Mycle Schneider

France’s program to produce and separate plutonium began immediately after the Second World War. While the initial purpose was to obtain plutonium for the nuclear weapons program, very early on the fast breeder reactor became a second strategic goal. European cooperation was another goal and the EUROCHEMIC consortium was created in 1957 with the participation of 10 countries; France and Germany held the largest shares with 17 percent each.1

The first reprocessing plant, the "plutonium factory" (usine de plutonium, UP1), began operating in Marcoule in 1958 and the first proposal for the experimental fast reactor Rapsodie was drawn up that year. Preliminary studies for a 1000 megawatt electric (MWe) reactor were conducted as early as 1964.

The behavior of materials was tested under neutron irradiation in Harmonie starting in 1965 and breeder core configurations were studied in the critical facility, Masurca, starting in 1966. These research facilities were located at the Cadarache site in southern France. Much later, in 1982, the Esmeralda facility, also at Cadarache, was designed to study sodium fires. While most of the research was financed by the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), up to 35 percent of some research projects were funded by EURATOM.

In 1966, the second commercial reprocessing plant UP2, financed entirely by the CEA (with the civil and military budgets paying equal shares), started operations at La Hague by separating plutonium from gas-graphite reactor fuel. In Belgium, the EUROCHEMIC plant began operating in 1967. It operated until 1974 and reprocessed 181.3 tons of spent fuel of various types and origins. Two years later the CEA started up a light-water reactor head-end at La Hague (UP2-400) and launched the 100 percent daughter company COGEMA under private law. Foreign (German) light-water reactor fuel was sent to La Hague as early as 1973. There had been no experience with reprocessing light-water reactor fuel with much higher burn-ups than gas-graphite reactor fuel and it took COGEMA eleven years, until 1987, to operate at a nominal capacity of 400 tons per year.

A version of this chapter has been published in Science and Global Security 17 (2008): 36-53.