Issouf Ag Maha

Transcription

What should never have happened, did. In the late 1960s the first drums of wastes arrived in the Asse salt mines. That salt has been there for 150 million years, thought the technicians, and two million years for holding radioactive wastes, geologically speaking, are nothing. Then, just a few decades afterwards, water started to come closer to the mines and is corroding them. Today there are 126,000 radioactive drums, and the Germans manage to stay calm A mistake was made: the nuclear wastes were put in the southern part, very close to the strata containing water. It was a fundamental error: the first infiltrations of salty water occurred, causing cracks in the drums. Excuse me, but hadn't the geologists said the site was safe? Of course! That's what the geologists said back then. You can easily see this in the documents from that period: they said that Asse 2 would have remained dry. And thanks to this assurance, the so-called permanent safety test was constructed. But in the 1990s something else was learned when water started coming in. This event confuted everything. And now what will you do, dismantle everything? To remove the wastes it has been calculated that it would take around 2 and a half billion euro. To bring it up to the surface, first it is necessary to wrap them up, transfer them to a conditioning plant, and then transport them to the Konrad mine 30 kilometers from here. We have calculated that it would take 20 years. So it would be more convenient to find a solution on site? Yes, correct. Up to now we have managed to keep the infiltrations under control but not regulate them. If they were to increase, the Asse mine would be in danger, and would be totally flooded. With 126,000 drums of wastes that would release radioactivity, compromising the whole zone and its inhabitants. So what have you decided to do? For the moment we don't know. The plant is shut down and we want to leave all options open, including the removal of the wastes. A few weeks later the federal office for radioprotection sounded the alarm about a danger of the roof of chamber 4 of the Asse storage site collapsing, which would result in the drums breaking and radioactivity being released. These are the external factors of a system, the external costs, the damages, the ones we all pay and leave as a legacy to future generations. Risks and costs versus what benefits? The energy independence of a country? It is said that nuclear power has brought energy independence to France. What is the thing we depend on most from the energy standpoint? All countries, and France like the others? It's oil. If we compare the oil consumption per inhabitant in the four major countries of the European Union, we see that France consumes 1.46 tons per inhabitant, Germany consumed 1,36 in 2007, Italy 1.31, and the United Kingdom 1.33. Without nuclear power Italy consumes less oil! Nothing changes in oil consumption. Indeed, France consumes even more. Because electricity isn't produced with oil. Because electricity isn't produced with oil. Having a lot of electricity of nuclear origin doesn't have anything to do with the top energy security problem, which is oil. So this story of energy security is a lie. In the second place, it is said that nuclear power accounts for 40 percent of primary energy in France, it's colossal. A nuclear plant is, first of all, a heating plant: it produces heat, and only a part of this is transformed into electricity. But instead of counting the electricity, they count the heat, which is three times more and so, in statistics, the importance of nuclear power is pumped up. Electricity accounts for around 20 percent of the final energy consumption, and in the end the contribution of nuclear power to the final energy consumption in France amounts to 14 percent. All the rest is oil, gas, coal, and renewable energies. And with the exception of the renewables and a little coal, all the rest is imported. If you pay attention to which countries have the greatest oil consumption and highest greenhouse gas emissions, you will see that they are the same countries that have nuclear power. The United States accounts for about one fourth of the world's nuclear production, while at the same time emitting a quarter of all the greenhouse gases. It is a model that encourages consumption: there's no need to economize because there is so much energy to waste. There are 58 reactors on French territory. The nuclear plants always produce at top capacity; once they are started up, there's no way to stop the nuclear reaction. And the energy has a totally typical characteristic: it can't be stored. If it produced, it must be consumed. How? It is sufficient to stimulate demand. And so everything is electrical: machines for cooking, heating, and hot water. So the demand skyrockets. So it is necessary to resort to imports when the peak electricity price is much more expensive than that which is exported. That is, it costs two and a half times as much. And when they realized that the system was very expensive, they put old plants back into service, including the oil-powered ones. That is, nuclear France decided in 2006, when the oil price was already very high, to put 2,600 MW of old oil power plants back into service. And it will never be enough. Because the consumption will increase and it will be necessary to build more plants. Issouf Ag Maha, who is a Tuareg from Niger, had never even considered the possibility of having to walk the streets of Normandy. And how is this pertinent? It's pertinent. Stories of uranium. It's not that there's a lot of it around. The plants are operating with the uranium of the nuclear warheads and sooner or later it will be gone. And so it's necessary to hurry and grab the fields. Niger sells the exploitation of its mines and its land becomes poisoned. Issouf was the mayor of a village, he protested out loud, and now he can no longer go back. If I go back to my country they'll put me in prison, and that would be the best that could happen, because otherwise there's the death penalty. The government has decided to crush all those who do not agree with the exploitation of the uranium mines. The mining companies pump water from the water tables and the Tarat one is by now 70 percent emptied; all the rest is completely contaminated. We have nothing left. Arlit is a city of 80,000 persons in the desert; what their future may be, no one asks. Areva exploits the mine; in a few years that uranium will be gone and they will pack up and leave. But the population will no longer have any water: it will be completely irradiated and, what is more, everything that comes out of the ground, the sterile ore from which the uranium was extracted, they leave it all there out in the open together with the contaminated tools. And they don't say anything to anyone, they don't say anything to the population who breathe these radioactive dusts. What will the future of the children born there be? All the iron objects abandoned outside the mines have been salvaged by the local population who know nothing of radioactivity, and reforged into pipes, knives, and forks and put up for sale at the Arlit market. Criirad, the independent French association that measures radioactivity, went to see what was happening in Niger and brought away some of those objects from the market. As you can see, it is an object that emits gamma rays. They are extremely strong and very penetrating rays, and when they pass through our body they can cause lesions to the DNA and increase the cancer risk. We have found heaps of thousands and thousands of tons with radioactive residues like polonium-210, radium, and thorium-230, all out in the open. This means that with the desert wind, which is very strong, the radon – which is a radioactive gas – and the radioactive dust are scattered into the environment. The two hills of radioactive wastes belong to two branch companies of the French group Areva. Then we analyzed the water, and we discovered that the water given out to the workers and the population by the mining companies is contaminated with uranium and radon.