In the late 1980s, as large scale reprocessing was becoming commercially established, the French government began looking for a repository site for its high-level commercial radioactive waste. As has been the experience elsewhere, there was intense protest when the preliminary list of sites selected for study was announced.² The process had to be shut down and France started over with a new nuclear waste law, passed in 1991. We will refer to the law as the Bataille Act, in reference to the parliamentarian who authored it, Christian Bataille, a member of the ruling Socialist Party.

The Bataille Act requires simultaneous research on three methods of high-level radioactive waste management (storage, transmutation, and repository disposal). Article 3 of the law requires the return of foreign radioactive wastes to their country of origin after the reprocessing of their spent fuel has been completed. Another crucial feature of the law is that it forbids the storage of foreign nuclear wastes on French soil beyond the limited time necessary for the reprocessing requirements.³ Implicit in this idea was that Cogéma (a) would not accept foreign spent fuel for storage in France if it was not intended for reprocessing, (b) would not store spent fuel for long periods of time before reprocessing, and (c) would not store the reprocessed wastes from the spent fuel for long periods of time.

Most of the radioactivity in the reprocessing waste is contained in liquid high level wastes, which are vitrified and stored in specially constructed structures at the La Hague site, located near Cherbourg in the northwest of France. Low and intermediate level radioactive wastes generated by reprocessing are due to be compacted and stored in containers at La Hague. While Cogéma has returned some vitrified waste generated from the reprocessing of foreign spent fuel to Germany and Japan, the majority remains and continues to pile up at La Hague. None of the low and intermediate level waste has been returned, and Cogéma and its clients are not resolved on its final destination. Liquid low level wastes are discharged into the English Channel.

Cogéma has accepted:

• close to 50 metric tons of German MOX spent fuel - that is, spent fuel resulting from the irradiation of mixed plutonium dioxide-uranium dioxide fuel in German reactors - between 1988 and 1998. Cogéma does not have a permit to reprocess this spent fuel and has not applied for one. Such a permit is necessary since MOX spent fuel contains far more plutonium and other transuranic radionuclides than spent uranium fuel. It is being stored in violation of the spirit 1991 law, as Bataille, the author of the law, has noted:

• four shipments to La Hague during the summer of 2000 of German non-irradiated MOX fuel scrap from the Hanau MOX fuel fabrication plant which is being dismantled. This fuel is slated to be reprocessed. However, Cogéma would need a special authorization from the DSIN (Direction de la sûreté des installations nucléaires, equivalent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States) to reprocess it and has not applied for one. Furthermore, these shipments have occurred without the knowledge of the French Ministry of Environment and in spite of the fact that for the last two years the French government has declared that no more imports of spent fuel from Germany would be accepted until Germany takes back its wastes from La Hague. The Ministry of Industry claims that the shipments were legal since the fuel is not irradiated and the contract was signed in 1997, before the 1998 ban on transports from Germany to France. Eleven more shipments from Hanau are scheduled for this year.
• three hundred sixty rods of irradiated MTR (Material Testing Reactor) fuel from the Australian Lucas Height research reactor. This fuel, which arrived in March in the port of Cherbourg, is also slated to be reprocessed but, again, Cogéma would need a special authorization from the DSIN.

A lawsuit filed in 1994 by a non-governmental organization in Normandy, the Committee for Reflection, Information, and Anti-Nuclear Struggle (Comité de Réflexion, d'Information, et de Lutte Anti-Nucléaire or CRILAN, for short), alleges that Cogéma is violating the Bataille Act. The complaint was amended in 1997 to include a charge of endangerment of public safety, since a law passed in that year allowed individuals to file suit if they believed their safety was being endangered due to illegal activities. Didier Anger (pronounced aahn-zhay), who represents CRILAN on the Commission Hague and the Commission Flamanville⁴ and was also a former parliamentarian to the European Union, is the plaintiff for this new charge. The activities alleged to cause public endangerment are the (illegal) storage of foreign nuclear waste at La Hague and the releases to the environment resulting from reprocessing.

Article 3 of the 1991 waste law is very specific in requiring the return of foreign wastes. CRILAN's position is that the law requires the return of all wastes that were generated at La Hague as a result of reprocessing foreign spent fuel. Besides vitrified high level wastes, Cogéma must also return other reprocessing wastes.

Before the lawsuit was filed in 1994, Cogéma appeared to have no plans to return the foreign waste to the countries where the spent fuel originated, including Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, and these countries had no plans to take back their wastes. In fact, a review of the older contracts indicates that Cogéma's foreign customers hoped that they could abandon their wastes in France under cover of sending spent fuel there for reprocessing.

Based on the testimony of Monsieur Bataille, reprocessing a batch of spent fuel takes five to eight years (including the time for high level waste vitrification). Reprocessing operations on the batches of spent fuel that resulted in the large amount of vitrified high level waste that is currently stored at La Hague have long been completed. One of the central arguments of CRILAN's lawsuit is that this waste is being stored at La Hague in violation of French law.

