France’s Minister for the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, announced on 18 March a new cycle for tritium production, essential for making nuclear weapons, by using two civilian Électricité de France (EDF) reactors, Euractiv informed.
Lecornu visited the Civaux nuclear power plant in south-west France, which would produce tritium for military purposes. The tritium would be manufactured on the premises of the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA), the French scientific and industrial research institution in the field of nuclear energy.
To produce tritium, the lithium-containing material must be treated with radiation by exposing it to the neutron fluxes present inside the reactor core.
Tritium, whose gaseous form is virtually non-existent, can be extracted from irradiated material. This isotope of hydrogen is particularly vulnerable to spontaneous decay, causing any stockpile to halve in 12 years and disappear almost completely after a century. It is vital to the production of nuclear weapons, especially hydrogen and neutron bombs, for which it is the main explosive.
The French army and the EDF came up with this “collaboration,” to ensure that there is an adequate stockpile of tritium “as part of the continuity and credibility of France’s nuclear deterrent.” According to the Federation of American Scientists, France currently has 290 active warheads, the fourth largest after China with 500, the US with 3,700 and Russia with 4,400.
However, French authorities are keen to emphasise that the current unstable international situation is not the main driver of this sudden push for tritium production. Etienne Dutheil, Director of Nuclear Generation at EDF, stated:
We’re not going ahead with this irradiation service because we don’t have any needs right now.
Dutheil added that the project would aim “to enable the people who will be responsible for France’s deterrent in fifteen or twenty years’ time to continue to have all the possible options at their disposal.”
Discussions between the French Ministry of Armed Forces and EDF on the matter have been taking place for more than 25 years. Ultimately, the parties chose Civaux, one of France’s most powerful and newest nuclear power plants, because of its ability to operate for a very long time, according to Dutheil.
The government and EDF stated that power generation would not be affected. The lithium would be irradiated during regular reactor operation. Duteil asserted that EDF would submit a dossier later this year to the Autorité de sûreté nucléaire, France’s nuclear safety authority, which would review the project’s feasibility.
The first test irradiation of lithium will take place in 2025 at the earliest, when the plant’s reactors are scheduled to be shut down for maintenance.
