Publication Laka-library:
Electricity and warheads. A guide to the French Nuclear Industry
| Author | Mary D.Davis, WISE Paris |
| Date | 1986 |
| Classification | 2.02.0.00/57 (FRANCE - GENERAL) |
| Front | 
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From the publication:
Introduction In France, as in other nuclear weapons states, the generation of electricity by nuclear fission is intertwined with a military program. Charles de Gaulle reflected at a press conference, 18 October 1945, two months after the bombing of Hiroshima, "As for the atomic bomb, we still have time. I am not convinced that atomic bombs have to be used in the near future in this world. In any case the French government is not losing sight of this question. " (1) Five days later he created the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) I the French Atomic Energy commission, the world's first civilian organization devoted to the applications of nuclear fission. Zoe (zero power, oxide of uranium, heavy 1 water), the first French atomic pile, began operating in the old fort of Chatillon near Paris in 1948, and in November 1949 a team of researchers extracted from its fuel the first milligrams of French plutonium. (2) Six years later the CEA was secretly allocated funds to work directly on an atomic bomb. (3) The government publicly declared its intention of producing a nuclear weapon in 1958; by then so much progress had been made that the French exploded their first bomb over the Sahara 13 February 1960. An article in the CEA's Notes d'Information, January-February 1984, describes the indebtedness of France's civilian nuclear program to the military. The author opens, "its it necessary to recall that all the [world's] first reactors, conceived and realized in the forties and fifties, had, in particular, the objective of producing plutonium for the military?" During the late fifties the French built at Marcoule three gas graphite reactors to furnish plutonium and electricity; and a reprocessing plant, UPl, to extract the plutonium from the irradiated fuel for their first nuclear barbs. The gas graphite reactors, the author points out, became the origin of "numerous electronuclear plants, " and UPl taught the French how to build a large commercial reprocessing facility. They learned to make a contribution to the technology of pressurized water reactors for utilities, by developing submarine reactors; and they became adept at enrichment through building at Pierrelatte a plant to provide highly enriched uranium for the naval reactors and for weapons. (4)
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