La Hague site

Operated by Orano, formerly AREVA, and prior to that COGEMA (Compagnie générale des matières atomiques), La Hague has nearly half of the world's light water reactor spent nuclear fuel reprocessing capacity.

It has treated spent nuclear fuel from France, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

High temperature treated ("calcined") fuel separation fractions are fed into an induction heated furnace with fragmented glass.

The fission products, which make up around 4% of the spent fuel mass, are the ones that are vitrified in this glass, as they cannot be used for any other purpose, and are generally highly radioactive.

The factory directed its efforts toward civil operations, and with the reduction of 350 people from the plant's workforce, its military connections ended.

France later reneged on the agreement and the nuclear material sold to Taiwan remains unreprocessed and is stored in temporary cooling ponds.

A sub-contractor working at the plant suffered skin contamination while rinsing equipment in the plutonium purification workshop.

[12][13] However the leader of Greenpeace France, Yannick Rousselet, has since stated that they have ceased attempting to criticize the reprocessing plant on technical grounds, COGEMA having succeeded at performing the process without serious spills that have been frequent at other such facilities around the world.