The museum's web site is http://www.visiatome.fr  (Very nicely done, IMO -- félicitations !!)

NUCLEONICS WEEK SEPTEMBER 1, 2005
Marcoule angles for tourists with new nuclear museum

France inaugurated its first museum devoted to radioactivity and the nuclear fuel cycle last week, in an initiative industry minister Francois Loos said would help bring nuclear technologies closer to the public.

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The Visiatome is housed in a low-slung building with nature-friendly raw wood shingles, local stone, and low-profile brushed steel nameplate. Inside, the visitor finds information- in both French and English-about energy, waste in general, nuclear waste, and health effects of radioactivity in a series of rooms joined by passageways, all in a low-lit, high-tech atmosphere with plenty of interactivity.

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the Visiatome is heavy on explanation about the nuclear fuel cycle and treatment of nuclear waste, especially high-level and long-lived waste.

In one exhibit, which compares reprocessing with the once-through fuel cycle, the visitor is informed that reprocessing allows concentration of final waste from France's entire nuclear power production into about 1,400 containers per year, holding about 250 cubic meters total. The total annual volume of waste corresponds to about "a tube of lipstick per (French) family," it said.

Reprocessing, the exhibit says, allows elimination of "toxic plutonium" from final wastes, reduces future energy dependence by recycling uranium, and "hardly increases the cost of a kilowatt-hour."

Not reprocessing, it says, "requires very long-term management of spent fuel" and "makes it necessary to condition spent fuel in appropriate containers."

France and Japan have chosen reprocessing, Sweden, Finland and Spain have chosen direct spent fuel disposal, South Korea, South Africa and Hungary "have not yet made a deci-sion," and "the U.S. ... is re-examining the question," Visiatome states.

But diplomatically, it concludes that "each country's approach depends on the national energy and environmental policy and on constraints imposed on natural resources."

Visiatome (http://www.visiatome.fr), which opened to the public in April, is open seven days a week to receive both school classes and general tourists.

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Visiatome partners also plan to conduct "educational workshops" about energy and nuclear for young audiences, and has facilities for scientific workshops as well.

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Participants in the inauguration were greeted by a noisy group of protesters from Sortir du Nucleaire, a network of French antinuclear organizations, who bore banners reading "Visiatome = nuclear propaganda."
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the facility stemmed from an early 2004 request from former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin for the CEA to help give the French public "the elements of physics that they need to understand what's at stake in energy" policy.
"There's no connection with the national debate" on nuclear waste policy, which was called for by Loos and former environment minister Serge Lepeltier earlier this year.
Visiatome "isn't pronuclear communication," Bugat said, but an attempt to provide the "physical bases to understand" nuclear energy.
-Ann MacLachlan, Paris