French nuclear products and services group Orano has secured a temporary solution for spent fuel shipments by rail following the derailment of a Brittany Ferries freight train at the start of last week. An agreement reached with France’s rail infrastructure manager, SNCF Reseau, will allow Orano to operate a weekly train, compared to the usual three weekly frequencies, while repair work made necessary by the derailment continues.
The incident brought rail traffic in proximity to the port of Cherbourg, in Normandy, to a standstill until further notice, All nuclear power stations in France send their spent fuel to the Orano plant in La Hague, near Cherbourg, for storage and reprocessing. “This weekly train will run on the single track that is still operational,” an Orano spokesperson told local media in an interview.
The solution was necessary to avoid excessive storage of spent fuel in the cooling pools at each French power plant. “It is very important to transport spent fuel regularly to La Hague and with this temporary solution, we will be able to maintain the operational conditions of French nuclear power plants.” The first train will run this week.
Questions that must be answered
For radioactivity monitoring group ACRO, lessons must be learned from the derailment, the causes of which have yet to be disclosed. “If Orano were located in the middle of France, it would undoubtedly be less complicated. The big problem is that the reprocessing facility has been built on a completely or almost completely isolated peninsula,” noted its president, Pierre Barbey.
For him, the incident has raised a number of questions. “What would have happened if the flatbed rail wagons had been transporting highly radioactive fuel packages that day?’ he asked, adding that he was determined to obtain a response from state energy utility EDF and Orano on how they manage the risks associated with this type of transport. “This derailment should really make us sit up and take notice. We have questions and these questions must be answered,” Barbey concluded.
Orano inaugurated a plant at the port of Cherbourg just over a year ago and is now behind a project to rehabilitate an abandoned one kilometer stretch of track in its vicinity which will provide access to the mainline rail network and take advantage of the port’s new intermodal terminal. The group is planning to ship its products by train to a terminal at another group plant located around 20 kilometers away in Valognes. Orano is contributing the lion’s share of the 600,000 euros investment required for the track’s renovation with the port authority also contributing.