The Greenpeace weblog

Nuclear power can’t save us from climate change if it’s too hot

Justin — 2009-07-03T15:18:05+01:00

In November 2007, Anne Lauvergeon, President and Chief Executive of French nuclear energy incompetents Areva boasted…

In a world enjoying a growing energy thirst, we have in our hands nuclear energy: a formidable asset to build an energy sustainable future. It means that one of the answers to the issues of achieving security of supply, competitiveness and the fight against climate change is already available to us.

Nuclear energy can already help us against climate change?

Oh really?

Tell that to the French government who are this summer are being forced to import electricity from the UK because its inland nuclear reactors cannot operate properly in the summer heatwave…

Fourteen of France’s 19 nuclear power stations are located inland and use river water rather than seawater for cooling. When water temperatures rise, EDF is forced to shut down the reactors to prevent their casings from exceeding 50C […] One power industry insider said yesterday that about 20GW (gigawatts) of France’s total nuclear generating capacity of 63GW was out of service.

Yes, this amazing, cheap, reliable and safe technology that is going to save us from rising global temperatures can’t work when the temperature rises. Really. The world’s major exponent of nuclear power, the one that is supposedly going to lead us the promised land of a nuclear ‘renaissance’, is having to import electricity because its own reactors aren’t up to the job. Nuclear power is supposed to save us from climate change but can’t work when the climate changes. That’s what they call a Catch-22.

With temperatures only set rise in the coming years, it looks like France has a big problem. And they’re not alone. There are over 400 nuclear power plants across the world. How many are inland and rely on river water for coolant? Not that coastal reactors are any better. Look for example at the CanDU facility in Ontario, Canada which is actively contributing to climate change.

So what’s the solution? In France, desperate times demand desperate measures when a country is so reliant on nuclear power…

EDF must also observe strict rules governing the heat of the water it discharges into waterways so that wildlife is not harmed. The maximum permitted temperature is 24C […] In 2003, the situation grew so severe that the French nuclear safety regulator granted special exemptions to three plants, allowing them temporarily to discharge water into rivers at temperatures as high as 30C.

Can these strict rules governing reactors’ discharges survive in the face of rising global temperatures? One would imagine not. In other words the nuclear industry will be allowed to damage the environment more than it already does.

‘In order to save the planet we must destroy it,’ should be its new slogan.

Nuclear News: Obama: Iran cannot be permitted to be nuke power

Justin — 2009-07-03T15:15:12+01:00

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Washington Post: Obama: Iran cannot be permitted to be nuke power
’WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama says he is "not reconciled" to the idea of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon within a year. The president told The Associated Press in an interview that U.S. government planning is running in precisely the opposite direction. He said a nuclear-armed Iran would likely trigger an arms race in the already volatile Mideast and said that would be "a recipe for potential disaster."’

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Rainbow Warriors - past, present and future

Lisa — 2009-07-03T09:49:27+01:00

We are excited about the creation of a new Greenpeace ship - the Rainbow Warrior III. Having just signed a contract for the build of this state-of-the-art vessel - three crew members from the Rainbow Warrior I and II take us back in time briefly - as we look forward to seeing this legend continue.

Bunny McDiarmid, executive Director of Greenpeace in New Zealand, talks about her memories of life on board the original Rainbow Warrior as a deckhand...

I can still see in my mind's eye and often do, the grain of the wooden decks of the old Warrior, I can remember their feel underfoot, and the smell of the black tar when the sun hit them. I first joined her as a deckhand in 1984 in Jacksonville, Florida in a godforsaken boat yard in the backofbeyond. We were turning her from a motor boat into a sailing boat. And she turned beautifully. And it was the 'we', the 12 crew and 5 or 6 dedicated volunteers that did it all over the course of 4-5 months. The doing of this welded us to her and to each other. I remember Ulla the 24 year old danish fitter and turner who redid all the welding on the chain plates after the yard guys buggered it up.

