The trial into the fatal landslide at the Bure lab in January 2016 took place.

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At the beginning of the week, was held at the correctional court of Bar-le-duc, eight years after the facts, the trial concerning the collapse of a gallery at the Bure laboratory, on January the 26th 2026, killing one machine driver and injuring another worker. Representatives of Eiffage, employer for this mission, and Antéa France, project manager, were summoned.

In 2016, the construction site employed 400 people, including 160 Andra’s agents and 240 employees of service companies. On January 26th, Eiffage’s two technicians were busy on a bolting operation when the working face collapsed. Several cubic meters of rock suddenly fell on them. Both companies’ lawyers have pleaded the same line of defense that they did not understand the causes of the accident – which, let’s be honest, isn’t really reassuring for CIGEO, if at this point, they don’t know what they’re doing. For the public prosecutor, if there was an accident, it was because there was a failure to secure the construction site. For instance, not using 6 meters bolts as it was authorized, but use 12 meters bolts instead. Another fault put forward by the experts’ rapports: the shotcrete wasn’t applied fast enough, leaving the working face bare. The prosecutor is requiring 30 000€ fines for each company. The deliberation will take place on April 4.

A little over a year ago, questioned aside during a public meeting in Mandres-en-Barrois about this professional homicide, the engineer in charge of safety and security in the galleries (who was then in office) told us that with every industrial project, there are inevitably deaths. He forgets to specify that in 2016, the landslide in the galleries was only in the test phase of the project; that the lab was then (and still is) made up of 2 km of galleries 500 meters underground, while CIGEO ultimately plans more than 270 km – if the project is validated (the DAC having only been submitted). Indeed, as the Bure Stop collective expressed in January 2016, “this landslide clearly raises the question of the real stability of the underground clay in which CIGEO could be dug. If underground fractures, linked in particular to tunnel digging operations, appear in the laboratory, what will happen if the underground storage center is built and experiences such an accident while it is filled with radioactive waste?”.

En mai 2002, un accident avait déjà coûté la vie à un mineur du Groupement fonds Est alors que le forage atteignait 226 mètres de profondeur. Pour répondre de nouveau à cet ingénieur de l’ANDRA : combien d’ouvriers devront encore trouver la mort, dans la réalisation du plus grand projet industriel européen qu’est CIGEO ?

In May 2022, an accident had already cost the life of a minor from the eastern fund group whereas the drilling reached 226 meters deep. To respond again to this ANDRA engineer : How many workers should die again, in the achievement of the greatest industrial European project that is CIGEO ?

What hypocrisy can we draw from this “affair” when ANDRA organized with France Travail, this same February 6, 2024, a recruitment operation, where more than 500 college students from 11 establishments in Meuse and Hauts-de-France were summoned ; as well as around a hundred job seekers for job dating with nuclear companies?!

And what cynicism can we see in this “affair” when we learn that ANDRA has just signed in September 2023 a new contract worth more than 1 million euros with Antéa France concerning drilling, for the months to come !

To present it, Antéa Group works mainly as an environmental design office and in particular for manufacturers, gas and oil companies and other energy producers, for governments and communities. Previously, Antéa was a former subsidiary of the Bureau of Geological and Mining Research (BRGM), well known in the world of extractivism. Moreover, the fact that the group has several branches in Françafrique (Mali, Burkina-Faso, Chad and Benin) leaves no doubt about its neo-colonial activities.

Antea France, among other things, carried out soil freezing to dig the tunnels for the Grand Paris Express. In 2020, he also carried out a study, at the request of the State, concerning the removal from storage of Stocamine waste in Alsace. The conclusion was that the conditions were not met for the removal of toxic waste (arsenic, mercury, asbestos, cyanide, etc.), which had to be left buried despite the fire that occurred in 2002…

The French head office is located near Orléans, and the company has nearly twenty offices in France (Arras, Aubagne, Lorient, Lille, Angers, Lyon, Dijon, Colmar, Nancy, Toulouse, Paris, Rouen, Montpellier, Pau, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Clermont-Ferrand, Caen, Nantes, Strasbourg, Reims, etc.). And the group’s subsidiaries are IRH Ingénieur Conseil (specialized in water management and treatment); ICF, (environmental engineering in Ile-de-France and due diligence activities) and Géo-Hyd (environmental data management).

Concerning Eiffage, the company is in charge of construction work on tunnels, wells and underground passages for CIGEO. And recently, it won the call for tenders for civil engineering works in the construction of the first two EPR2s announced for the relaunch, in Penly, for more than 4 billion euros and a site with nearly 4,000 employees.

In Bure, the burial of nuclear shit produced in recent decades by capitalist industry irremediably causes human and environmental “risks” and “damage”. After some security tinkering, ANDRA continued the implementation of the CIGEO project by requesting creation authorization (DAC) in January 2023, which is still under investigation. Risks are still to be feared for the years to come regarding the lives of many workers forced by the capitalist wage system to go down into its galleries to be able to earn their living if CIGEO gets its authorization. The recruitment fair on February 6 attests to this: the propaganda, aimed at middle school students (!) in the region, is particularly worth throwing up.

Once again, ANDRA doesn’t care about it and continues its headlong rush, responding to the injunctions of a deadly industry in full recovery. How many deaths will still have to be counted in the realization of the CIGEO project? When will we learn the news of a new death in the bowels of the CIGEO project? With what communication pirouette will ANDRA react? And how long will it be before a fire breaks out, as was the case in Stocamine after 5 years of burying toxic waste?

More than ever, it is time to mobilize against the nuclear trash project. Let industrial society and capitalism die!

08/02/2024