Nuclear weapons: France to restart tritium production with EDF

France’s Minister for the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, announced on Monday (18 March) a new production cycle for tritium, which is essential for the manufacture of nuclear weapons, using state utility EDF’s two civilian reactors.

Lecornu visited the Civaux nuclear power plant in south-west France, which will produce the tritium for the military.

The tritium will be manufactured on the premises of the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA), the French nuclear scientific and industrial research establishment.

To manufacture tritium, it is necessary to treat lithium-containing material with radiation, by exposing it to the neutron fluxes present inside the core of a reactor.

Tritium, whose gaseous form is practically non-existent, naturally, can be extracted from the irradiated material.

This hydrogen isotope (1 proton, 2 neutrons, and hydrogen-3) is particularly vulnerable to disintegrating spontaneously. As a result, any stockpile is halved in 12 years and disappears almost entirely after a century.

But it is vital for the production of nuclear weapons, particularly hydrogen bombs and neutron bombs, for which it is the main explosive.

The French army and EDF have come up with this “collaboration” to ensure the availability of sufficient stocks of tritium “as part of the continuity and credibility of France’s nuclear deterrent”, according to the annex to the press release.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, France currently has 290 active warheads, the fourth largest, after China with 500, the US with 3,700, and Russia with 4,400.

Capture d’écran 2024-03-20 à 09.53.08 [Federation of american scientists]

No immediate needs?

However, the French authorities are keen to stress that the current unstable international situation, is not the main driver for this sudden push to produce tritium.

“We’re not going ahead with this irradiation service because we don’t have any needs right now,” insisted Etienne Dutheil, Director of Nuclear Generation at EDF, speaking at a press briefing.

Rather, “the project that is being undertaken today aims to enable the people who will be responsible for France’s deterrent in fifteen or twenty years’ time to continue to have all the possible options at their disposal,” he added.

Discussions between the French armed forces ministry and EDF on this subject have been underway for more than 25 years, in anticipation of the closure in 2009 of the two reactors intended solely for the production of tritium located in Marcoule, in south-east France, after more than 50 years in operation.

The parties finally selected Civaux, one of France’s most powerful and newest nuclear power stations. It was selected because it was capable of operating for a very long time, Dutheil said.

Electricity production is not affected

The government and EDF said that electricity production will not be affected. The lithium will be irradiated during the normal operation of the reactor.

But despite the reassurances of the various parties involved, any signed agreement between the French government, CEA, and EDF, will not specify a date – to define the legal and contractual scope of the activities, a press release states.

Dutheil stated, that later this year EDF will submit a dossier to the Autorité de sûreté nucléaire, the French nuclear safety authority, which will examine the feasibility of the project.

As a result of this timetable, the first test irradiation of lithium will not take place until before 2025, when the plant’s reactors are scheduled to be shut down for maintenance.

[Edited by Rajnish Singh]