I remember Henk skill sawing the aluminum bridge wings off so we could mount winches for the main sheet, I remember all of us walking the stays of the main mast as she swung over the yard into her sleeve on the main deck. I remember sitting braced on the main deck as we sailed through the night repairing the mainsail on an old sewing machine and I remember how fast we could unscrew all the bolts holding down the benches in the mess and push them into the companionway so that we had enough room for dancing. No campaign office, there was just the mess and the radio room off the bridge. No email just a clamour for the mail when we arrived in Hawaii after two weeks at sea.

The crew of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 - Bunny is second from the right

I did not know much about Greenpeace when I joined the Warrior, I just liked what she was going to do - an anti nuclear campaign in the Pacific. The first stop was helping 350 Rongelap islanders move from their home island to another island 40 miles away because of the radiation contamination from US nuclear testing.

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The EPR at Olkiluoto: from disaster to farce

Justin — 2009-07-02T16:30:43+01:00

After Areva - builders of the disaster-prone state-of-the-art third generation OL3 European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) in Olkiluoto, Finland - lost its reputation and credibility over the project, it only had one thing left to lose: its dignity.

And so it happens. The recriminations over just who is to blame for the world’s largest prototype reactor being massively over budget and over schedule, which doubts over its design and construction, have begun. Areva are now engaged in a very public and childish game of he-said-she-said with the reactor’s owners, Finnish utility TVO and nuclear safety agency, STUK.

Jukka Laaksonen, director general of STUK says…

They (Areva) started planning when they won the contract, which was of course too late. They should have used two years for planning (in advance)… The French did not understand at first the Finnish system, that no important device can be built before the plan is approved.

Areva weren’t going to take that lying down and managing director of Finnish operations, Osmo Kaipainen, argued back…

"Authorities are never satisfied" when it comes to meeting safety regulations, he said. He added that TVO was slow delivering Areva-Siemens' documents to STUK for validation, needed before moving from one building task to another.

Those pesky safety agencies and their fussy ways about… safety. Whatever next? We’re not sure if we’d like to eat a meal cooked by an Areva executive – let’s hope they wash their hands and cook the chicken properly.

TVO managed to confuse things further by saying Areva had spent "significantly more time on planning" than the contract asked for. STUK say not enough time was spent by Areva on planning, TVO say too much time was spent. You’d feel sorry for Areva if they hadn’t made a complete disaster of the OL3 construction from the very start and were capable of giving a straight answer to a straight question themselves.

On the whole, Areva, TVO and STUK all look and sound like children squabbling over which of them gets the biggest piece of cake. If it was up to us the three of them would be sent to bed without any supper.

(Apparently Areva have declared the OL3 EPR as the first child of the ‘rebirth of the nuclear industry’. Boy, it’s going to be an ugly baby.)

Nuclear News: Cost Concerns Loom Over US Nuclear Revival

Justin — 2009-07-02T16:21:19+01:00

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

CNN: POWER POINTS: Cost Concerns Loom Over US Nuclear Revival
’For U.S. utilities gearing up to build new nuclear-power plants, the rewards could be great, but the risks of cost overruns, delays and regulatory battles persist. Expanding the nation's use of nuclear power is seen by many as a key component of any strategy to fight climate change, and utilities are lining up to provide it. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received applications from 14 companies to build and operate new nuclear power plants. Energy Secretary Steven Chu last week told utility executives that nuclear power, along with renewable energy and conservation, will be an important way to meet growing U.S. energy demand while cutting emissions of greenhouse gases. The companies behind these projects, including Southern Co. (SO) and Duke Energy (DUK), are upbeat on their prospects, noting guaranteed long-term returns on investment and increasing acceptance of a need to replace coal-fired power plants and their emissions. History sounds a cautionary note, however. Nuclear-power plants under development in Europe have come under fire for exceeding previously estimated costs, a fate that led developers to abandon several nuclear-power projects during the last U.S. nuclear build-out that ended in the early 1990s.’

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Oh nukemen, will you never change?

