Turkey’s government announced over the weekend that it is cancelling (for the fourth time) its farcical tendering process to build the country’s first nuclear reactor (following the likes of Canada, Bulgaria, South Africa, Texas, Missouri, Idaho, Alabama, and the rest who’ve all seen their own nuclear plans fall through).

In the UK is looks like a big chunk of the jobs that were hyped by the British government as part of the nuclear ‘renaissance’ may be going to go to overseas contractors. We hate to say we told you so.

Hard-headed capitalists like Citigroup are calling new nuclear reactors ‘corporate killers’ and an utter financial nightmare for potential investors offering non-existent returns.

Bearing all this mind, you be forgiven for asking, ‘just what kind of renaissance is this anyway?’ Where’s the rebirth and revival?

The Renaissance that swept Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries produced masterpieces that have the power to inspire awe even to this day: Gutenberg’s mighty printing press, Michelangelo’s David and the Sistine Chapel, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, the far-sighted vision of Copernicus and Galileo… to name but a very small few.

So where are the nuclear ‘renaissance’s major works and masterpieces? What does this 'renaissance' have to show for itself? The EPR reactor being built in Olkiluoto, Finland and Flamanville, France is supposed to be the ‘renaissance’s flagship endeavour. Is it the nuclear ‘renaissance’s Mona Lisa? If it is, it’s one drawn in crayon by a five year-old with his eyes shut.

Is the Turkish government, who can’t build a nuclear reactor after four attempts, the nuclear 'renaissance’s Michelangelo? Is Westinghouse, which lacks the vision to see that its new AP-1000 reactor design might need to include safety systems so it can ‘withstand events like earthquakes and tornadoes’ the nuclear ‘renaissance’s Galileo? It's starting to look pathetic.

With the nuclear industry facing yet more accusations (this time from Peter A. Bradford a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1977 to 1982) of seeking ‘to shift ever more economic risk to taxpayers who are already staggering under the weight of other federal bailouts’, it seems the nuclear 'renaissance' shares just one thing with its historical counterpart: the leading exponents of both being reliant on the money from generous patrons.

The nuclear ‘renaissance’ is really shaping up to be the ‘renaissance that wasn’t’.

Britain poised to lose jobs as £10bn nuclear power plant contract goes to US
‘Thousands of jobs that were to have been created in Britain to build the next generation of nuclear power plants could be heading overseas instead, after Westinghouse, the nuclear company sold by the government three years ago to Toshiba, chose one of its largest shareholders as the lead contractor to build reactors. Westinghouse is expected to confirm this week that it has appointed US-based Shaw Group to head up its £10bn nuclear programme, passing over the favourite for the contract, rival engineering group Fluor. Industry sources said that Shaw is likely to source far more reactor components from overseas than Fluor, which has close relationships with British manufacturers. The Unite union claimed that 10,000 new jobs in the UK would not be created as a result of Shaw being selected.’

An independent expert commissioned by Greenpeace has found the two nuclear reactors currently being built in Finland and France have serious safety flaws in their design. Dr. Helmut Hirsch, Scientific Consultant for Nuclear Safety says the design of AREVA’s much heralded third-generation EPR reactor is ‘contradictory to the foundation of nuclear safety’.

A nuclear reactor’s control systems are supposed to be independent, so that a failure of one system doesn’t compromise the whole reactor. This is not the case with the EPR – its systems are interlinked. ‘In the worst case,’ says Dr Hirsch, ‘this can lead to a minor incident developing into a severe accident.’ This has led to the nuclear regulators in the UK (who are evaluating the EPR design as part of their nuclear ‘renaissance’), France and Finland to jointly express their concern with this design flaw.

This is on top of ongoing serious problems at the construction of the OL3 EPR at Olkiluoto, Finland. Last week it was found that the pipes in the reactor’s essential cooling system (the part of the reactor that prevents a meltdown) have been welded using unacceptable methods without any supervision or written records. The surface of the pipes had been welded to cover up damage which may have weakened the pipes beyond repair.

The number of defects in OL3’s construction is around 3,000. The Finnish nuclear regulator STUK has detected many that were in fact approved by AREVA’s quality control but can we be certain that STUK has found them all? In 2006 STUK admitted that they could not be sure due to the high number of problems.

