My Diaries

Ci-joint le lien vers un article de France Info qui fait mal là où ça passe. Ça parle du premier démantèlement stoppé d’une centrale nucléaire française, à Brennilis en Bretagne. Le démantèlement, c’est la déconstruction pas à pas de la centrale nucléaire (généralement arrivée en fin de vie) par EDF, avec confinement des matériaux radioactifs et dépollution des sols, de façon à remettre le site en état. C’est une opération très coûteuse, mais c’est également un savoir-faire à développer à tout prix pour l’opérateur historique, car le “marché du démantèlement” dans le monde s’ouvre aujourd’hui alors que la plupart des centrales nucléaires des années 70 arrivent en fin de vie : une aubaine pour l’électricien français. (more…)

I just love it!

For non-French speakers :
The demonstraters’ posters say : “More CO2!” “More Cancers for our kids!” “SUVs for all” “Leave Kyoto!” “Bhopal it’s not that bad!” “Less birds more cars!” and in big and yellow, the main banneer : “CO2, I want it!” mimicking the Danone ice-cream brand Gervais slogan “Gervais, j’en veux!”.

They chant “It is fordidden to forbid to pollute!”, “We are here to make sure that the Grenelle for the Environnement [the big environmental brainstorming set up by Sarkozy and happening right now in France] is going to become the Grenelle against the Environnement!” “Yesterday I have been polluting, today I’ll keep polluting!” “Nuclear is a bomb! [meaning it is great] and it is good money for France! Let’s do it nuclear!”. They claim to represent “oil industries”, “chemical industries”, “car industries”, “nuclear lobbyists”, “GMO lovers” who “came to Paris to defend their right to sack the planet”! They had to demonstrate because, “under the pressure from ecologists, the list of infringements to [their] fundamental rights is everyday larger : quotas on CO2 emissions, fishing restrictions, prohibition to use toxic products, drastic anti-polluting norms… and maybe soon a moratorium on GMOs!!” (Late september, Environment Minister Jean-Louis Boorlo announced that there might be a moratorium on GMOs “because we can’t control dissemination, so we won’t take any risk”. It has triggered a tsunami of reactions, good from the left and green parties, unhappy from the agriculture syndicate –and agronomic industries, and embarrassed from the government.)

A quick update about the Act4Trees operation : it is doing good! In 12 days there was 5 million new leaves on the website. At this rate, in “only” 204 days AquaVerde association will be able to get their 10000€. Let’s hope it won’t slow down!

Just between us, an easy trick to spread the word: create a link toward one of the forests in your e-mail signature. In that way, your contacts will be able to know about Act4trees without you needing to talk about it!

Read on MEDAD (French Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Planning and Development) website.
(I’ll pass the details, and please forgive my poor English since the translation is very technical and I didn’t spend too much time on it):

Our State Minister Jean-Louis BORLOO visited last August Météo France National Center for Research in Meteorology in Toulouse, and participated into a workshop about last summer’s climate conditions, and on the climate change question. Here below are some summarizing elements from the meeting, as presented by the Ministry :

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Going back to the presidential campaign, during the Sarkozy-Royal debate : at the time, Royal had been called an ignorant because she stated that French nuclear power only met 17% of France consumed energy, and Sarkozy had triggered passionate debates (at least between one of my colleagues and I) when he affirmed that the soon-to-be-built French nuclear reactor, an EPR type, was a 4th generation reactor (for those who haven’t seen it: the Sarko-Ségo debate on environment and nuclear power).

At the time, my opinion was that neither one or the other was right. I thought that nuclear power counted as much as 78% in our electricity production, and I thought I understood that part of the debate on whether France should build the EPR reactor or not actually was that the EPR technology was already outdated, part of a 3rd generation of reactors, while the 4th generation was more secure, less polluting, and more efficient.

But I just found on Ressources-solidaires.org website the answer to my questions : it is a very interesting article (in French) which explains everything and settles the debate.

I won’t spoil it for you… Enjoy!