Justin — 2009-07-01T15:37:36+01:00

Reuters’ Felix Salmon hops down to a sandwich show, at which apparently great big swigs of industry Kool-Aid were served to wash down the finger buffet. Apparently, the presiding GE nukeman, Eric Loewen…

was there, talking about nuclear power, and specifically what he calls a PRISM reactor — a fourth-generation nuclear power station which runs on the nuclear waste generated by all the previous generations of nuclear power stations.

Wow! That sounds fantastic, safe, carbon-neutral and most importantly cheap! So, tell me more about this "Integral Fast Reactor", of which you speak…

They’re super-safe: if they fail they just stop working, they don’t melt down. And they can even literally replace coal power stations:

This sounds even better than the old breeder reactors, the last miracle technology to come out of the nuke industry that was going to solve all our energy needs without any of that nasty "radioactive" (wiggles fingers) stuff. And you say that this runs on waste material?

Fast reactors also solve at a stroke the problem of what to do with the vast amounts of nuclear waste which are being stockpiled unhappily around the world.

So, you can just take that nasty toxic waste and basically shovel it into your new IFR reactor and it works!

... (tumbleweeds, crickets)

The answer is unfortunately no. You have to reprocess the waste before it can be used in the IFR. Specifically, you have to reprocess a hell of a lot of it, via a process that has never been made to work on a commercial scale[1] before you can even get started. That's why the only country that's ever had a serious look at this technology (France) decided that this was a technology way too expensive and speculative even for them.

Ahhh, nukemen.

[1] Lots and lots of things work in labs but can't be scaled, basically because the size and number of blemishes and cracks in an item scales roughly as a power of its size, while the size of atoms doesn't. Very big things, made to very high tolerances, are very expensive.

(This is a guest post by Daniel Davies who writes for the Guardian’s Comment in Free, Crooked Timber and his own blog, D-Squared Digest. More of his thoughts on nuclear power can be found here and here.)

UK nuclear reactor design review runs into trouble

Justin — 2009-07-01T15:33:19+01:00

In May we told you that the review being conducted by the UK’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate into new reactor designs had issues with EDF and Areva’s European Pressurised Reactor (EPR). Further details are now coming out about how the Inspectorate regards the EPR design as ‘significantly compromised’…

The Health and Safety Executive, which oversees the NII, said that the EPR design could be rejected for use in Britain if its concerns could not be satisfactorily addressed. “It is our regulatory judgment that the control and instrumentation architecture appears overly complex,” the NII letter [to EDF] said. “We have serious concerns about your proposal which allows lower safety class systems to have write access [the ability to override] to higher safety class systems,” it continued.
The letter also highlighted concerns about the absence of safety display systems or manual controls that would allow the reactor to be shut down, either in the station’s control room or at an emergency remote shutdown station.

In other words, the NII don’t trust the designs of EPR’s control and safety systems. Areva is apparently ‘scrambling to produce revised plans’, a situation mirrored in Finland where plans for the control system for the massively late and over-budget EPR being built in Olkiluoto have been described by Finland nuclear watchdog STUK as ‘without a proper design that meets the basic principles of nuclear safety’.

Apparently, in the UK’s case, ‘the design assessment phase could be delayed well past its expected completion in 2011.’ So in Finland, so in the UK. Areva and EDF are nothing if not consistent.

Nuclear News: Exelon delays plan for Texas nuclear plant

Justin — 2009-07-01T15:26:40+01:00

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

AP: Exelon delays plan for Texas nuclear plant
’COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Power generator Exelon Corp. said Tuesday it has called off plans for now to build a new nuclear plant in Texas because of worries over the economy and the limited availability of federal loan guarantees. The Chicago-based company, the largest nuclear power generator in the U.S., is the second company in the past two months to postpone work for a new nuclear plant. St. Louis-based AmerenUE said in April that it was suspending work on a reactor in Missouri. "We just aren't in a place to pursue the nuclear project," John Rowe, Exelon's chairman and CEO, told The Associated Press in an interview regarding the company's plans to add two nuclear reactors in Victoria, Texas. But the projects are so expensive, running an estimated $6 billion to $8 billion per unit, that they are proving difficult to finance.’

