Just been posted minutes ago, still no update on what's the actual situation

French: Le Figaro

English: Time

Another article here: BREAKING NEWS

http://rt.com/news/rocks-nuclear-plant-france-337/

Are we back to era of Chernobyl and follow steps of precaution related to health hazard in the region?

Crap...I leave the US only to be in the vicinity of another nuclear accident?

If Fukushima is any barometer, can't expect the French to be forthcoming on the accuracy of the dangers to the surrounding areas - including Switzerland

Anyone seen anything on Suisse telly?

There is no "greener grass" on the other side. Anywhere you go in this world there will always be one sort of disaster or the other, inevitable me think.

I modestly called it health hazard here as this kind of accidents should be referred to as a disaster . There is nothing worst then nuclear wastes spillage. What belongs to the core of the earth should stay in the core of the earth and it should never see a surface, were flora and fauna exist.

And only a few hundred kms away

The papers said the body of one male worker at the plant had been "found carbonised", but it added that there was no evidence that the explosion had "caused any radioactive leak".

BTW, this is a nuclear waste processing plant so, I assume, no reactor?

According to the BBC there are no leaks. Let's hope they are right.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14883521

Hate to spoil the feeding frenzy, but Marcoule has no nuclear reactors, and it was not a "nuclear" explosion.

True. I still wouldn't want to be too close to an explosion at a nuclear waste treatment plant.

Yeah, guess we should merely trust the news reports...They were so accurate with Fukushima, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl

And just so you understand the implications, there doesn't need to be a nuclear reactor for there to be a nuclear leak...What do you think is going on at Marcoule, btw?

French Emergency Services have said that the possibility of radiation leak does exist

But, as this doesn't have any nuclear reactors, there is no chance of it being a disaster on the scale of Japan, where the reactor will continue to pump out radioactive material after the breach has occurred.

As this is "only" a nuclear waste site, any radiation leakage will be localised.

ASN, the French nuclear watchdog, says there was no leak.
(their press release, in French)


Now before we all jump straight to the "oh no another Chernobyl" line, can we check the facts? This is not even remotely similar.

1) It wasn't "the Marcoule nuclear reactor"; it was the low-level-waste processing plant at the edge of the site.

2) It wasn't "the Marcoule reactor" because there isn't a reactor at Marcoule, and hasn't been since 1984.

3) A furnace exploded: sorry to sound hard-nosed but this is a bog standard industrial accident, could happen in any line of work that involves furnaces. In this case it killed one guy, injured four others. Very unfortunate but again, not special glow-in-the-dark unfortunate.


EDIT: hannah'sauntie and weejeem beat me to it!

Party poopers.

What's the point of EF, or for that matter the internet in general, if we can't work each other up into a frenzy of conspiracy theories and sky-is-falling doom predictions?

Sheesh.

Doesn't matter, expect a feeding frenzy of anti-nuclear nuts in 3, 2, 1......

There are no nuclear reactors, true...Is there radioactive material in Marcoule?...Yes

The oven in which the explosion occurred was doing what?...It is a nuclear waste processing plant...It produces MOX fuel from a mixture of plutonium & uranium from that nuclear fuel...Is that radioactive material?...Yes

The CEA said 'at the time being' nothing had gotten outside...The ASN also said only that there is no current leak, not that there isn't a risk of any potential leak

I'm not suggesting panic or that there is definitive lying but it's folly to merely sweep it under the rug as a non issue...In Fukushima they were lying to the Japanese and the world as the leak was going on so why would the French somehow be any less scrutinized?...Particularly when you consider that the French do not have tremendous transparency when it comes to their nuclear reporting

Damn, he was right

On a more serious note...

By the way, many news websites (yes, I'm looking at you, Reuters) are reporting that this furnace was "used to melt waste with levels of radioactivity ranging from low to very high, ASN said."

I don't know whether that's a lost-in-translation thing or whether perhaps somebody misspoke while reading the press release out - but either way, this is incorrect.

What the ASN press release actually says (see my link to their website above) is "un four servant à fondre les déchets radioactifs métalliques de faible et très faible activité." Now even my extremely rudimentary French can tell you that "faible et très faible" means "low and very low", not "low and very high".

OMG!!! Those heavy metals from the lost transmitter's batteries could pollute the Southern Ocean for millions of millennia

Nice to have a sedia gestatoria