Another of the nuclear industry’s wild boasts is about its ability to create huge numbers of jobs. It’s often a promise it can’t keep. Just ask Bulgaria whose Prime Minister Stanishev said of the Belene nuclear reactor, "I am proud of Bulgarian power engineers, who are capable of developing such a complicated design". The reactor is of Russian design and with Bulgaria lacking ‘sufficiently educated and skilled specialised construction personnel’ plans were made ‘to bring over hundreds of Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese workers’.

These boasts are also being revised downwards in the UK. Under plans to build ‘up to’ ten new nuclear reactors, the then business minister John Hutton said in September last year that ‘up to’ 100,000 jobs would be created – ten thousand jobs per reactor. Keep an eye on those ‘up to’s – they don’t constitute a promise or a guarantee but merely an aspiration. They work hard at obfuscating, like a magician’s assistant distracting you from what the magician is really doing.

In April, the UK environment minister Ed Miliband said each new reactor now would employ 9,000 people – a drop of 1,000 jobs per reactor on the 2008 ‘up to’. We wonder how much further that jobs-to-reactor figure will fall if the UK government and nuclear industry win the propaganda battle and no longer have to rely on big, unprovable promises to win their case – especially if the builders, finding themselves over budget or behind schedule (as we can fully expect), have to cut costs.

We also wonder how many of those jobs will be only short-term construction jobs just for the duration of build process and how many of those will be imported technicians and labourers rather than local workers as is the case with the EPR reactor construction at Olkiluoto in Finland.

And if – if – the nuclear industry were to create these thousands of jobs, who is going to train them, considering the majority UK’s nuclear experts and builders are now retired or no longer with us?

Take for example, Energus (formerly known as The Nuclear Academy), which has just opened as part of the National Skills Academy for Nuclear in the north-west of England. David Barber, head of training for British Energy, which is part of EDF Energy, who want to build four reactors in the UK (and so create ‘up to’ 36,000 jobs) said:

With the increase in demand for quality skills across all sectors of the nuclear industry it is absolutely essential we have the confidence in our capability to meet this, both for our own workforce and that of our supply chain. We see the National Skills Academy for Nuclear as the key enabler to broker the provision of both provider capacity and quality skills.

Energus is funded by the European Regional Development Fund, The Learning and Skills Council via National Skills Academy for Nuclear, North West Development Agency, Northern Way, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Sellafield Sites and West Lakes Renaissance. That is, not by EDF, who won’t have to pay the bill for training those experts it doesn’t import from France. No wonder they’re so keen on the idea.

Posted by Justin at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Bloomberg: Nuclear-Waste Dump Shored Up as Germany Buys Time
Operators of an underground nuclear- waste dump in Germany are trying to shore up the interior faster than it’s being eroded by water leaks, buying time until they determine whether the site should be shut down. Workers will use cement to reinforce ceilings of chambers in the former salt mine, said Wolfram Koenig, president of Federal Office for Radiation Protection, the atomic regulator. Water has seeped into the site since at least 1988. About 12,000 liters (3,170 gallons) enter daily, forming underground pools that must be covered to avoid contamination so the water can be pumped out safely or used to make cement.

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Posted by Justin at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We knew there’d be a lot of people who’d say Canadian province Ontario’s embarrassing suspension of its plans for new nuclear reactors is good news, but who knew one of them would be Ontario premier, Dalton McGuinty?

‘Here's the good news: Under previous projects we didn't find out about the high pricing until we were half or three-quarters of the way or five years into the damned things,’ the premier said.

That’s some fine spin as Premier McGuinty tries to save the blushes of his administration. Only at the last minute did it realise that accepting the price tag for the new reactors would be like falling for one of those email scams promising a share of riches locked in Nigerian bank accounts.

(If only the Finnish government had had the same flash of inspiration before embarking on the farcical construction of the OL3 EPR reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland. We imagine there are quite a few people referring to that reactor as a ‘damned thing’ as well.)

This is just the latest example of countries finding new nuclear reactors unaffordable. Apart from OL3 in Finland, remember Turkey’s disastrous tendering process for its first nuclear reactor? The price of electricity from a new reactor was pegged at three times the average price of electricity in Turkey. Premier McGuinty could have saved him and his administration a lot of hassle if he’d only read the news.

Just how his plans for new reactors in Ontario come back from this he isn’t saying. Somehow, the price of these new reactors has to be reduced by two-thirds to match the province’s budget. Good luck with that. In the meantime, while Ontario crosses its fingers and waits for the price of nuclear power to fall, how about investing in cheaper, more reliable and safer alternatives?

Posted by Justin at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Earth Times: Damaged rod found at crippled German nuclear site
’Berlin- A damaged fuel rod sought since last week has been located inside one of Germany's 12 nuclear power stations, regulators said Wednesday. The jinxed plant at Kruemmel near Hamburg was shut down for two years by a transformer fire. It was crippled again July 4 by a short circuit and was then reported to have a problem in one or more of its 80,000 fuel rods. Engineers took the lid off the reactor to find the damaged uranium rod. The problems at Kruemmel have led to calls to retire the station and re-ignited debate in Germany about nuclear power as an election approaches. Anti-nuclear activists are also highlighting mismanagement of nuclear waste dumps in old salt mines.’