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Just how do you get Internet at 82 degrees North?

Juliette — 2009-07-01T12:59:24+01:00

... or how we traveled back in time to dial-up connections and email without attachments.
Warning: This is an entry that might interest more the geeks among you than the general public.

The Arctic Sunrise is on top of the world right now, at 82 degrees North, and the difficulties encountered are not just weather related. Because so few people live that far North, satellite cover is almost nonexistent, and staying in touch with the ship is a complicated operation.
We had to install iridium phones on top of the crow's nest to create a very low bandwidth dial-up connection.

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Polar Bear!

Dave — 2009-07-01T09:57:01+00:00

From Melanie, campaigner on board the Arctic Sunrise:
A few hours after arriving at 82.31 degrees north latitude, a polar bear was sighted wandering not too far off the ship’s port beam. As you can imagine when someone shouts out “polar bear!” a fair bit of mayhem ensues, we drop what we are doing, grab our cameras and run out on deck. My cabin mate, Faye, is on watch from 12-4 so she was asleep, but she’d given me explicit instructions to wake her if a polar bear was sighted. I crossed my fingers and hoped the polar bear would remain in sight for at least a few minutes more while I ran down below to wake Faye.

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The spin and fiction of EDF's Vincent De Rivaz: 4 – ‘CO2-free’, support, and 60 months

Justin — 2009-06-30T20:33:09+01:00

On Wednesday evening last week, Vincent De Rivaz, Chief Executive of EDF Energy, was interviewed on the UK’s Sky News channel. It was the same day as the UK government announcing its latest nuclear power strategy.

The interview is worth watching because of the evasions and contradictions in what Mr De Rivaz said that are common in nuclear power propaganda. Unfortunately they weren’t challenged by the interviewer so, in a short series, we're going to challenge them instead ( - part one is here, part two is here, part three is here).

In the interview, Mr De Rivaz said ‘nuclear is a CO2-free energy’. Yet more spin. Mr De Rivaz seems to be conveniently forgetting the C02 emissions from uranium mining, enrichment and nuclear fuel production along with the emissions from manufacturing the concrete and steel needed to build nuclear reactors.

When asked about support from the major UK parties for nuclear power and ‘are you confident you’ve got it in the current government and from any possible future government’, Mr De Rivaz said emphatically: ‘Yes, I am… I am confident that the main opposition party is exactly on the same policy.’ Strange then that the energy policy document from the opposition Conservative Party makes no reference to future plans for nuclear power at all. Not a single one.

Mr De Rivaz also said that EDF’s nuclear power plants will take ‘less than 60 months’ to build which is a pretty wild boast in the current climate. Can we really expect EDF to buck a very large trend and actually get their reactors built on time and on budget? Stranger things have happened but the precedents are poor to say the least.

Nuclear News: French government forces Areva's 'iron lady' to bend

Justin — 2009-06-30T20:27:15+01:00

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Financial Times: French government forces Areva's 'iron lady' to bend
’Areva's board meets today to rubber stamp what was always inevitable - the sale of the nuclear group's transmission and distribution business and its stakes in a number of blue-chip companies. This is what Areva's main shareholder, the French government, has long wanted to fund the rising investment needs of its nuclear champion. This is what Jean-Cyril Spinetta, its new chairman - also the chairman of Air France-KLM - is going to recommend. He is also expected to confirm that the government, which, through different state or state-controlled institutions, owns more than 90 per cent of Areva, has agreed to open up the company's capital to new investors, although perhaps not the investors Anne Lauvergeon, Areva chief executive, would have wanted. Ms Lauvergeon, sometimes called France's "iron lady", has long campaigned for a market flotation to open up the group's capital, which is only traded through investment certificates. However, the government has always regarded Areva as a strategic national asset. It now wants to raise funds which are urgently needed not just for investments, but also to finance the â‚2bn ($2.8bn) Areva needs to buy out Siemens, its German engineering joint venture partner.’

