Beyond Nuclear International
A forgotten community
The little town in Niger keeping the lights on in France
By Lucas Destrijcker & Mahadi Diouara
Reprinted with kind permission from African Arguments
Welcome to Arlit, the impoverished uranium capital of Africa.
From Niamey, the capital of the landlocked West African nation of Niger, we call ahead to a desert town in the remote north of the country.
“Journalists? On their way here? It’s been a while”, we hear down the phone from our contact. “We welcome you with open arms, but only on the pretence that you’re visiting to interview migrants on their way to Algeria. If they find out you’re poking your nose in their business, it’s a lost cause.”
That same evening, the public bus jolts as it sets off. Destination: the gates of the Sahara.
The stuffy subtropical heat gradually fades into scorching drought and plains of seemingly endless ochre sands. About two days later, we pass through a gateway with “Arlit” written on it in rusty letters.
The town of about 120,000 inhabitants is located in one of the Sahel’s most remote regions, not far from the Algerian border. The surrounding area is known to be the operating territory of numerous bandits and armed groups, including Islamist militants. It is like an island in the middle of the desert, an artificial oasis with only one raison d’être: uranium.
Children were dying. They took action
The British campaigners who shed light on deadly nuclear fuel reprocessing
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The road winds steeply up through bucolic countryside, some of the most spectacular in Britain. There are sheep bleating in the distant meadows. Then suddenly, you are out on the fell, stripped almost barren, black, empty. But still there are sheep, their wool the same smoky color as the landscape, dotted like the rocks that are scattered across these bleak tops, the hallmark of the storied Lake District. Then down we go again, past a stone-walled pub, up another hill, and we are pulling up in front of a whitewashed cottage straight from a Beatrix Potter story.
And indeed, that is where we are — in Potter country — about as far removed in atmosphere and idyll as it is possible to be from the ugly, industrial, and deadly blight that sits just a few miles away on the Cumbria shore. That would be the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing facility, which spews radioactive waste into the sea, pumps it into the air, and has accumulated 140 tonnes of plutonium to absolutely no purpose.
The dramatic beauty of the Lake District fells are just a stone’s throw away from the blight of the Sellafield reprocessing plant. (Photo: Peer Lawther, Flickr.)
A sheepdog runs out to greet us. A pair of elderly cats languish contentedly on a warm stone wall, basking in some late afternoon sunshine. Later, we are introduced to a small flock of Herdwick sheep who are “pets,” and a flock of pigeons, of which more later.
The people who live in the house are Janine Allis-Smith and Martin Forwood, the heart of the aptly named small activist group CORE — Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment. They have dedicated more than three decades to challenging the continued operation of Sellafield and calling out the harm it has caused.
Protest and painting
Didier and Paulette Anger are the godparents of the French anti-nuclear movement
By Linda Pentz Gunter
In English, when we use the word “godfather”, it conjures up a menacing figure, the lead hit-man from the mafia, fierce and dangerous. Didier Anger is known all over the world as the godfather of the anti-nuclear movement in France, and you could hardly find anyone less fitting of that tough guy gangster image. Instead, Didier Anger is a kind and dedicated activist, a retired school teacher with a firm hand but a gentle touch, a painter and a Green Party politician.
“Godmother,” on the other hand, evokes a magical matronly woman with a wand who can make everything right with the world. This, in fact, fits Paulette Anger perfectly. In partnership with Didier, she is the “godmother” of the French anti-nuclear movement. Also a former school teacher, her sparkling spirit and generous warmth epitomize that character who we hope and believe can guide us to a happy-ever-after ending.
Didier and Paulette Anger are still looking for that happy ending to the nuclear power story. They have dedicated most of their adult lives to getting us there. When Didier was drawn into nuclear opposition, it was not for the reasons that most people take up the fight. “It was not about radiation and health back then or the effect on the environment but because I was active in the trade union movement,” Didier told Swiss journalist, Martin Arnold in an interview for Mankind and the Atom published in German. “I saw persecution and suppression in the nuclear sector when workers tried to organize,” he said.
Didier and Paulette Anger (Photo: Kolin Kobayashi)
The couple reside in Normandy, France, in the belly of the French nuclear beast. To the north of them, on the Cherbourg peninsula, sits the biggest blight of nuclear France, the La Hague reprocessing facility. “The currents there are very strong so I assume they chose the site because it can disperse the liquid radioactive wastes into the sea very quickly,” Didier told Arnold, not without a hint of sarcasm.
