"Security and safety risks at French nuclear reactors exposed by drones"

Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear campaigner with Greenpeace Germany, has posted a blog regarding the serious risks to safety and security made manifest by the large number of mysterious drone flights over French nuclear facilities and atomic reactors in recent weeks.

Burnie writes:

Of course the implications go way beyond France. Nuclear power technology, conceived, designed and developed from the mid-20th century onwards has run slap bang into a 21st century technology that is capable of inflicting serious damage and potentially causing a major nuclear accident.

Burnie also reports:

Greenpeace has also issued a series of demands and recommendations, including:

• Closing the gaps in regulation, where the nuclear safety regulator has no responsibility for security despite the fact that it relates directly to safety.
• That EdF [Electricité de France] should be required to construct hardened bunkers over its spent fuel pools as a matter of urgency, and in the meantime should move as much fuel as possible from the pools into dry cask storage reducing the risks of loss of cooling function at the site.

"French government on high alert after unexplained drone flights over nuclear power stations"

As reported by John Lichfield at the Independent:

"[A] recent spate of five co-ordinated “visits” in one evening to nuclear reactors hundreds of miles apart has now placed the French government on high alert...A campaign of harassment by anti-nuclear campaigners is considered the most likely explanation. Surveillance flights by a terrorist group testing the security of France’s 19 nuclear sites have not been ruled out...[a] score of intrusions by...elaborate drones in the restricted airspace over 13 nuclear power stations [have happened] since early October."

Despite the allegation that a "Campaign by anti-nuclear campaigners is considered the most likely explanation," Greenpeace France "has denied any link with the flights." So too has Greenpeace International.

To the contrary, the group "has accused the government of “minimising the risk” and covering up the fact that France’s nuclear power stations are vulnerable to terrorist attack. “A medium-sized drone could carry an explosive charge big enough to damage the pools [of cold water] in which spent nuclear fuels are stocked,” a spokesman said.