What we can be certain of however is that the EPR reactor is a dangerous and failed experiment. The safety flaws highlighted by Dr Hirsch reveal that there can be no confidence in the safety of the EPR design. The massive budget and schedule overruns show that a programme of building EPRs across the planet, as AREVA plans, presents a very real threat to the fight against climate change. Neither must we forget the legacy of nuclear accidents.

EPR, like nuclear power as a whole, not only threatens our safety, but takes and wastes the vital money, time and resources that we need to expand renewable energy and energy efficiency programmes if we are serious about saving our climate. The risks are too great. EPR must be abandoned immediately.

Read Dr. Hirsch’s report here. Greenpeace’s EPR factsheet is here.

Peak Uranium? Our nuclear future might be shorter than we thought
‘We’ve all heard of Peak Oil (even if there’s some doubt about whether we’ve heard the truth over when it’s going to actually kick in), but there’s no need to worry –nuclear power will step in to fill the gap, right? Well, not for long, perhaps, at least according to Dr Michael Dittmar and his new analysis of the global nuclear industry…’

Big polluters love them because it's a cheap way of passing off their responsibility to someone else, somewhere else. Even though big polluters have already got the current draft US legislation filled with far too many loopholes, last week they wrote a letter asking for even more offsets, otherwise it would mean slightly lower multimillion profit margins. What was surprising was that joining such huge polluters such as Duke Energy, Dominion, Exelon and American Electric Power was Intel.

Yep Intel, one of the foundations of the IT industry that claims in can cut emissions by 15 percent by 2020 and generate billion of dollars of efficiency saving as well. Now Intel is firmly siding with the regressive, dirty companies and adding it's name to calls for US legislators to make even less effort to cut emissions in the US.

The full text of the letter and entertaining translation is in on our US blog but here's a flavour:

Re: The Importance of International Offsets for U.S. Climate Change Mitigation Efforts

We, the undersigned, are companies that employ hundreds of thousands of American workers, and serve hundreds of millions of American consumers. We expect that our companies would be affected significantly by any greenhouse gas regulatory program. We write today to communicate our firm belief that in order for any such program to be both environmentally effective and economically sound it should be market-based and incorporate both domestic and international offsets. To this end, we are concerned about the further restrictions on use of international offset credits in S. 1733, reported last week by the Environment and Public Works Committee.

TRANSLATION: We are some of the biggest, richest polluters in the world and we have a lot invested in dirty business. If you pass climate legislation without huge loopholes for us, we’re going to be very upset. One of the most important loopholes we want are carbon offsets – cheap vouchers that allow us to side-step cutting our pollution with the rationale that someone else, somewhere else, will cut pollution instead. Sure, the legislation in Congress already has massive subsidies for us and billions of tons of offsets in it, but we are still not happy. We always want more.

When IT companies need to be championing a strong deal in Copenhagen Intel is pushing in the wrong direction. It certainly won't help Intel's score in our Cool IT Challenge. Maybe Intel deserves a new slogan "Intel is working on the technologies of the future today" is more like "Intel is promoting excuses at the expense of the future today"

The Cool IT campaign tracks 14 top companies, rating them based on five criteria: public climate speeches; political advocacy; climate solutions; own emissions targets and renewable energy use. These are combined to give a total score out of 100. At the moment, by our reckoning, less than 50/100 is pretty lame. Anyone who knows what it's like to score 43 on a school assignment would probably agree.

“Have a French nuclear industry that works. That means that we have to rethink the whole industry.”
Henri Proglio, the incoming boss of EDF

“For a nuclear power station to be built at Kirksanton, the Haverigg windfarm would have to be demolished.”
Jill Perry, Green Party candidate for Copeland, UK

Read on…

New Greenpeace Chief Calls for Sustainable, Nuclear-Free Power Supply
‘Kumi Naidoo was appointed executive director of the environmental campaign group Greenpeace International this month after two decades leading civil society groups in Africa and internationally. Mr. Naidoo, 44, who is from South Africa, takes over the role at a time when environmentalism increasingly enjoys mainstream status, although the agenda of groups like Greenpeace remains at odds with those of many governments in critical areas like nuclear power and biotechnology. Mr. Naidoo, who is based in Amsterdam, answered questions on energy and climate policy in an e-mail exchange with Green Inc. ‘Nuclear power is a dangerous distraction to real solutions.’

