Business: Where the Atom Is Admired

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In the Rhone Valley town of Tricastin, engineers have begun operating a uranium enrichment plant that is designed to diminish European reliance on the U.S. for enriched reactor fuel. To increase the amount of energy they can get from a given amount of uranium, the French also operate one of the world's largest plants for reprocessing spent fuel rods to extract unused uranium 235 and plutonium. But retreating nuclear fuel this way also produces highly radioactive liquid wastes that must be stored indefinitely. The French now refrigerate the waste and store it in double stainless-steel tanks, sheathed in reinforced concrete then hermetically sealed in a reinforced concrete vault, and buried several meters below ground.

At a plant in Marcoule, near Avignon, scientists are using a simpler system called vitrification. The waste is allowed to cool off for five years, then mixed with borosilicate glass and hardened into a black, solid glass cylinder. Storage is easier because this cylinder occupies only one-sixth the volume of the waste in liquid form. French scientists reckon that if all the nuclear waste that the country generates in the next 20 years were formed into a solid glass cube, each side would measure 53 ft. in length. This glass is expected to resist corrosion and prevent seepage. Creating a waste-treatment industry, France is also reprocessing spent fuel from Japan, West Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland. The waste is to be returned to the country of origin, probably in the form of glass cylinders.

Most striking of all is the French commitment to fast-breeder reactors like Super Phenix, which produce or "breed" more fuel than they consume. That is because breeders, which are fueled by plutonium and uranium 238, generate more plutonium than is "burned" during the nuclear cycle. The danger is that plutonium, if it winds up in the wrong hands, can also be used to make nuclear weapons. For this reason President Carter is opposed to the construction of the experimental fast-breeder on the bank of the Clinch River in Tenn. Skeptics argue that Super Phenix, which will cost $1.5 billion—a conventional reactor costs $1 billion—is too expensive. But the plant's builders, a French-Italian-West German consortium, counter that the fast-breeder's electricity will be competitive with oil-generated power. The bonus, says Giscard, is that "if uranium from French soil is used in fast-breeder reactors, we in France will have potential energy reserves comparable to those of Saudi Arabia."

Though there is some opposition to nuclear development—two weeks ago, 20,000 marchers and 15 sheep descended on Plogoff in western Brittany to symbolize the resistance of local farmers to plans for a reactor there—the pro-nuke momentum will be hard to break. A Harris poll conducted after the Three Mile Island accident indicated that 57% of Frenchmen supported their government's nuclear program. Still, Giscard is taking no chances that people might forget the advantages of the atom. Last month he announced a 15% electricity discount to anyone living near a nuclear plant.