FRENCH-ATOM-I 3takes
First of three articles suggested for use beginning Sunday
By PETER J. BERNSTEIN

    PARIS - With unswerving single-mindedness, France is plunging ahead
on an ambitious nuclear power program that has enormous implications
for the world.
    Undaunted by the doubts and fears that elsewhere have caused
opposition to nuclear energy - particularly after the Three Mile
Island accident - French leaders are placing the highest priority on
expanding their civil and military nuclear program.
    Not only are they accelerating development of established nuclear
technologies and plants but, with a speed that is causing concern
among American policy-makers, they are moving into new - and not
wholly proven - ways of harnessing the atom.
    Ignoring ''go slow'' warnings from President Carter and rising
protests from European critics, the French are spending billions of
dollars to make so-called fast-breeder reactors the backbone of their
energy system.
    As a step in that direction, a breeder reactor is being constructed
with nearly five times the power of a prototype plant that has been
operating since 1974 at France's giant Marcoule nuclear complex in
the Rhone Valley.
    The breeder - so named because it produces more nuclear fuel than it
consumes - requires the use of plutonium, the principal element in
nuclear weapons.
    As a source of nearly unlimited energy, the breeder falls into the
same category as solar energy and thermonuclear fusion. However,
there is great concern, especially in the United States, that
non-nuclear nations, or terrorists, might be able to divert enough
plutonium to make a bomb.
    Authorities interviewed on a recent tour of major French nuclear
facilities said the decision to proceed with breeder development has
not been made casually.
    ''We take the matter of weapons proliferation very seriously,'' said
Georges Vendryes, chief of France's civilian nuclear program. ''But
there is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, in holding back
development of breeders and plutonium reprocessing.''
    He said that France, virtually devoid of domestic oil and coal
resources, feels particularly vulnerable in the energy crisis.
    Industry Minister Andre Giraud said in France's Parliament recently,
''Our country has no serious alternative to nuclear energy, except
economic recession and dependence on the outside world.''
    Michel Pecqueur, head of the government's Atomic Energy Commission,
asserted: ''It's not a toy we are asking for, but a way of providing
people with electricity. And we have to provide enough electricity to
avoid political and economic damage in the future.''
    Pecqueur added: ''In the United States, you may be operating under
the illusion that you have many options. We in France can see no way
to go without nuclear power.''
    The French, caught between increasing demands for energy and scant
supplies of fossil fuels, are going nuclear quickly. They have 16
nuclear plants now in operation and 32 under construction.
    Underscoring France's commitment to nuclear power, President Valery
Giscard d'Estaing earlier this year did what no other Western leader
would dare attempt.
    While the radioactive gases were still billowing inside the crippled
reactor on Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pa., Giscard calmly
ordered a speed-up of his country's construction of nuclear power
stations.
    Such action would have been politically unthinkable in West Germany,
Holland or Sweden, where opponents of nuclear power have brought
reactor construction to a virtual standstill.
    But in France, Giscard's decision was accepted almost without
question by a great majority of citizens as a logical response to the
cutback in Iranian oil exports and ensuing increase in oil prices.
    Nuclear opposition is not entirely absent in France, but it is weak
and scattered. The national elections last year saw the elimination
of the small anti-nuclear Ecologist Party as a significant political
force. Meanwhile, the major political parties, from the Communists to
the far right, have endorsed the government's determination to
proceed with nuclear development.
    ''We are the only country with a real political consensus for
nuclear energy,'' said Jean Pellerin, chief spokesman at the Atomic
Energy Commission.
    In the last decade, France has committed more than $30 billion to
building commercial reactors, mostly 900-megawatt pressurized water
reactors based largely on a design licensed by Westinghouse.
    In addition, France has spent billions building its own nuclear
weapons force from scratch, along the way mastering the process of
uranium enrichment and other nuclear techniques that are now starting
to pay off in the civil field as well.
    A tour of French nuclear facilities arranged by the government's
Atomic Energy Commission provided a close up look at the
newly-developed centerpiece of French nuclear sovereignty, the
gigantic gaseous diffusion plant operated by Eurodif - a five-nation
consortium - in the southeast of France.
    This $5-billion plant, and a string of companion enterprises that
make up a complete nuclear ''loop'' from the mining of uranium to its
enrichment for fuel to its disposal in glass canisters provide France
with a nuclear competence not yet achieved in other Western
countries. Only the Soviet Union, which is fully committed to
developing fast-breeder reactors and recycling nuclear fuel, can hope
to compete with the French.
    This is not because the French possess superior technology. Their
conventional nuclear stations are based on borrowed American
technology, though they have made extensive modifications in the
basic Westinghouse design.
