Poking around to find out more about their reprocessing decisions and proliferation risks, I ran across this pretty scary report about France's role in proliferation of nukes around the world--seems that it helped Israel develop its reprocessing plant which has created its nuke stockpile, and even gave Saddam Hussein a reprocessing plant at Osirak, which Israel had to blow up to stop. France has not solved its radioactive waste problems with reprocessing--in fact it has made it worse. It's more expensive than standard waste storage, plus now they have a huge security risk by having accumulated 60 TONS of plutonium that could be made into nuclear weapons, and are still getting 8 tons/year more every year since 2005. For more details, check out:
http://www.citizen.org/documents/Burnie%20paper%20on%20French%20reprocessing.pdfBottom line: France is no model for the rest of the world!
