French nuclear waste: a one-way ticket to Siberia. The French nuclear industry is sending its cumbersome stocks of spent uranium to Russia

At each stage of its production, nuclear electricity generates tons of waste and material that is difficult to reuse and as a result accumulates throughout France. These ever-increasing quantities of useless radioactive substances are a problem for the French nuclear industry and tarnish its message regarding the alleged environmental virtues of nuclear power. To rid themselves of some of this cumbersome waste, French companies EDF and Orano have chosen to resume the sale of spent uranium to Russia - a business interrupted over 10 years ago. While investigating in the port of Le Havre, Greenpeace France discovered that several dozen tons of uranium obtained by reprocessing spent fuel were loaded on board the ship Mikhail Lomonosov bound for St. Petersburg on 20 January and 12 February 2021. Orano (formerly Areva), which specializes in the production and processing of nuclear fuel, has acknowledged that it was behind these shipments. The company revealed that it signed a contract for the sale of more than 1,000 tonnes of reprocessed uranium to the Russian state-owned nuclear company Rosatom, which is supposed to reuse the uranium in its nuclear reactors after processing at the Seversk (Tomsk 7) plant in the heart of Siberia. Russia already has enormous amounts of this material at its disposal, so it is likely that French reprocessed uranium will simply be stored at Seversk for an unlimited period. According to a confidential source of Greenpeace France, Orano is thought to be preparing another shipment of spent uranium from France to Russia between October and December 2021. These shipments are not about to stop: in May 2018, Rosatom subsidiary Tenex announced a deal with EDF to process French reprocessed uranium, also at Tomsk 7. Once processed, with the production of tons of waste that will remain in Siberia, this uranium should return to France to fuel the Cruas-Meysse nuclear power plant. Unlike Orano, EDF has not, to date, restarted shipments of reprocessed uranium to Russia. In 2010, when it stopped exporting reprocessed uranium to Russia, Areva (now Orano) acknowledged that it had stopped for economic and environmental reasons. The process used at the time in Tomsk to transform the uranium was extremely polluting, with chemical and radioactive residue injected directly into the subsoil of the site in liquid form. Greenpeace France has no guarantee that this process is cleaner today. Greenpeace France calls for a permanent halt to exports of French reprocessed uranium to Russia, a practice which make no environmental, social or economic sense. Most of the material remains in Russia and is not reused, making it nuclear waste export, a practice that is subject to strict conditions in the EU legislation, including the safety and proper management of the destination facility. Currently classified by French law as a recoverable 'material', reprocessed uranium should be classified as 'waste', as is the case in most of the world's nuclearized countries. Measures must be implemented for its indefinite storage inside France. Furthermore, because it produces hazardous waste for which there is no treatment or recycling solution, nuclear energy production should be definitively excluded from the European taxonomy, an inventory of green investments