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Posted by Justin at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nuclear fuel production – the mining, milling and enriching of uranium – is one of the nuclear industry’s dirty secrets. Very little attention is paid to it by industry propagandists and pro-nuclear politicians and for very good reason. It’s dirty, dangerous, incredibly damaging to the environment and endangers the health of those people unfortunate enough to live close to uranium mines.

To hear some supporters of nuclear energy talk, you’d think the whole process of generating electricity begins with the throwing of a reactor’s ‘on’ switch. But there’s a long story before we even get that far. It’s also a long, sad story that often goes untold in the wider media.

Pick any uranium mine around the world and it will invariably be surrounded by stories of pollution, contamination and the exploitation of local communities. Niger, Namibia, Brazil, Canada, Kazakhstan.

And Australia. The country’s ‘Environment Minister Peter Garrett has formally approved the new Four Mile uranium mine in South Australia, saying it poses no environmental risks’. The premier of South Australian, Mike Rann, welcomed the decision saying operations at the state’s nearby Beverley mine ‘show that uranium can be mined without damaging the surrounding environment’.

Which means neither man can have read the South Australian governments own figures into spills at the Beverley mine. Here are just a few…

Apr. 22, 2006: spill of 14,400 litres of solution containing approx. 0.5% uranium

Oct. 31, 2005: spill of 23,700 litres of mining solution, containing approx. 0.06% uranium
Aug. 8, 2005: spill of 13,500 litres of extraction fluid containing approx. 0.01% uranium

Mar. 7, 2005: spill of 50,000 - 60,000 litres of injection fluid

Dec. 8, 2004: spill of approx. 2,300 litres of mining solution, containing 0.028% uranium

June 13, 2002: spill of 1,750 litres of brine solution

June 7, 2002: spill of 1,500 litres of injection fluid in the well field

May 5, 2002: spill of 14,900 litres of water containing 0.0018% uranium

May 1, 2002: spill of almost 7,000 litres of brine solution containing some uranium

January 11, 2002: spill of 60,000 liters of groundwater containing acid and uranium, after pipe rupture

Fancy the premier of South Australia being so ignorant of such worrying safety violations going on in his own state. Scandalous.

In fact, that’s the word to sum up the whole Four Mile story: scandalous. Peter Garrett is a former campaigning rock star who fought doggedly against nuclear power before entering politics (‘Why would Australians support an industry that produces radioactive waste, toxic waste?’ he said just three years ago), And with the local Aboriginal communities being (yet again) left out of the negotiations and decision-making over Four Mile, this all has a horribly familiar ring to it.

Posted by Justin at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Daily Kos: The best-kept nuclear secret
’Thirty years ago this week - on July 16 - the worst accidental release of radioactive waste happened at the Church Rock uranium mine and mill site. While the Three Mile Island accident (that same year) is well known, the enormous radioactive spill in New Mexico has been kept quiet. It is the U.S. nuclear accident that almost no one knows about. On July 16, 1979, just 14 weeks after the Three Mile Island reactor accident, and 34 years to the day after the Trinity atomic test, the small community of Church Rock, New Mexico became the scene of another nuclear tragedy. Ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, burst through a broken dam wall at the Church Rock uranium mill facility, creating a flood of deadly effluents that permanently contaminated the Puerco River. However, the accident happened "far from civilization" in a remote area inhabited by possibly the most poverty-stricken and disenfranchised community of people in the country - Native Americans. The massacres and smallpox blankets were over, but another deliberate act of racially-based discrimination - the avoidable radioactive contamination of the Navajo community and likely well beyond it - went unpunished and largely unreported.’

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Posted by Justin at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nuclear power is cheap, the nuclear industry boasts. Isn’t time that myth was finally laid to rest? The latest example of nuclear’s false financial promise has emerged in Canada in recent days.

Late last month, the Ontario provincial government announced it was postponing its plans to build new nuclear reactors after it was found that the cost would be "billions" too high compared to what the province is able to pay.

Now it turns out that the price tag is in fact three times higher than what was expected: for two Candu reactors is 26 billion Canadian dollars – 16 billion Euros or eight billion each. Two EPR reactors would cost Ontario 23.6 billion Canadian dollars – 14.7 billion Euros or 7.35 billion each.

When Areva persuaded the Finnish government back in 2002 to build the disaster-prone EPR reactor at Olkiluoto, the price they quoted was 2.5 billion Euros (it’s currently costing five billion and counting). Seven years later and an EPR costs nearly three times as much. Talk about inflation!

The two Candu reactors would cost 10,800 Canadian dollars per kilowatt of power capacity. In 2007 the Ontario Power Authority assumed for a price of $2,900 per kilowatt – a third of the actual cost. The EPR price tag now says €4,587 per kilowatt of power capacity, while the International Energy Agency still tends to use a price of €1,600 per kilowatt in policy recommendations. Can you think of any other walk of life where getting figures so wrong would be tolerated? Thank goodness these guys aren’t in the census business – imagine the chaos they’d cause.

So what has the Ontario provincial government done? That’s right, it’s gone to the national government to ask for a bail-out, like a kid begging daddy for a larger allowance.

‘By simplifying any one submission down to a single number at this point would be very difficult to do and highly speculative,’ said Amy Tang, a spokeswoman for the Ontario energy ministry. She’s absolutely right. No-one can ever be sure how much a nuclear reactor will cost, least of all the nuclear industry whose promises and projections should never be believed, until the thing is completed. Going on previous experience, you should expect those figures to rise sharply.

Posted by Justin at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)