(Bure/France) Demonstration: Without nuclear power our earth will live

international | environment | event notice Wednesday August 09, 2023 11:36 by nn - peasant struggles

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For 2 September 2023, we are calling for a big peasant- and anti-nuclear demonstration that will start in the village of Bure in the Meuse department.
Against the revival of the nuclear disaster wanted by Macron and in defence of our soils, we want to join forces to protect the land threatened by the Cigéo nuclear waste repository project in Lorraine.
We invite all actors of the environmental struggles, whether farmers or not, to meet up at the camp of the "Land and Commons"-gathering near Bure from the end of August to encounter and prepare a strong and joyful day of demonstration. The registered demonstration will run between the villages of Bure and Mandres-en-Barrois to confront us with the ecological and territorial impact of the future construction sites planned by the nuclear agency Andra.

Defend the living

During the recent health-, military- and energy-crises, and despite a climate chaos with record-breaking droughts and fires, France has accelerated its programme to revive nuclear energy. Yet there is nothing to suggest that this technology is a solution to current environmental problems. Only industrialist lobbies defend nuclear energy as beneficial. In view of the events surrounding the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which is involved in the fighting in Ukraine, no one can deny the danger posed by so-called "civilian" nuclear energy. Many other plants in Western Europe have also reached the end of their life, even if the nucleocrats, in the name of profit and despite numerous safety warnings, ensure that they continue to operate.

Since its beginnings, the industrialisation of the use of nuclear energy has always served military purposes. From Algeria to the Pacific, France has imposed a nuclear programme in the post-war period to consolidate its colonial and geostrategic power. The atom is not a symbol of scientific progress, but a real threat to the environment and society, against which we are fighting with all our determination.

Mainly in France, the anti-life capitalist lobbies and the techno-solutionist media engineers tell us that nuclear power will save the climate. The pro-nuclear rhetoric ignores all the harmful effects, the risks and the impossibility of financing such an industrial renaissance. For us, the only conceivable perspective for a change of course is a radical reclamation and re-appropriation of our rural areas and territories. We advocate a perspective of social, ecological and democratic transformation that takes account of current warnings and states clearly that "business as usual" will lead to our end.

The nuclear state kills

All over the world - whether states continue to install new power plants or not - the problem of waste, toxic for millennia, remains unsolved. France has decided to push through its project for the Cigéo repository on the southern Meuse (in the departments of Meuse and Haute-Marne), and to invest force and capital accordingly. Today, with the Declaration of Public Utility (DUP) in its pocket since the end of 2021, Andra is preparing to register works and submitted the Declaration of Authorisation for Construction (DAC) earlier this year.

Apart from the technological risks deliberately taken and the impossibility of foreseeing the financing and safety of the Cigéo centre, it is also the disregard for the wishes and interests of the population that outrages us.

The nuclear state shits on any form of democracy, as the violence of uranium mining in the former colonies and the murders to impose nuclear energy show us: from the death of Vital Michalon in Creys-Malville in 1977, to the explosive attack on the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland by the DGSE in 1985, to the death of Sébastien Briat in 2004 in Avricourt in Lorraine. This is brought home to us by the violence of the police, the judiciary and the prisons suffered by thousands of demonstrators when they resist the government's neoliberal reforms, the destruction of life and a racist and colonial police state, whether in the city or in the countryside, in Sainte-Soline or in Nanterre.

For an ecological and social future

We stand up for a social and ecological future that will overthrow the technocratic imagination of the nuclear energy elites. We demonstrate for living landscapes and a desirable future. We mobilise to underline our rejection of the revival of nuclear energy, whose legacy would pose a lasting threat to our capacity for self-determination and material autonomy.

Cigéo and all other toxic landfill projects threaten life. With respectful peasant and rural practices, we defend the earth, water and everything that keeps our rural areas alive with our hearts, our bodies and our clear imaginations.

We are implementing forward-looking practices and educational and cultural activities that radically oppose the threat of nuclear devastation. We will overturn their table of profit from below, and on the rubble of their disaster our children will grow!
We call on all opponents of Cigéo, friends of the struggle in Bure, residents of the threatened area and participants in the meetings of peasant and rural struggles to join our festive and determined demonstration that will start in Bure on 2 September at 2pm.

Resistance is fertile!