Niger: Greenpeace and Areva Controversy

By on May 10, 2010
The French nuclear group Areva is accused of endangering the population of the mining towns of Arlit and Akokan. The people would be exposed, according to NGOs, to levels of radioactivity exceeding the standards. Areva had played the card of transparency by inviting and accepting Greenpeace to visit mine sites and make freely measures and levies.

Taking advantage of the Areva cooperation on the subject, Greenpeace took the opportunity to be the speaker and the “mouth-piece” of destabilisation, catalysing several local conflicts in giving them a global audience. The back idea and the purpose of the operation are not the decontamination of the sites under investigation but the questioning of the mining of uranium by Areva.
The controversy between Greenpeace and Areva reached  France on March 28, 2010, following a Greenpeace press release picked up by news agencies, coinciding with many NGOs concerns which had arose, following the military coup that took place in Niger (18/02 / 2010), with the request of renegotiation of mining contracts signed by Areva in 2008. This accumulation might seem somehow troubling, but don’t we say that the more one pays attention to coincidences, the more they occur?…

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