Re: incident in France?

[Jean-Charles ABBE <abbe@in2p3.fr>]

Difficult to answer to Sandy's message. Too much to comment ...
Now, concerning a recent incident - we have one every day (week ?) from a
lamp which fails in some corridor to a missing pencil on a table - which I
am aware of and seems significant is a radioactive gas leak at the
Cruas-Meysse nuclear power station which resultated in the evacuation of
some workers around. The Security authorities (DSIN) estimate that the
decision to evacuate was too much delayed, as it was the case at the
Golfech nuclear power station, for the same causes, in november. Nobody was
irradiated but it is estimated that the workers took too much time to
verify that the alarm detectors were effectively working properly before
evacuating. Whatsoever, the origin of this repetition of radioactive gas
leaks during maintenance is being investigated seriously.

This is translated from a diary, Le Figaro.

As concerns the Chernobyl cloud, it is exact that some official did make
declarations too securing claiming that the cloud was stopped by the Rhine.
However, if you go back to the newspapers from that period, you can find a
lot of articles reporting on measurements of radioactivity all over the
country. I was in Strasbourg at that time, we could pick up some grass just
leaning out of the window, put it on the detector and thus obtain a
beautiful fission spectrum. This was reported in the local newspaper ...


***********************************
Jean-Charles ABBE
Ecole des Mines de Nantes
Laboratoire SUBATECH
BP 20722
44 307 NANTES CEDEX 3

Tel 33 (0)2 51 85 84 01
Fax 33 (0)2 51 85 84 79

ABBE@SUBATECH.IN2P3.FR


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