Posted 13 октября 2021, 12:28

Published 13 октября 2021, 12:28

Modified 24 декабря 2022, 22:36

Updated 24 декабря 2022, 22:36

Russia will process uranium waste produced by France

Russia will process uranium waste produced by France

13 октября 2021, 12:28
The French state-owned company Orano has signed a contract with Rosatom. According to the document, over a thousand tons of spent uranium will be sent to Russia from national nuclear power plants. Moreover, the first batch was already exported at the beginning of the year.

At GreenPeace's request, the company confirmed the deal. It was also reported that the next delivery is already being prepared.

From the port of Le Havre in eastern France, the cargo will be delivered by sea to St. Petersburg. From there, the uranium waste will be transported to Seversk, one of 45 closed cities in Russia, where the world's only uranium waste processing plant is located.

GreenPeace sources indicate that the next delivery will be before the end of this year.

Rosatom re-enriches uranium and sends it to Russian nuclear power plants. The technological process also includes the production of plutonium, which is included in the stuffing of atomic bombs.

Let us recall that the USSR, and then the Russian Federation, have been exporting spent nuclear fuel from Europe since the 1970s. This practice was suspended in the 2010s.

“The export of radioactive materials from Europe to third countries is possible only if strict conditions are met, including the safety of the destination”, - said GreenPeace.

The organization noted that Russia does not comply with these requirements, and the deal is a burial radioactive waste in Siberia. GreenPeace is confident that Russia does not need such a quantity of uranium "tails", because the country also accumulates waste from its own nuclear power plants.

“Rosatom considers radioactive waste to be a valuable resource. Now Russia has already accumulated about forty percent of the world's reserves of this substance, they said then, in 2019, at Rosatom.

Note that France is the second country to dump its uranium waste into Russian Siberia. Three years ago, the same agreement was concluded with a German company - a subsidiary of the British company Urenco Group.

Note that the transportation of radioactive waste causes protests from environmentalists, both in Russia and in Western European countries. For example, in Germany, environmental activists got in the way of trains with containers and lay on the rails in front of the trains carrying them, but this did not interfere with transportation.

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