http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markmardell/2008/07/flamanville_normandy_northern.html
Link: BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Mark Mardell.
Rounding the coast road, as blue-green breakers crash against the dark beaches, you can see a vast building site. It perches on the edge of the sea, on top of old industry, for here there used to be a granite mine and and an undersea iron mine. A few hundred yards out to sea there is a paler expanse of water in the shape of a flattened oval, while overhead scores of gulls hover and swoop on some tasty morsel below.
The site itself resounds with clatters and bangs, men in hard hats wield lengthy pieces of metal, while very tall cranes swing overhead. Two of the cranes are almost entirely encircled in huge concrete tubes, taller than a tower clock.
These oddities are connected, for this is not just any old building site. This is Flamanville Three, where France's latest nuclear reactors are being built. The two cranes wear concrete jackets, to make sure that in the unlikely event they fell over, they wouldn't crash into either of the live reactors next door. And the seabirds are scoffing algae and other goodies forced to the surface by the pressure of the water flowing from the pressurised water reactors....
(((Well, at least there's one member of NATO that won't black-out when the Straits of Hormuz get blasted.)))