    Rather, the reason for France's being way ahead is the country's
single-mindedness in the pursuit of atomic know-how.
    Even more ambitious than the Germans, the French plan to produce by
1985 an almost incredible 60 percent of their electricity by using
the atom, compared with 14 percent today. Toward that goal, France is
constructing six nuclear power stations a year, mainly 900-megawatt
and 1,300-megawatt pressurized water reactors.
    Moreover, French nuclear reactors are generally constructed on
schedule in four years, compared with an average construction time of
nine years in the United States.
    Because of its reputation, the French nuclear industry has taken off
like a shot.
    According to Jean-Claude Leny, managing director of Framatome, a
quasi-governmental firm that constructs all of France's conventional
nuclear stations, the company's order books are completely full
through 1985.
    While other reactor firms such as Westinghouse and General Electric
subsist on dwindling backlogs and maintenance programs, Framatome has
a different problem: complying with the government's demand for a new
pressurized water reactor every two months.
    The accelerated nuclear program is helped along by the country's
centralized and authoritarian administrative system, which
concentrates power in the hands of an elite corps of officials who
know one another personally and are convinced of the rightness of
what they are doing.
    Decision-makers need only develop an approval plan for reactor
construction and count on the nationalized French Electric Authority
to order the plants.
    There is none of the interminable public argument aht bedevils
nuclear power development in the United States and West Germany.
Because France's civil nuclear program grew out of a military
enterprise and was established by presidential decree rather than an
act of Parliament, anti-nuclear lawyers have no opportunity to
challenge the substance of government nuclear actions in court.
    The government has overruled local municipalities in Normandy and
Alsace that opposed the siting of nuclear facilities.
    Remy Carle, director of construction at Electricite de France, the
national electric authority, admits that EdF has encountered trouble
finding sites - for any kind of plant, not just nuclear. But approval
comes eventually. And EdF's policy - one that would hardly go over
the United States - is ''not to let the population know where the
future sites are.'' That, he said, ''could raise emotional opposition
without any benefit.''
    The government's campaign in behalf of nuclear power takes many
forms - posters, television, encouraged (if not planted) news
stories. There is no official embarrassment about manipulating public
opinion.
    In a recent statement that probably would have gotten his American
counterpart fired, Jean Pellerin, chief spokesman for the French
Atomic Energy Commission, said, in part: ''The real problem in
informing is not solved simply by making more information available,
as demanded by the opponents of nuclear development, but lies in
discovering what the public is prepared to take an interest in and
what they are capable of assimilating.''
    He said the publication of technical data ''frequently has little
other effect than to heighten feelings of insecurity, the technically
ignorant seldom retaining anything other than the existence of the
risks in question....There is nothing to be gained for real
information of the public by holding controversial debates.''
    Inherent in such remarks is the attitude that public opinion is not
to be weighed, but formed.
    Commenting on press coverage of the Three Mile Island accident,
Pellerin complained that although there were no fatalities or serious
environmental damage, this ''harmless'' event drew great attention
while the commonplace hazards of life - highway accidents and
storm-related injuries - went unnoted.
    In the last decade, the French press's coverage of nuclear programs
has reflected the pro-nuclear consensus in France. When a French
gas-cooled reactor sustained an actual ''melt-down'' in 1969, French
newspapers reported the accident two weeks after it occurred.
    The crippled plant at St. Laurent was shut down for a year while
damaged fuel rods were replaced and the reactor vessel decontaminated.
    Though there were no releases of radiation into the envirjean Stolz,
nuclear safety chief at the national electric authority, played a key
role in the clean-up. Stolz said he was ''pessimistic'' about the
chances of decontaminating Three Mile Island any time soon. ''It
would be cheaper to build a new reactor,'' he said.
    He noted that the Three Mile Island accident occurred while the
reactor fuel was irradiated, causing massive contamination of the
building shielding the reactor and cooling water. By contrast, the
French accident took place during fuel loading and was brought under
control within minutes.
    Stolz voiced strong criticism of the handling of the Three Mile
Island accident, contending that from the beginning there were faults
with the operating methods that accounted for the trouble: negligence
regarding security measures taken by the plant management, inferior
operating personnel and inadequate technical safeguards in the
plant's construction.
    He said that as a result of the accident in Pennsylvania the French
electric authority is revamping its own emergency procedures for
pressurized water reactors similar to the one at Three Mile Island.
    Reactor operators are going through retraining programs with the use
of simulators that require them to respond to emergency situations.
    French reactor operators, unlike their American counterparts, are
not licensed.
    ''In France,'' Stolz said, ''there are no formal exams for reactor
operators because the unions don't accept them.'' Rarely is anyone
fired at the national electric authority, he said.
