Proponents of nuclear power often champion France’s nationally-celebrated plutonium recycling (aka “reprocessing”) program as proof that nuclear power is both clean, and renewable. But the reprocessing program is far from perfect — in fact, it’s just as problematic as nuclear energy itself.

First off, nobody’s made the reprocessing process close to cost-effective — even when the price of uranium spiked up a year or so ago. And it tends to be one of the more messy, hazardous and polluting parts of the so-called "fuel cycle".

The UK’s famous Windscale fire was at a Plutonium (Pu) recycling facility, and the Pu contamination of the Irish Sea — from Windscale, now renamed Sellafield — is an ongoing embarrassment to Britain and an irritant to Ireland. Several countries are paying people to extract Pu from their spent fuel but not actually fissioning the extracted Pu (aka "MOX" or "mixed oxide fuel", since the idea is to blend Pu oxides with U oxides). Britain is receiving shipments from Japan of this sort and storing them.

And then there’s the nuclear weapons connection, which is hard to avoid where purified Pu is concerned.

As a waste-disposal technology, reprocessing also disappoints, because the volume of the wastes is actually increased by the process, and some of the longest-lived and most hazardous fractions aren’t eliminated. Moreover, the wastes – initially in relatively stable ceramic form — are transformed into a liquid acid slurry, which has to be transformed back into some kind of solid before disposal. All of these steps involve leaks, contamination, and exposures to workers and neighbours.

As far as I know, nobody has succeeded in reusing the unfissioned uranium in the spent fuel. Doing so would greatly increase the theoretical usefulness of the original mined uranium. I say "theoretical" because if the resulting fuel is harder to get (and more expensive) than the alternative of new uranium (as it always seems to be, so far), then it doesn’t really accomplish anything useful.

One good source of info on these concerns, and on AECL’s (past) aggressive plans to get Canada into Pu reprocessing, is at Gordon Edwards’s web-site, www.ccnr.org . And  University of Greenwich Professor of Energy Studies Stephen Thomas recently exposed the “myth of the European nuclear renaissance” in an article on the Physicians for Social Responsibility website (click here to read the story).

There have been a number of interesting recent articles (searchable online) exposing the ugly under-belly of the French nuclear program — not just the problems of Areva, including at Flamanville (and Olkiluoto-3), but also the way France relies on its neighbours to keep the lights on and to use up France’s surplus baseload power (an increasing problem here in Ontario, and one that will presumably get worse before it gets better), and also the issues of cost and cross-subsidies.