The reason the French are ahead of us in nuclear power is that the French system of government stifles local objections to what the national government decides to do. For almost a generation, a combination of political NIMBYism and environmental litigation has kept the US government from building a nuclear waste facility in Nevada. That didn't -- and couldn't -- happen in France.

France has riots and the occasional revolution, but in between it doesn't suffer from a whole lot of due process or local democracy. When the French bureaucracy decides that something should be done, that's what the French government does. Period. Governments come and go, regimes come and go, sometimes the Germans come and go, but what the French call the Administration goes on forever.

Forty years ago the Administration decided that France needed to generate electricity from nuclear power because it doesn't have much coal and has no oil. The national electric utility, EdF, picked two standardized designs (one big, one small), and built them all over the country. There was a modicum of complaint from environmentalists, but it didn't matter.

In Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and Finland nuclear provides about half of the electric power that is generated. These countries are also considering the addition of more nuclear plants to meet the Kyoto accord.

So where do those countries dump their radioactive crap? The North Sea, or is all that material the real reason why the polar ice caps are melting?

I'm actually serious about my question on where they dispose of it.

Actually french local democracy is very much present, but France never had any major nuclear catastrophy, therefore the public never had any major issue with nuclear power. Although a nuclear plant is a major source of tax for any local authority. Finally, reliable and cheap electricity is something most people would go for. That said, some french citizens do keep a close eye on what the state own EDF monopoly does with nuclear. An organisation called CRIRAD has been keen to point out any mishaps or any incident related to radioactive products. Here is a link to their site: http://www.criirad.org/

That may be partly true, but the French have educated people about the comparative benefits of nuclear power. Now provinces lobby to have plants built in them because of the economic benefits -- jobs, infrastructure, etc.

Storage judgment of the waste is mostly a psychological phenomenon.We are unwilling to storage in the state of art facility in Yucca Mountain because it is "out of sight." Instead we store it on asphalt pads surrounded by chain-link fence and razor wire in steel clad cylinders 3 to 5 feet in diameter and 6 to 8 feet tall with paramilitary response teams available 24/7. Psychologically, this seems safer than any alternative. Obviously it is not. I have seen film of these cylinders loaded onto trains and deliberately crashed at top speed. No problem. (I received most this information and saw the film in a physics class taught by Richard Muller, Ph.D. in physics at the University of California at Berkeley, MacArthur foundation Genius Award winner.) No one says that the cylinders will last indefinitely, or anything near the lifespan of its contents. However, I believe that we can be optimistic that it will last long enough to come up with a solution in the next 50-100 years. They will last that long.

So where again do the French store their wastes?

Da5id:

That may be partly true, but the French have educated people about the comparative benefits of nuclear power.

That's true, but the French legal and political system gave the people who disagreed very limited leverage against the government compared with the US. The contrast with Germany, where authority is much more dispersed, and where the Greens were able to use opposition to nuclear power as a vehicle to national political stature, is also instructive.

In the US, federalism, litigation, and the need to build coalitions at the national level provide a number of points for a determined minority to delay and frustrate a national policy they oppose. In France, when the higher levels of the bureaucracy decide that something should be done, the only way to stop it is for protesters to take to the streets en masse. That the anti-nuclear movement has never been able to mobilize masses for that purpose does say something about the state of French opinion on the issue.

while recycling it greatly reduces the volume of waste. I don't know what happens to the stuff that can't be recycled.