Greenpeace activists secretly invaded a French nuclear site before dawn Monday and draped a banner on its reactor containment building, embarrassing the government and exposing the vulnerability of atomic sites in France. Police, whom Greenpeace told immediately of the publicity stunt, took several hours to round up nine intruders who had broken into the power plant in Nogent-sur-Seine, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) south-east of Paris.
France, which gets about three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear power, regularly faces protests from environmental activists over shipments of nuclear waste. Activist incursions into atomic plants are unusual. Greenpeace said the break-in aimed to show that an ongoing review of safety measures ordered by French authorities after a tsunami ravaged Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant earlier this year was focused too narrowly on possible natural disasters, and not human factors.
Activists who tried to enter three other French nuclear sites in the co-ordinated action Monday were prevented from doing so, but Greenpeace said other invaders were still holed up inside other, unspecified, nuclear sites. That prompted authorities to immediately launch a "thorough sweep" of all of France's 20 nuclear power plants, Interior Oinistry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said by phone. Interior Minister Claude Gueant has scheduled a meeting this week to launch a review of the security breach, Brandet said.
French power company Electricite de France, which operates the site, denounced the "illegal" break-in at Nogent-sur-Seine, and insisted that it did not harm security at the site. After Greenpeace alerted authorities that its activists were behind the incursion, police and security teams held their fire and allowed the peaceful activists to continue scaling a containment building that houses the reactor to put a banner on top, Brandet said. The activists didn't penetrate the reactor.
EDF said activists' banners were also hung on the outside of two other nuclear sites Chinon in north-western France and Blayais in the south-west before they were removed. Three other activists were driven off by security forces while trying to enter yet another plant, in south-eastern Cadarache. "We have to understand what's behind this malfunction notably in Nogent," Brandet said, adding that "in the other sites security worked the intrusions were thwarted."