THEY were so confident, those French nuclear physicists of the 1970s. By the turn of the century they planned to endow France with 10 fast breeder reactors - wonder machines that would transform uranium into plutonium, producing more fuel than they would consume.
The FBR was a goose designed to lay golden eggs, an inexhaustible source of nuclear-generated electricity.
President Valery Giscard d'Estaing proudly announced that France would have energy reserves comparable to those of Saudi Arabia.
But the goose turned out to be France's biggest white elephant.
First planned in 1975, a prototype 2,500 megawatt fast breeder reactor at Creys-Malville, near Grenoble, was plagued by bad luck, cost overruns and dangerous accidents until the new Socialist Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, finally announced it would be abandoned.
Planned in 1975, the Superphenix - as the giant cement wart in the foothills of the Jura mountains is known - came into service in 1984. An anti-nuclear demonstrator was killed there in 1977. The plant produced electricity for only 10 months out of its first decade, then functioned again from September 1995 until December 1996. Total bill so far: Pounds 7 billion.
Local residents - who need the jobs and government subsidies generated by the plant - are campaigning against its dismantling; an odd attitude when you consider the dangers.
FBRs, with five to 10 times as much plutonium as an ordinary nuclear reactor, can cause a variety of atomic explosions. Another peril is posed by the presence of 5,000 tonnes of liquid sodium, which ignites when it comes into contact with air - no one knows how to extinguish a big sodium fire.
Press reports say it will cost Pounds 3.5 billion just to take the Superphenix apart; Mr Mycle Schneider, the director of the Paris-based World Information Service on Energy, believes the final expense could be much higher. "How will they dispose of 5,000 tonnes of highly reactive sodium, when it must be kept away from air and humidity?" he asks.
"A couple of years ago, a sodium tank at a research plant in southern France exploded, killing an expert - and it held only 100 kilos of sodium." That is only the beginning of the problem. Superphenix also contains about six tonnes of highly reactive plutonium, some of it nuclear weapons grade.
Fifty-one per cent of the site is French government-owned, but the other 49 per cent belongs to Italy and a German-led European consortium. Once a highly valued commodity, plutonium is now considered dangerous waste; France's partners don't want their share, and officials conjure up images of trucks dumping two tonnes of plutonium on the Italian border.
When Mr Jospin announced the end of Superphenix, he in effect pronounced the death sentence on fast breeder reactors around the world. Only two still exist outside France, one in Russia and one in Japan. "The Russians make all kinds of wild claims for their reactor," Mr Schneider said. "None of it is verifiable." The Japanese reactor has been shut down, and will probably also be scrapped.
As a result of the Superphenix fiasco, France's nuclear power programme is under unprecedented scrutiny. Alone in Europe, France derives close to 80 per cent of its electricity from 56 pressurised nuclear reactors. Belgium relies on its nuclear plants for 65 per cent of its power. The figures for Britain and Germany are much lower, about 35 and 30 per cent. For the first time, French officials have admitted that natural gas - not nuclear power - is the cheapest form of energy.
The La Hague plutonium reprocessing plant - France's equivalent to Sellafield - on the north-west coast near Cherbourg, is increasingly controversial. According to the environmental group Greenpeace, La Hague - the biggest nuclear reprocessing site in the world - dumps 230 million litres of radioactive waste into the Atlantic every year.
Last January, French scientists published a study in the British Medical Journal showing a higher incidence of leukaemia around the plant. In the spring, a low tide uncovered a steel pipe disgorging waste 100 times above "safe" levels into the sea.
This prompted Greenpeace to launch a new campaign at the end of May. Its divers found pebbles so radioactive that they could be classified as nuclear waste. COGEMA, the French government-owned company which operates La Hague, commenced a speedboat war, sending its own craft out to harrass the Greenpeace flotilla and several times "confiscating" the environmentalists' equipment.
The next round will take place at a European environmental conference in September where five countries, including Ireland, will advocate reducing nuclear waste. France has fielded a counter-proposal, saying that it will not accept a ban on dumping from nuclear plants.
