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“EDF’s secret dump,” headlines Libération on the front page, pointing the finger at the state-controlled Éléctricité de France (the world’s largest utility company). According to an exposé in the Parisian daily, 13% of the radioactive material produced in France is discreetly deposited out in the open air in Siberia. More precisely, in the Tomsk-7 atomic complex in Seversk, a town of 30,000 inhabitants and off limits to journalists. “Every year since the mid-1990s, another 108 tonnes of depleted uranium from French reactors is deposited in containers on a big parking lot under the open sky,” after a long 8,000-km haul by boat and by train. This transfer of radioactive material is the upshot of an industrial choice that France is one of the few nuclear powers to have made: to reprocess and recycle nuclear waste, explains Libération, recalling that the atomic industry officially vaunts its 96% recycling record. A documentary on this special report will be broadcast this 13 October on the Franco-German channel Arte.
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