The Happy Ranger carrying both steam generators - for AREVA's disaster-prone OL3 EPR nuclear reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland - and eight Greenpeace activists arrived at their destination this afternoon. After the formalities of Finnish immigration, our heroes are now enjoying well deserved baths, hot dinners and celebrations.

A press conference will be held in Helsinki on Friday and we'll bring you all the details from there. This isn't the end of the story so stay tuned.

(A full briefing on Areva's OL3, its many safety issues and negative impact on Finnish climate policy is available here. One of the activists on board, Lauri Myllyvirta, blogged the experience here. There are photos and video, and more photos.)

Nuclear power: less effective than energy efficiency and renewable energy?
‘If the U.S. wants to help stop global warming, nuclear power is not the way to go, according to a new report released today. The Environment California Research & Policy Center concluded that launching a nuclear power industry nearly from the ground up is too slow and expensive a process. Energy efficiency standards and renewable energy options are better solutions, researchers said. Currently, no new nuclear reactors are under construction in the country, and no U.S. power company has ordered a nuclear plant since 1978. Meanwhile, building a reactor would probably take around a decade - 2016 at the earliest, the study suggested. Without an existing infrastructure, manufacturing reactor parts with the dearth of trained personnel would be difficult. But even if the nuclear industry managed to build 100 reactors by 2030, the total power produced would reduce total U.S. emissions only 12% over the next 20 years, which Environment California deemed “far too little, too late.”’

French nuclear giant AREVA is upset by the six Greenpeace activists who boarded the transport ship Happy Ranger in the Fehmarn Belt strait between Denmark and Germany. The ship is taking massive steam generators to the construction site of AREVA’s beleaguered OL3 EPR nuclear reactor in Olkiluoto, Finland.

The company says it is ‘saddened that Greenpeace refuses to engage in a calmer debate on energy issues’. Just how this ‘calmer debate’ is supposed to take place in the eyes of AREVA remains unclear. AREVA studiously ignore the issues raised on this blog, for example, although we know AREVA people are avid readers. And a visit to the facility where these large EPR components have been produced will not advance us in the debate on how nuclear energy undermines climate protection or how the choice for nuclear power has shut the door for renewable energies in Finland. A calmer debate? Greenpeace is ready when you are, AREVA.

©Greenpeace/Mueller

The company certainly wasn’t interested in calm debate at the European Commission’s European Nuclear Energy Forum (Enef) this year. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Sortir du Nucléaire - the only groups invited into the industry-dominated body - walked out accusing Enef of ‘stifling critical voices’, ‘ignoring their concerns and riding roughshod over alternative scientific evidence’. If the likes of AREVA are so sure of themselves and their reactors you have to wonder why they have to resort to such cover-up and cowardice.

On top of that, AREVA spokesperson Jacques-Emmanuel Saulnier seems to think some kind of ‘association’ is ‘opening up’ between AREVA and Greenpeace just because a Greenpeace team visited the AREVA uranium mines in Niger last week. As if inviting people to the hellish nightmare of what AREVA has done in Niger would endear the company to anyone.

In its Happy Ranger press release AREVA also uses a rather strange and inappropriate metaphor…

To quote a well-known saying, "Our house is burning and we are looking the other way". If we apply this metaphor, then Greenpeace's attempts to stand in the way of nuclear power is like preventing a trusted fire service from getting to the blaze.

AREVA is comparing nuclear reactors to a ‘fire service’ fighting against the ‘burning’ that is climate change. Now, we don’t know about you, but if our house was burning we’d want the fire service at the scene immediately. We wouldn’t want the fire service being massively delayed and taking years to arrive like AREVA's nuclear reactors are. By the time the AREVA fire truck arrives the house could be in ruins. And just imagine the highly toxic and radioactive extinguishing chemicals that AREVA uses when trying to put out this fire. Even if they managed to save the house, it would be uninhabitable for thousands and thousands of years.

And don’t get us started on ‘trusted’.

(Get the latest news on the Greenpeace activists’ progress on Greenpeace Finland’s Twitter feed and Nuclear Reaction’s Twitter feed. One of the activists on board, Lauri Myllyvirta, is blogging here. There are photos and video, and more photos.)

India puts nuclear plants on alert
‘NEW DELHI, Nov 16 (Reuters) - India has put its nuclear power plants under alert and tightened security around them after intelligence about possible attacks, a report said on Monday. The step comes after a man arrested in the United States on charges of plotting attacks in India was found to have travelled to Indian states that have nuclear installations. The Press Trust of India quoted unnamed sources in the home ministry as saying that state governments had been asked to step up security around their nuclear plants as a "precautionary measure".’

