François Fillon visite l’usine Georges-Besse2 au Tricastin ! Le mythe du nucléaire français

8/05/2009
François Fillon visite l’usine Georges-Besse2 au Tricastin - La France paye une société étrangère pour utiliser la technologie de l’enrichissement de l’uranium !

- Areva pourra utiliser cette technologie… mais sans y accéder
- La France "à la pointe dans le nucléaire" n’est qu’un mythe

Lundi 18 mai 2009, le Premier ministre François Fillon visitera, en compagnie de Mme Lauvergeon, présidente d’Areva, la nouvelle usine française d’enrichissement de l’uranium, située au Tricastin (Drôme), baptisée Georges-Besse2.

A cette occasion, les autorités françaises vont une nouvelle fois célébrer le mythe de la France "à la pointe de la technologie nucléaire". Mais, ce qu’elles vont se garder de révéler, c’est que la France ne possède pas la technologie d’enrichissement utilisée dans l’usine Georges-Besse2.

Cette technologie, basée sur l’utilisation de centrifugeuses très spécifiques, est louée - très cher - à l’entreprise Urenco (Pays-Bas, Allemagne, Grande-Bretagne). Pour cacher cette vérité très gênante, Areva met en avant la société commune, ETC (Enrichment Technology Company), créée pour l’occasion et qui sera effectivement détenue à parts égales par Urenco et Areva.

Mais, en réalité, les centrifugeuses vont être utilisées dans le cadre de protocoles très particuliers qui empêcheront Areva d’accéder à cette technologie. Dans le jargon de l’industrie nucléaire, on parle d’une "boite noire".

En clair, en payant très cher, Areva pourra utiliser cette technologie… mais sans y accéder. Il est assez amusant de voir que la France nucléaire, supposée être "triomphante" ; ne maîtrise pas la technologie des centrifugeuses, contrairement à certains pays comme... l’Iran.

Le Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire" attire l’attention sur la fait que ce n’est pas là la seule preuve que le nucléaire français "triomphant" n’est qu’un mythe. Par exemple, 54 des 58 réacteurs nucléaires "français" sont en réalité sous licence de la société Westinghouse (USA).

Quant aux réalisations purement françaises, elle se soldent la plupart du temps par de lourdes déconvenues comme ce fut le cas pour le surgénérateur Superphénix, ou aujourd’hui pour le réacteur EPR dont les deux chantiers en cours - Areva en Finlande et EDF à Flamanville (Manche)- tournent au désastre industriel et financier.

Au lieu de persister dans la voie de garage d’une industrie nucléaire dépassée et largement obsolète, le France ferait bien de suivre l’exemple d’Obama aux USA et d’investir massivement dans les économies d’énergie et les énergies renouvelables.

Pour info : NuclearFuel - Volume 30 / Number 26 / December 19, 2005

French centrifuge plant will be ’black box’ equipped with TC-21 machine

The Urenco-Areva joint venture (JV) agreement awaiting final political approval calls for Areva’s planned enrichment plant at Pierrelatte to be outfitted with a new and more powerful Urenco centrifuge, but Areva will not have access to individual components or design information for the machine, senior Urenco officials told NuclearFuel last week.

Paul Dawson, head of business analysis, planning, and strategy for Urenco’s centrifuge research and development subsidiary, Enrichment Technology Co. (ETC), in the U.K., told the Ninth European Nuclear Conference (ENC) in Versailles last week that the French plant will be equipped with the TC-21 centrifuge.

According to some industry sources, TC-21 is estimated to have a design throughput of more than twice the separative power of Urenco’s current commercial machine, TC-12. That machine, sources said, has been set up at Urenco’s existing locations and would also be installed initially in the plant that the Urenco-led LES consortium plans to build in New Mexico. The New Mexico plant is being designed, however, to accommodate the taller TC-21 centrifuges, and LES will consider in the future the economics of installing TC-21 centrifuges after those machines are fully qualified, a source said.

After leaving the issue open in 2002 when they signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to cooperate in centrifuge enrichment, Urenco and Areva in 2003 agreed on terms for a JV that excluded both of them from direct access to centrifuge design information and did not call for joint centrifuge research and development by the two companies, according to senior European enrichment officials. Areva and Urenco would each be 50% partners of ETC, which has already been established as the technology holder for all of Urenco’s centrifuge and enrichment plant design information and will be the vehicle for joint R&D.

Earlier this year, with political approval of the JV still pending, market sources in the Urenco countries questioned the business judgment of Urenco management in having agreed to share its know-how with Areva, since centrifuge enrichment is the only major piece of the nuclear fuel cycle for which the French firm has no near-term commercial future (NF, 18 July, 8).

These sources then said that Urenco spelled out to them this fall that, in fact, under the JV terms, Urenco is not concerned that it will lose its current comparative technological advantage in centrifuge enrichment over Areva because the French firm will not obtain access to sensitive design information about centrifuges installed in the plant in France. They called the planned facility at Pierrelatte a "black box." That term describes a plant that is provided by a technology-holder to a second party, which owns and operates the plant but is not permitted to obtain design information on critical processes.

On the basis of the black box transfer model, during the 1990s the USSR, and then the Russian Federation, built three centrifuge enrichment facilities in China. A subsidiary of the China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) operates these plants, which are packed with small-throughput Soviet-design centrifuges.

However, Chinese organizations do not get any access to the design information for the centrifuges and they do not see any components during operation, removal, or centrifuge manufacture by Russian industry.
"The interesting things in a centrifuge plant are what’s inside the covers of the machines, and (Areva) won’t see that," Dawson said. When the French centrifuge enrichment plant is built, ETC will protect its design information during centrifuge production and assembly. "Areva won’t learn how to build (TC-21) centrifuges" while setting up the plant, Dawson said.

The partnership in ETC will not give either Areva or Urenco access to the JV’s centrifuge technology in the future. Currently, Urenco owns 100% of ETC, which is responsible for all centrifuge technology development for the trilateral enrichment consortium. Dawson and other officials said that the French firm, like Urenco in the future, would be a 50% shareholder in ETC but would not obtain design know-how.
If Urenco’s plans to build a centrifuge enrichment plant in the U.S. bear fruit, the U.S. plant would also be a black box, Dawson said. That would assure that the technology held by ETC does not fall into the hands of Urenco’s U.S. partners.

Urenco is the main partner in the LES consortium, which is preparing to build a centrifuge enrichment plant in New Mexico. The consortium also includes Westinghouse and three U.S. utilities—Exelon, Entergy, and Duke Power.

As far as technology propriety issues are concerned, Dawson said, "the Areva project and the U.S. project would be set up on the same basic model. Neither Areva nor (the U.S. partners) would get the technology."

During the 1990s, Urenco, the three Urenco countries—Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K.—and the U.S. government negotiated a detailed agreement to set up firewalls to protect Urenco’s know-how from disseminating to partners in the then-Louisiana Energy Services (LES) project. Sources said this month that that agreement for LES still serves as the fundamental basis for protecting Urenco design know-how in a future JV project in the U.S.
Some observers drew parallels between the Urenco-Areva partnership being formed and the existing Eurodif venture it aims to replace. Eurodif has shareholders from several countries, but only Areva’s Cogema subsidiary has had access to classified and proprietary technology for the gaseous diffusion enrichment plant known as Georges Besse I.

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