France could turn radioactive waste into cutlery if public agrees to proposed recycling plant

What does one do with a nuclear plant after it’s shut up shop? 

French energy company EDF has come up with a novel answer following the closure of Fessenheim plant: turning some of the leftover material into forks, saucepans and door handles. 

This won’t mean France’s dining tables are lined with radioactive cutlery, thankfully.

Only “very low-level radioactive” metals will be turned into cast iron or steel, the company said. Other materials will be sent to nuclear waste processing facilities. 

If it makes it through approval processes, the new recycling centre will be spread over 15 hectares near to the closed plant. 

“This would make it possible to process 500,000 tonnes of low-level radioactive metals over a period of forty years,” Laurent Jarry, former director of EDF's Fessenheim site, told French news website Reporterre.

Some say radioactive material is never safe

Low level radioactive metals are essentially rubble, earth or scrap from the dismantling or operation of nuclear facilities, or from conventional industries using naturally radioactive materials. 

Getting rid of this kind of material is always a headache for manufacturers, as they need to pay for it to be stored long-term if no other solution can be found.

While EDF’s plans are a first in France, Sweden, Germany and the United States already use a similar technique to ‘clean’ metals of their radioactivity before melting them down into ingots for reuse.

But not everyone is in favour of giving radioactive material a second life. For this reason, the public can vote on the project between now and February 2025.

Anti-nuclear campaigners claim that there is no harmless threshold for exposure to radioactivity and that any dose, however low, presents risks to human health such as increased chance of developing some types of cancer.

Because of this, the French public health code would need to be amended for the recycling plant to go ahead. An environmental clearance would also have to be obtained.

French law change means low radioactive waste can sometime be recycled

As the French Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity (Criirad) showed in a 2021 study, a tiny amount of radioactivity will always remain in the recycled product (with a variable quantity depending on the metal).

Until 2022, French law prohibited the recovery of low radioactive waste, based on the principle which considers all waste from a nuclear facility to be radioactive. The French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) itself was initially opposed to the idea, fearing that radioactive materials might inadvertently come into contact with the public.

This French ‘precautionary principle’ used to be the exception in Europe, until a ministerial decree published in February 2022 made it possible to recycle low radioactive waste under certain conditions.