Close by is the port of Cherbourg where nuclear-powered submarines are made. Just a few miles west of them, on the Normandy coastline, are the two operating Flamanville nuclear reactors and the embattled third one, still under construction. There is a nuclear waste dump in the region as well. And the Angers have been there to oppose all of it for 46 years. “We are dealing with a whole system of lies, secrecy, concealment, intimidation and threats,” says Didier.
A deadly serious French farce
Flamanville reactor fiasco tops list of France’s giant nuclear con game
By Linda Pentz Gunter
At the Flamanville 3 reactor construction site, the falling French toast never lands with the jam side up. This isn’t a case of Murphy’s law, where anything that can go wrong will go wrong, eventually. It’s the worse version, called Sod’s law, in which everything always goes wrong and with the worst possible outcome.
Of course, in any normal business environment, no one in their right mind would continue on with such a reckless venture as is the nuclear reactor project at Flamanville on France’s Normandy coast. Nor would anyone look at the litany of technical, ethical and financial disasters at Flamanville and immediately sign up for their own version.
But this is nuclear we are talking about, where no such sanity applies. While a corporation would walk away from a deal as disastrous as Flamanville, the French and UK governments would rather fleece their citizens’ wallets and risk the survival of their own populations as long as it keeps their nuclear power projects moving forward. So Flamanville is still not canceled. And its evil twin, at Hinkley C on the English coast, isn’t either.
There have been frequent protests at Flamanville to stop construction
Is space for wonder or for war?
With Space Force, White House wants space as “a warfighting domain.”
By Linda Pentz Gunter
“What country is that?” asked Congressman Elijah Cummings on Tuesday, outrage choking his voice with emotion.
Cummings, a Congressman from Maryland, could have been asking his question about any number of policies. In this case it was about the internment of children at the US border. But it applies almost universally. And certainly to the prospect of provoking, even encouraging, war in space. But that’s also what the Trump administration is now doing.
“Space is a warfighting domain,” said the White House statement this week. It came as the Trump administration once again proclaimed that it plans to create a “Space Force.” What country is that?
Last time the Trump White House tried this, Pentagon officials objected, saying it would “lead to unnecessary costs and bureaucracy.” Maybe. What’s far far worse is that it would lead to unnecessary wars.
Have we lost all reason? Are we supposed, now, to lose all hope as well? Space is for wonder. It’s where we live. We are a small dot in the midst of enormity, floating in a dark vastness about which we know a surprising amount, and yet with so much more still mysteriously unknown.
We used to be able to gaze up into space and pretend to count the infinitesimal stars. Now, cloaked in the haze of light pollution, we actually can — maybe a dozen or so on a non-cloudy night for those of us who live in cities. We have lost our perspective, our sense of where we fit in the universe. Light pollution is a tragedy that has allowed us to forget who we are. It has drawn a veil over the most wondrous and imponderable thing in our existence.
The blue powder entranced. Then it killed
Odesson Alves Ferreira still fights for compensation for victims of deadly nuclear accident in Brazil
By Norbert Suchanek
On September 13, 1987, Brazilian scrap metal dealer, Devair Ferreira, unwittingly opened Pandora’s box. Out spilled a bright blue crystalline powder that fell glowing to the floor. Fascinated by the magical iridescence, Ferreira invited family members to his home to see the mysterious substance for themselves. They were entranced. They touched it and passed it around to other friends and relatives.
What none of them knew was that they had just set in motion Latin America’s worst nuclear accident. The blue powder was cesium chloride, encased inside a cesium-137 teletherapy unit that had been left behind in an abandoned cancer treatment hospital in the City of Goiânia, the capital of the State of Goiás. Two jobless youngsters had picked it up, pulled out the heavy lead cylinder containing 19 grams of cesium-137, and sold it to Ferreira.
Ferreira, and his friends and family, soon became sick. His brother Ivo took some of the powder to his house where his six-year old daughter Leide played with the glowing radioactive crystals on the floor just before dinner. When she ate boiled eggs with her contaminated fingers, the deadly cesium-137 entered her body. Twenty two Ferreira family members had direct contact with the cesium-137. But they unwittingly went on to contaminate others.
Decontamination of houses and streets in Goiânia
At least 40 people were hospitalized, and by October 28 four had died. They were Ivo’s daughter Leide and Devair Ferreira’s wife Gabriela — who had first sounded the alarm about the sudden mysterious sicknesses in her extended family — along with two of Devair’s employees.
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