Former President Jacques Chirac would do it all the time, making his state visits into parallel sales drives. (American presidents have been known to copy the practice.)

The first fuss came from the Germans, who thought they had a deal for a joint Franco-German sales and manufacturing agreement on nuclear power plants, and were miffed when they seemed to be excluded. The Germans also made the point that while Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi may present himself as a reformed character who has given up his own nuclear ambition and now supports that global anti-terrorism coalition, his is not the most reliable of regimes. Libya may not be the best country to be entrusted with even the fairly basic reactor the French are selling him, apparently in order to fuel water desalination plants.

The more measured reaction of State Department officials in Washington, who said that they were confident that France would ensure that suitable safeguards were attached, should help soothe German and other European (and Arab) concerns.

But that brings us to the other French nuclear story of the week, which has excited far less media attention but set off a spate of rumors in the nuclear power world. Once again, it dates back to a pourboire, the apparently successful effort of President Chirac to sell China French nuclear power technology. During his 2005 trip, Chirac was apparently convinced that he had stolen a march on the U.S. Westinghouse group and secured the contract for France's Areva.

The Chinese are in the market for nuclear power in a big way, planning on building 32 plants by 2020. And they are too smart to put all their eggs into one basket. They have signed a contract to buy four plants from Westinghouse, and on Thursday last week the French daily Le Figaro reported that Areva had finally signed its $8 billion "deal of the century" to build two French-designed plants for with China's Guandong Nuclear Power Corp.

That news tip came from French government sources, and also came as a surprise to Arnaud de Bourayne, head of Areva's Chinese operations, who said that talks were sill under way and the contract was not yet signed. At stake are two very advanced "third generation" pressurized water reactors.

It is no secret that the Chinese drive a hard bargain, and part of their demand is technology transfer so that they can build (and eventually export) their own power stations rather than rely on French and American technology.

The world market for nuclear power plants could boom dramatically. There are currently some 440 such plants in operation around the world, and Francis Sorin of the French Nuclear Power sees it doubling to over 800 plants by 2030. In Washington, senior officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have spoken privately of an eventual market of up to 1,500 plants, which could make a dramatic contribution to cutting fossil fuel emissions and global warming.

The catch is the post-Chernobyl concern about nuclear safety, which the new third generation plants are supposed to resolve, and the problem of disposing of the nuclear waste. The French had hoped to fix this with their SuperPhenix fast-breeder reactor, which was supposed to burn its fuel in such a way that it consumed most of its own waste, but it never quite worked and was closed and decommissioned at vast cost.

So the holy grail of nuclear scientists is to find an elegant and safe way to dispose of nuclear waste, and a rumor has been circulating for some weeks that the French think they are now close to a new breakthrough. This rumor, which seems to have started in the European Union's Euratom group, may help explain the sharply critical German reaction to Sarkozy's Libyan deal.

What the French are now thought to have achieved, or at least made significant new developments, sounds like alchemy but goes by the name of accelerator-driven transmutation. Simply, it is about bombarding the nuclear waste with high-energy subatomic particles and changing it into different, more stable and far less radioactive materials. Scientists love the idea because it is so elegant, in theory able to create more new energy and usable energy than is put in.

The theory is not new, and there are formidable problems. Nobody yet knows exactly what these new "transmuted" materials might be, and what could happen when they are mixed together, but no one doubts that the end result could be very nasty indeed if things go wrong. The British looked at the idea and ducked it. The Japanese and Russians have research projects. In the United States, the Government Accounting Office did a survey and thought the price tag could be as high as $280 billion and no such funding is in view.

But the French have been running an ambitious research program into transmutation for the past 15 years, and the rumor that they have made important new progress is now thought to explain the delay on the Chinese contract. There is speculation in Paris that the Chinese have upped their demand on technology transfer and now want a part of the transmutation research program as the price of buying from Areva.

These rumors are given substance by the fact that Alain Juppe, who was briefly France's new environment minister before losing his parliamentary seat in the June legislative elections, spoke briefly of plans to have a fourth generation "transmutational" reactor up and running by 2020. This would be a sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactor, based on the original SuperPhenix design.

Nobody underestimates French nuclear scientists, who have been able to deliver 80 percent of France's electric power with a very good safety record at 58 reactors, and their new third generation reactors now being built at Flamanville, near Cherbourg, and in Finland, are acknowledged to be state of the art.

But with so many nuclear power plants, the French are looking at a jaw-dropping accumulation of 2 million cubic meters of nuclear waste by 2020. If they are now close to the technology that can safely dispose of this stuff, the French will own the next generation of nuclear technology, and might even save the world from climate change. The stakes here are very much higher than the fate of one Libyan desalination plant.

Related Links
Nuclear Power News - Nuclear Science, Nuclear Technology
Powering The World in the 21st Century at Energy-Daily.com

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News