    Asked if an accident similar to Three Mile Island could occur in
France, he said: ''Yes, it could. Things that happened at Three Mile
Island could happen here.''
    Nevertheless, French authorities maintain they have solved the
important safety problems of conventional light-water reactors and
that their construction must continue until France achieves energy
independence.
    The Atomic Energy Commission believes it can manage on its own when
the Westinghouse licensing agreement expires in 1981, although it
hopes to continue technical cooperation with the American company.
    In addition to meeting its own energy needs, France hopes to
supplant the United States as the leading exporter of reactors and
handler and recycler of spent nuclear fuel among industrialized
nations.
    Many American policy-makers are concerned not so much that France
may replace the United States as the dominant force in the world
energy market, but that Washington will no longer be calling the
shots.
    
(NEXT: BREEDING NUCLEAR DANGER)
 
FRENCH-ATOM-II 3takes
Second of three articles suggested for use beginning Sunday
By PETER J. BERNSTEIN
Newhouse News Service
    CREYS-MALVILLE, France - From this pastoral farming region in a part
of Europe where Roman legions once marched and Medieval castles
abound, France is making its bid for entry into the Plutonium Age.
    Here on a bend in the Rhone River near the Swiss border - a site
chosen not for its historic symbolism but for its isolation from
heavily populated areas - a French-led consortium is constructing the
world's first commercial-size fast breeder reactor.
    The development of this huge breeder called Super-Phoenix - if it is
completed for electric power production by 1983, as most nuclear
experts expect - is of importance far beyond France's borders.
    For the industrialized world, breeder technology offers the hope of
smooth passage to energy independence. It would guarantee practically
limitless electric power at a time when all Western countries are
looking increasingly to high-technology industries to provide future
employment and prosperity.
    Even before the 1,200-megawatt Super-Phoenix starts up, France's
national electric authority, Electricite de France, plans to take
bids for construction of two more breeders - twin units at the same
site, each producing 1,500 megawatts.
    ''We think there is no time to lose in developing breeder
reactors,'' said Georges Vendryes, chief of France's civilian nuclear
program.
    Vendryes, a well-respected and tough-minded physicist who runs the
government's Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, predicts that after
1990, breeders will be the backbone of the French energy system. ''I
don't see any difficulties in going to plutonium,'' he said.
    However, there is a growing concern, even among many pro-nuclear
scientists, that breeders may pose serious and possibly
insurmountable safety hazards.
    Because of fears that increasingly routine commerce in plutonium
might hasten the spread of atomic weapons and increase the likelihood
of nuclear war, the Carter administration has reined in the American
breeder program and refused to provide funds for a $2.1 billion
prototype breeder on the Clinch River in Tennessee.
    A typical breeder - so named because of its ability to produce more
plutonium fuel than it burns - would produce enough material every
year for 25 atomic bombs. Third World developing nations or
terrorists might be able to divert enough to make a bomb, U.S.
officials maintain.
    Another drawback is reactor safety. Studies in the United States and
other countries where breeder programs have been stalled or slowed,
such as Great Britain and West Germany, suggest that accidents are
less likely to occur in breeders and would release less radioactivity
than accidents in conventional reactors.
    But the worst breeder accident would be a true disaster, releasing
much more radioactivity. Unlike conventional reactors, the breeder
could actually suffer a low-grade nuclear explosion - not nearly as
powerful as a bomb, but probably potent enough to rupture the
protective containment and allow dangerious material to escape.
    Why then is France placing so much emphasis on the breeder?
    Vendryes, interviewed while this reporter was on a recent tour of
French nuclear facilities, said that France is not the least swayed
by the anti-breeder sentiment in the United States and elsewhere in
the West.
    Americans, he said, can afford to lag in breeder technology. But the
French, with no reserves of oil, scant coal reserves and a finite
supply of uranium, must move ahead quickly on breeder reactors.
    H1973, as well
as the Iranian cutback earlier this year - French energy officials
are as loath to rely heavily in the future on imported uranave in the pa''On mo-
ral grounds, it is a risk we can't take, even if it proves
later to be wrong,'' Vendryes said.
    The plutonium breeder's single compelling virtue is the expectation
that it will squeeze 50 to 60 times as much energy from a given
supply of fuel as do conventional light-water reactors.
    Although the French government has supplemented its own small
indigenous supply of uranium fuel by obtaining privileged access to
the rich deposits in its former African colonies of Niger and Gabon,
it would be helpless if the world's major uranium producers formed a
cartel and jacked up the price.
    For that reason, the breeder reactor translates in the minds of
French officials as nothing less than a guarantor of energy
independence.