The Happy Ranger is expected to arrive in Finland tomorrow afternoon.

(Get the latest news on the Greenpeace activists’ progress on Greenpeace Finland’s Twitter feed and Nuclear Reaction’s Twitter feed. One of the activists on board, Lauri Myllyvirta, is blogging here. Here are photos and video, and more photos.)

Read Lauri's latest blog post from from the deck of the Happy Ranger...

Find out more here.

A few days ago the cargo ship The Happy Ranger left France carrying steam generators intended for the nuclear European Pressurised Reactor under construction in Olkiluoto, Finland. As the ship made its way from France to Finland, activists from the Arctic Sunrise boarded the cargo ship and are currently occupying the cranes on deck.

Read on...

The activists have not been removed and intend to stay on board all the way to Finland.

Photos of the action can be seen here and here. The Greenpeace press release is here.

The EPR reactor could be coming to your country. It's worth finding out why that might be a bad idea. You can find out more about this ill-fated reactor on Greepeace's factsheet and read its disastrous history recorded here on Nuclear Reaction.

Update: Greenpeace Finland nuclear campaigner Lauri Myllyvirta is blogging from the deck of the Happy Ranger.

Who said speaking out against nuclear power couldn’t be fun? Last week Greenpeace Mediterranean asked the Turkish public, “are you ready to live with nuclear?” by holding a highly visual performance from Abarjazz Avandgard Music Group in Istanbul. It was the first of many activities to come in the following months. Abarjazz Avendgard is a professional drumming group, that came to help us launch our campaign “I lovve nuclear” with an objective to knock out any chance of bringing nuclear power to Turkey in the future. The group played on barrels marked to look like radioactive waste, while wearing gas masks, and activists asked the government to end all nuclear plans present and future. It received a very positive response.

The Turkish government has spent decades entertaining the idea, and working to bring nuclear power here. So far, they have managed to go through the lengthy and expensive tendering process four times, and have failed all four times. Although, most recently, they accepted the one and only bid, from Russian company, Atomstroyexport, and against the tender’s own regulations, they accepted it. Greenpeace, and other local NGOs brought a legal case against such actions, and three days ago, the High Court restricted the conditions of the tender so significantly that it basically brought it to an end.

Even still, as good as this does sound, history has shown us that we cannot call this a full victory yet, but just another failed tender. In spite of repeated failures, calculated proof that nuclear power is incredibly expensive, and the examples of severe danger, such as Chernobyl, the Turkish government has not taken the nuclear option off the table. In fact, they still have another tender process on the agenda for 2010.

We intend to crush the beast while it’s down. From now until the anniversary of Chernobyl on April 26th next year, we will be pull together one million ‘radioactivists’ through our website ilovvenuclear.org. The campaign will be supported by several offline activities and tremendous outreach on the main social networking sites, and will promote the reality that nuclear power is expensive, dangerous and not the right solution for Turkey. One million voices cannot be ignored!

(This is a guest post by Stephanie Hillman, Programme Director for Greenpeace Mediterranean. More information is available in Turkish here. You can follow the ‘I lovve nuclear’ campaign on Twitter here and sign up to the Facebook group here.)

Nevada's hidden ocean of radiation
‘A sea of ancient water tainted by the Cold War is creeping deep under the volcanic peaks, dry lake beds and pinyon pine forests covering a vast tract of Nevada. Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and in some cases directly into aquifers. But today, as Nevada faces a water crisis and a population boom, state officials are taking a new measure of the damage. They successfully pressured federal officials for a fresh environmental assessment of the 1,375-square-mile test site, a step toward a potential demand for monetary compensation, replacement of the lost water or a massive cleanup. "It is one of the largest resource losses in the country," said Thomas S. Buqo, a Nevada hydrogeologist. "Nobody thought to say, 'You are destroying a natural resource.'" In a study for Nye County, where the nuclear test site lies, Buqo estimated that the underground tests polluted 1.6 trillion gallons of water. That is as much water as Nevada is allowed to withdraw from the Colorado River in 16 years - enough to fill a lake 300 miles long, a mile wide and 25 feet deep. At today's prices, that water would be worth as much as $48bn if it had not been fouled, Buqo said.’