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.

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."’

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.

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.)

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.’

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.)

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.’

How this works:

The accumulating costs above are based on the EUR 1.7 billion overrun announced by Areva/TVO plus an extra EUR 1.2 billion which will be needed to purchase electricity that has not been produced by Olkiluoto-3 since its projected start.

These costs will eventually be paid for by Nordic electricity consumers and French taxpayers, either through higher bills for customers or through taxes.

The financing of Areva’s EPR programme isn’t going well at all. It needs ‘between eight and 10 billion euros by 2012 to fund its investment programme’ and a desperate French government are putting parts of the company up for sale.

Related posts: EPR: Enfant Terrible of the French Nuclear Industry

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).

What about the highly dangerous waste produced by nuclear reactors? Here’s Mr De Rivaz’s entire response to the question, ‘there is the legacy of waste, isn’t there? That can be very dangerous for many years…’

The biggest challenge that we are facing all of us, we know it and we know it more and more, is climate change. We need to de-carbonise electricity and if we as a country to deliver what is our plan in 2050, 80% reduction of C02 emissions we need to de-carbonise electricity. So nuclear is part of the solution for sure.

Do you think he answered the question or singularly failed to address it? We know what we think. The biggest problem of nuclear power, it’s toxic, deadly legacy that will be with the human race for hundreds of thousands of years to come, is the waste it produces. And yet the CEO of EDF, lacked the courage to give a straight question on this vital issue with a straight answer.

According to writer H. Michael Sweeney there are 25 Rules of Disinformation. The number one rule? Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

Globe and Mail: Canada Reactor design puts safety of nuclear plants into question
’Canadian nuclear safety regulators say they have underestimated the seriousness of a design feature at the country's electricity-producing reactors that would cause them to experience dangerous power pulses during a major accident. If reactors are not shut down quickly, their ability to keep radioactivity from escaping would be put to the test, according to an internal commission document. The document says Canada's seven nuclear stations, which all use Candu technology, have a feature known as "positive reactivity feedback," in which their atomic chain reactions automatically speed up if the water pumped into the reactors to cool them leaks, one of the worst accidents possible at a nuclear station. If reactors aren't immediately shut down during this type of incident, positive reactivity leads to a quick snowballing in the pace of nuclear reactions, which in turn could cause potentially damaging overheating. The document was obtained by the anti-nuclear environmental group Greenpeace through a federal Access to Information Act request. Positive reactivity is "the Achilles heel of Candu," said spokesman Shawn-Patrick Stensil, who contended it amounts to a design flaw that puts the safety of the reactors into question.’

So the Greenpeace team went down to the Delta head office in Middelburg, while the plans for the plant were being presented to shareholders, and built Delta their very own (mock) nuclear waste dump…

© Greenpeace/Bas Beentjes

Where will all the waste from a second nuclear power plant go? We can safely assume Delta won’t want it on their doorstep. No, it will be dumped at COVRA, the Netherlands’ nuclear waste storage depository, where it will sit for the next 100 years while the nuclear industry hopes and prays that a solution to dangerous nuclear waste will present itself.

And where will all the electricity from the plant go? Right now, there’s no demand. The Dutch environment minister Jacqueline Cramer has her doubts…

She believes the Netherlands will produce more energy than it can use by 2012. 'Then you have to ask if you should be creating more capacity in the form of nuclear power stations.'

There’s no solution to the waste a second plant will produce. If Ms Cramer is right, the Netherlands doesn’t need the electricity. Wind power capacity has almost doubled in the country since 2005. Research suggests the Dutch electricity system is capable of coping with the supply of large-scale wind power in the future.

There’s no need for a new nuclear power station in the Netherlands. So why build one?

(More information is available in Dutch on the Greenpeace Netherlands website. Video of the action can be seen here.)

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

Mr De Rivaz said, ‘I am very open to debate and discussions’ with the like of Greenpeace on the matter of nuclear power and climate change. Debate? What debate? How is this debate to conducted? Where will these discussions take place?

What about the debate at the European Commission’s European Nuclear Energy Forum (Enef) from which ‘Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Sortir du Nucléaire, the only groups invited into the industry-dominated body, have walked out, accusing Enef of stifling critical voices, ignoring their concerns and riding roughshod over alternative scientific evidence’? EDF is part of that industry-dominated body. Where was Mr De Rivaz’s openness to debate and discussion at those meetings?

London Evening Standard: EDF Energy’s chief sees his pay rise after profits plunge
’Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of gas and electricity giant EDF Energy, got a £200,000 pay rise last year at a time when it put up prices for customers and saw profits plunge. De Rivaz was paid £900,000 in 2008, accounts published today showed. In that period, pre-tax profit fell to £252 million from £305 million a year earlier as gas prices fluctuated wildly.’

If you google “ Mount Difficulty” the first twenty-five pages do not link to information about the evocatively named central New Zealand mountain – they all go straight to adverts for wine and vineyards. It is apt that the analogy adopted (not by consensus) by the IWC Commissioners is that discussions on the future of the IWC are like scaling Mount Difficulty, as the very process of discussing the discussions could drive you to drink.

The interview is worth watching because of the evasions and contradictions in what Mr De Rivaz said. Unfortunately they weren’t challenged by the interviewer so, in a short series, we're going to challenge them instead.

Answering the question about how his nuclear ‘renaissance’ will be funded (‘Will it happen with government subsidy?’), he said:

I’ve always said we don’t ask for taxpayers’ money. We don’t ask for government subsidy. I’ve always said that. I’m still saying that. I will continue to say that.

That’s pretty definite. And it’s a nice little piece of spin. Mr De Rivaz isn’t asking the British government to directly support EDF. No, he’s a little more subtle than that. What he actually asked in May this year was for the British government to fix the energy markets to make financial life easier for EDF…

New nuclear power stations will not be built in Britain unless the government provides financial support for the industry, the head of the country’s biggest nuclear generator has warned.

Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of the UK subsidiary of EDF, told the Financial Times that a “level playing field” had to be created that would allow the nuclear industry to compete with other low-emission electricity sources such as wind power.

‘We believe nuclear is competitive,’ he said in the Sky News interview when he actually doesn’t believe anything of the kind. He believes it could be competitive but only with serious government intervention.

The Manufacturer: Mandelson sets out nuclear strategy
’Lord Mandelson has outlined his vision for the future of the British nuclear industry in one of his first addresses in his amended role as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS). The creation of the Department for BIS represents the amalgamation of the Departments for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and Innovation, Universities and Skills. Mandelson headed the former since October last year and now takes up the reins at the joint office. Speaking at the UNITE Nuclear Supply Chain Conference, Mandelson praised the legacy of British manufacturing, yet warned that it must remain strong in its "capacity to compete and win in a global economy."’