best deal with the final storage issue,” Harms said.
But most opponents of nuclear power say it is too soon to put down their protest signs. “There’ll always be resistance because it’s a problem,” said Heinz Smital, a nuclear energy expert with Greenpeace Germany and a seasoned anti-nuclear campaigner. “We will demonstrate,” he said, adding that resistance will be more forceful if the search process is seen as “unfair” or if it looks like the ultimate site will — once again — be Gorleben.
“Our movement is a long way off being shelved, unfortunately,” said Martin Donat, the chair of the citizen initiative Luechow-Dannenberg, the region where Gorleben is located. Resistance is necessary to protest “the carelessness, with which the issue is dealt with,” Donat said.
He added that while protests might appear to be in a period of quiescence, they will quickly flare up again after the government takes a decision on a potential site. “Then, we’ll see people back on the streets,” he said.
Already, taking politics out of the debate is proving to be impossible. Neither Bavaria nor Saxony want to be considered as potential future sites.
“The problem is that people are afraid,” said CDU’s nuclear spokesperson Kanitz. “Radioactivity is invisible, and leaks can have horrible consequences.”