    But a system of breeder reactors requires a costly set of operations
to supply fresh nuclear fuel to power reactors and to arrange for the
disposition of irradiated ''spent'' fuel when it is discharged after
use.
    These facilities, along with storage depots for tons of surplus
plutonium stockpiled in the system, pose security problems unlike any
that civilian industry has ever faced.
    The Super-Phoenix, just one reactor, will require an astounding
10,000 pounds of plutonium fuel when it starts up. Since about 20
pounds of plutonium are needed to make an efficient nuclear bomb
capable of destroying the center of a major city, the weapons
potential of a nation with only a few nuclear reactors can be readily
imagined.
    Most nuclear-powered countries, including France, obtain their
plutonium through a technique called reprocessing, in which plutonium
is extracted from the spent fuel of conventional fission reactors.
Once separated, plutonium is fairly safe to handle because its alpha
radiation is not penetrating; a chunk of it can be held safely in a
gloved hand.
    With the expectation that security problems will somehow be
surmounted, breeder development is proceeding.
    Although the costs are high and the technology new and untested, the
French expect to have Super-Phoenix ready for fuel loading possibly
as early as 1982. The 280-foot-high concrete containment building is
nearly completed, and in an adjacent building welders are assembling
the stainless steel reactor vessel and fuel storage tanks.
    Except for cladding material around the fuel rods that is being
supplied by a California firm, all of the technology and components
going into Super-Phoenix are European.
    The huge breeder is being built practically on schedule - in six
years, which is less than half the time allotted for a comparable
nuclear project in the United States. Despite President Carter's
campaign against plutonium-based nuclear technology, the United
States has had under construction for at least 10 years a research
breeder designed to test the effects of irradiation on a wide variety
of components, but not generate power. The project, named the fast
flux test reactor, is under way at Hanford, Wash.
    Some French officials suspect that commercial motivations underlie
the Carter administration's pleas for restraint in commercializing
plutonium. Perhaps, these officials suggest, the United States is
seeking a pause not to buy time for improving international nuclear
safeguards but for closing the breeder gap.
    One senior official, in explaining this view without subscribing to
it, noted that the Carter administration still proposed to spend
nearly $500 million in the next fiscal year on a breeder research and
development program.
    That amounts to substantially more than France, West Germany and
Great Britain will spend collectively this year on breeder
development.
    ''I should be quite happy with that amount of money,'' the French
official said. ''You may be slow, but you are still moving on a
majestic scale.''
    Nuclear scientists from different nations who have been closely
watching the performance of France's 250-megawatt prototype breeder,
Phoenix, since it began producing power five years ago seem to agree
that the experience of operating the reactor has put France ahead of
the United States, probably by as much as 10 years.
    Although the Phoenix has been a technical success, operating for the
most part at 80 percent of capacity, the reactor falls very short of
the cost and fuel production rate generally set as goals for
commercial breeder programs. The doubling time of the Phoenix - the
time needed for it to double its original inventory of fuel - is 50
to 60 years, too long for a commercial electric system based on
breeders to expand at a reasonable rate. The doubling time of the
Super-Phoenix will be about 40 years. Ten or 12 years is the goal of
breeder development.
    The cost for both the Super-Phoenix and Phoenix is high, and the
major factor that controls the cost of the breeder fuel cycle -
called the percentage ''burnup'' of the fuel - falls substantially
short of the economic goal.
    French nuclear officials emphasize that the Super-Phoenix is a
conservatively designed reactor. ''For Super-Phoenix as well as
Phoenix, the major emphasis has been to achieve a technical
success,'' said Georges Lucenet, safety chief for the Super-Phoenix
project. ''Surely, it won't be economic, but today we are confident
of our technology, and after Super-Phoenix we'll go to an economic
reactor.''
    But there are signs that resulting pressure from a public that is
becoming concerned about nuclear hazards, combined with economic
constraints on the growth of energy demand, may yet curtail France's
headlong effort to commercialize the breeder.
    Vendryes said the French government is placing top priority on
achieving a ''drastic reduction'' in the costs of both breeder
reactors and their associated fuel cycle.
    ''In my own view,'' he said, ''the main problem facing the
development of breeder reactors in coming years is not safety but
economic competitiveness with today's light-water reactors.''
    Vendryes is confident that some day there will only be breeders at
work in France. Indeed, France's atomic energy authority already has
plans for a ''breeder park,'' encompassing four reactors with a
combined power of 6,000 megawatts, as well as plutonium fuel
fabrication and reprocessing facilities.
    But if the U.S. view is correct, France could end up with a monopoly
on a dangerous and uneconomic energy strategy. If the French system
proves correct, the United States could end up importing breeders
from France.
    (NEXT: BURYING RADIOACTIVE WASTES)