CRILAN's goals in filing the lawsuit are:

1. To have it officially confirmed that Cogéma's La Hague site has become the nuclear dump for Europe and Japan.
2. To demonstrate that Cogéma has used illegal tactics to obtain contracts.
3. To have highlighted the fact that the government has allowed Cogéma to transgress the law, notably by not specifying that penalties would be incurred in case of infraction, and thus not fully implementing the Bataille Act.⁵
4. To promote the return of foreign waste to the country of origin and thereby to help stem or stop reprocessing.
5. To make the French and German governments accountable and to force them to resolve the difficulties confronting the repatriation of the waste. Not only Cogéma but also the governmental agencies are responsible for the failure of the lawful return of the waste to Germany.

Besides the environmental and legal aspects of this case, the matter should be of considerable interest to all other countries concerned with the management of nuclear materials and nuclear waste. If Cogéma, the world's top plutonium handling and processing company, is found to be routinely in violation of the laws of France, should it raise the question of whether much of the world's commercial separated plutonium is in the "wrong hands"?

Before CRILAN's 1994 lawsuit, wastes from foreign spent fuel reprocessing were not returned to their countries of origin. Since then, there have been six shipments to Japan, two to Belgium, and three to Germany. However, Germany does not have enough storage space at its power plants for the vitrified logs of radioactive waste. Further, shipments of vitrified logs to the Gorleben repository in Germany have encountered stiff opposition from anti-nuclear activists.

The widespread publicity attracted by the CRILAN lawsuit played a role in the suspension of spent fuel shipments from Germany to France in May 1998, pending a resolution of resuming repatriation of German vitrified high level wastes now stored in France. An agreement between the French and German governments was reached in January 2001 to resume the shipments in both directions. A shipment from La Hague to Gorleben took place in March 2001. It caused enormous protest in Germany, with thousands of activists blocking the transport route, which was escorted by thousands of police.⁶ In the other direction, 1,000 metric tons of spent fuel are due to arrive at La Hague between now and 2005 for reprocessing. Repatriation is a central issue in the lawsuit.

In January 1999, the judge Frédéric Chevallier, who has investigative powers under French law, decided that there was enough merit in Didier Anger's charge to put Cogéma under investigation. In May of that year, the judge visited Cogéma's La Hague site and Anger accompanied him. Since Cogéma did not meet the judge's demand for documents, Judge Chevallier carried out a search of Cogéma's headquarters in Vélizy in September 1999 to obtain these documents in person.

Cogéma petitioned the court to dismiss the CRILAN case after an official report by the IPSN (Institut de protection et de surveillance nucléaire, an institute under both the Ministry of Industry and Ministry of Environment) claimed -- contrary to the findings of a paper published in a British medical journal -- that cases of leukemia near the La Hague site were likely not attributable to reprocessing activities. In October 2000, the Court of Criminal Appeal rejected Cogéma's appeal.

In October 2000, CRILAN's lawyer, the Cherbourg judge granted Maître Tilbault de Montbrial, and Didier Anger access to the documents that were confiscated during the judge's search at Cogéma headquarters, in particular the German reprocessing contracts that had been translated. There were several types of contracts. The oldest, made with France's Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, covering at least 1,700 metric tons, has no explicit return clause. Others have a return and a no return option. Some provide for return but with no date attached.

Judge Chevallier has named an expert to provide him with a report on the case. The expert is expected to file his report to the court around June 2001. There will be a judicial hearing after that, in which plaintiffs and defendants will participate, and upon which the judge will make his findings. Cogéma may appeal the findings of the judge. The process of judicial hearing, appeals, and concurrent organizing and media work by CRILAN is expected to extend into the year 2002.

• CRILAN took Cogéma to the Cherbourg court in 1994 for the illegal storage of highly radioactive foreign waste. (See accompanying above for details.)
• Greenpeace France took Cogéma to court for shipping irradiated nuclear fuel from Australia. On March 15, 2001, the court ruled in favor of Greenpeace, forbidding Cogéma to unload the fuel. To make its judgment stick, the court imposed a fine of 100,000 francs (about $15,000) per rod unloaded, to be renewed every week until the fuel is either shipped back or the authorization to reprocess obtained. The court also ordered Cogéma to pay 20,000 francs to Greenpeace for laywers' fees, but Cogéma got the fee overturned on appeal. The case is still underway.
• In March 2001, CRILAN took Cogéma to court for accepting German non-irradiated MOX fuel scraps. Although the arguments were the same as those put forward by Greenpeace, the case was not judged on the validity of the arguments. It was dismissed on the grounds that CRILAN did not have the standing to bring forth such a case. CRILAN has referred the case to the environmental group Manche-Nature, which appears to have the standing to file the complaint.

6. This one shipment included waste generated from the reprocessing of approximately 250 metric tons of German spent fuel.