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Arctic Sunrise on Top of the World

Dave — 2009-06-30T01:35:32+00:00

The crew of the Arctic Sunrise is on top of the world today, for many mindblowing reasons. As I write this, the ship is nudged up against the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean at 82.5 north – a latitude higher than any Greenpeace ship has achieved before, as far as we know. A couple of hours after we arrived, and had barely finished breakfast, a young polar bear loped past, seemingly curious and indignant about us unfurry humans gawping at it from our inedible green ship. It had been prowling along the ice edge, looking for seals for breakfast. We later saw evidence that it may have been successful, but I’ll spare squeamish readers the details. After such a short time here, it’s incredible that we’ve seen one of the world’s most formidable animals, one that is at risk from the lost of sea ice caused by climate change.

Where are we anyway? To the west, in the distance are mountains in the north of Ellesmere Island, and we can just about see the Canadian base at Alert. To the east, the mountains Greenland’s top end lie on the horizon. To the south, Nares Strait – the route to Baffin Bay by which we arrived, and to the north – well, there’s really only frozen ocean between here and the geographic North Pole.

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Kom och delta i seminariet om GMO-fria zoner i Almedalen

hejdagmo — 2009-06-29T19:20:02+01:00

Hej!

Ska du vara i Almedalen nu på fredag? Vi ska ha ett spännande seminarium om ett GMO-fritt Sverige den 3:e juli från 10:15.

Vi som är medvetna om riskerna med GMO har tröttnat på att vänta på att regeringen ska ta ställning i enlighet med försiktighetsprincipen. Ni vet redan att 6 länder i EU har tagit beslut om nationellt förbjud mot GMO-odling. Det är enda sättet för ett land att bevara landets biologiska mångfald och skydda jordbruket från GMO-kontaminering.

Därför vi är så glada för Östersunds kommun, Åre kommun och Jämtlands län som öppnade möjligheter för att göra sina områden GMO-fria zoner i Sverige. För en gång skull har någon tagit hänsyn till försiktighetsprincipen!

Hur började deras arbete och hur har de skapat GMO-fria zoner? Ni måste alla vara nyfikna?

På vårt seminarium, ska vi höra en berättelse av Bogna Wojtkiewicz Adolfsson, ordförande för Centerkvinnorna i Jämtlands län. Hon har förstått att GMO är riskfyllt och inte behövs och därför agerade hon tillsammans med lokala jordbrukare och konsumenter för att skapa GMO-fria zoner.

Vi ska ha en paneldiskussion och en frågestund med deltagarna.

Kom och delta i seminariet och skaffa nya kontakter!

Dag: 3/7 2009 10:15 - 11:15
Plats: Strandvägen 1, Visby hamn
Platsbeskrivning: Miljöarena, miljöscenen

Rubrik: ”Hur kan vi skapa ett GMO-fritt Sverige? Erfarenheter från det första GMO-fria länet”

Medverkande:
Bogna Wojtkiewicz Adolfsson (C) Jämtlands läns Centerkvinnor, Östersund
Tina Ehn (MP), Riksdagsledamot
Björn Jansson (S)Oppositionskommunalråd, 2:e vice ordförande kommunstyrelsen för Gotlands kommun
Frans Brozén, Ordf. Samodlarna Sverige
Camilla Sparring, Matupproret
Lasse Hellander, Nätverket GMO-fritt Sverige;
Akiko Frid, Greenpeace.

Vi ses i Almedalen!

- Akiko

Obama heard us, but will he listen?

Martin Lloyd — 2009-06-29T13:32:49+00:00

Barack Obama knows we're not happy

"I think that the Waxman-Markey bill represents a great start. And I suspect that the Senate is going to come in -- that there's going to be a strong overlap, but not perfect overlap; the final legislation that emerges is probably not going to satisfy the Europeans or Greenpeace. On the other hand, I think that when you've got corporate leaders like Jeff Immelt, legislators from coal regions like Rick Boucher, and Al Gore all agreeing that this is worth doing, that's a pretty good coalition to work with."

Keep the pressure on here