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.’

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.

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.)

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.’

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.)

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."’

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.

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Times of India: Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano is new IAEA chief
NEW DELHI: Veteran Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano was elected new director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in a closely contested election this week. Widely seen as a candidate for the developed world, Amano's election would have been difficult without the support of one crucial country: India. Amano wasn't India's first choice. It was South Africa's Abdul Samad Minty who won India's support as the premier developing country candidate. As 2009 rolled around, the developed and developing worlds were split in their choice of IAEA chief. The developed countries chose Amano, and openly expected him to get tough with countries like Iran as well as on non-proliferation issues. The `poor' countries wanted Minty, a person who would understand their quest for nuclear power.

As we’ve said before, nuclear reactors are unbelievably complex and therefore unreliable machines. The smallest of faults can shut a reactor down for extend periods. Just where the myth that nuclear power is a ‘reliable’ energy source, we’re not quite sure.

Another example of how the tiniest faults can bring a reactor to a grinding halt has been seen at the Diablo Canyon power plant in California last week. ‘A blown fuse caused a loss of power’ and now the number 2 reactor is shut down while the cause of the fault is found.

Between them the two reactors at Diablo Canyon produce ‘about 10 percent of all electricity generated in California’. Or, rather, they now produce about 5 percent of all electricity generated in California. And ‘there was no immediate word on when the reactor would be operating again’. All for a blown fuse. Have you ever heard the proverb ‘For Want of a Nail’?

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

AP: Plant shutdown reignites German nuclear spat
BERLIN (AP) - Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-left rivals made it clear Monday they will make nuclear power a major issue in the September national election, following a weekend shutdown at a troubled German nuclear plant. The plant at Kruemmel, near Hamburg, shut down automatically on Saturday following a short-circuit in a transformer. The plant had reopened only last month after a two-year closure that followed a fire in another transformer in 2007. That offered the center-left Social Democrats - currently the conservative Merkel's partners in a "grand coalition" of Germany's biggest parties that both hope to end in Sept. 27 elections - a chance to highlight a key policy difference. The Social Democrats have fiercely defended the decision by Germany's previous government, which they led, to phase out Germany's 17 nuclear power plants by 2021. Merkel's Christian Democratic Union opposes abandoning nuclear energy and wants to extend some reactors' lives.

Does Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain suffer from medial spinal aplasia, a medical condition ‘characterized by isolated absence of spinal segments’?

The reason we ask is that Mr Zapatero appeared to be completely spineless this week when he gave the go ahead for the Garona nuclear power plant’s operational lifetime to be extended by four years.

Lacking in backbone, the Spanish government has broken its election promise and will not now close the aging and dangerous reactor this year but in 2013 instead. At 38 years old Garona is more than ready for decommissioning. The reactor has suffered from severe cracking and corrosion has affected various components in the reactor vessel.

‘We have no experience with plants more than 40 years' old,’ said Zapatero himself recently before he misplaced his spine. So why is he asking his country to nursemaid a 42 year-old one? He’s barely had a good word to say about Garona until now, saying, ‘it has safety conditions, but it is an old plant, designed with decades-old technology and we have to very much bear that in mind when thinking of our country's future’. The national grid operator in Spain, REE, also says closing Garona ‘would pose no supply problems’. It provides a mere 1.4 per cent of Spain’s electricity.

So why the complete reversal of promises and viewpoints? Why the lack of courage when it came to Mr Zapatero making this step for the good of his country? Only he can tell us and we look forward to hearing whatever weak excuses he can give in the coming days. One reason could be that by extending the date to 2013 and with the current government being elected until only 2012, Zapatero is passing the responsibility to a future government. How’s that for leadership?

You can also have aplasia of other parts of the body, most notably shown in the absence of internal organs. Does Mr Zapatero have the condition throughout his body? He’s certainly gutless, that’s for sure.

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Reuters: British Energy probes incident at nuclear plant
LONDON (Reuters) - An incident in late June at the Dungeness B power station near London has been provisionally rated at level two on the seven-tier International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), the EDF-owned operating company said on Tuesday. While connecting new fuel to a fuel plug unit on June 29, a piece of rubber was found to have become trapped, threatening the integrity of the connection. "The coupling did not fail, there was no plant damage, no staff were injured and there was no release of radioactivity," plant operator British Energy said in a statement. Operations in the fuel building at the power station in southeast England ceased immediately and foam was injected under the fuel assembly as a precaution. But a subsequent review confirmed that the foam used was not permitted under the rules.

Common Dreams: Obama Makes Nuclear Compromise to Pass Clean Energy Bill The Obama administration endorsed a revival of America's nuclear industry yesterday in an effort to build forward momentum for climate change legislation before the Senate. The seal of approval for nuclear power - a cause embraced by Republican senators - came on day one of a full-on lobbying effort by the White House for one of Obama's signature issues. Obama sent four of his top lieutenants to the Senate - his secretaries of energy, interior, agriculture and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) - to try to drum up support for a global warming bill. The PR effort saw direct appeals to the farming and nuclear lobbies - some of the fiercest critics of Obama's clean energy agenda - with Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning energy secretary, calling for new nuclear plants to re-establish America's technological dominance in the world.

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

The Peninsula Online: EDF presses govt to hike power price
PARIS: Tension is shaping up over pressure from EDF, the world’s biggest nuclear power producer, for a price leap for French households amid big developments in France’s vital nuclear power industry. The group’s chief executive Pierre Gadonneix revealed in a magazine interview on Wednesday that EDF was seeking permission from the government to raise the price of household electricity by 20 percent over three years, or slightly longer, so that the group could stop going deeper into debt. He backed this up with comments yesterday, but Economy Minister Christine Lagarde shot back that the government was ‘absolutely not tied by the points put forward’ by EDF. She said ministers would examine the request in due course and take decisions. But she observed: ‘When one wants the stars one reaches even higher for the moon.’

Meet Swedish energy giant Vattenfall. The nuclear industry attracts serial incompetents like a big, ugly and dirty cake attracts big, stupid flies. And they don’t come much bigger and stupider than Vattenfall.

This week has seen big trouble for the company. Two serious incidents at its Ringhals nuclear reactor in southern Sweden have seen the company threatened with ‘special supervision’ measures with would put safety procedures under increased scrutiny.

One of the incidents involved the failure of an automatic safety system designed to prevent the release of radioactive material. To make matters worse almost sixty other incidents have been reported at the reactor this year alone. Ringhals employees have also tested positive for drugs or alcohol.

(Vattenfall are also the operators of Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear reactors, one of which came perilously close to a meltdown in 2006, narrowly avoiding causing the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.)

To add to Vattenfall’s woes, the company has had to fire the plant manager of its Krummel reactor in Germany. The reactor had only been running for two weeks - after a fire in a transformer in 2007 closed the plant for two year - when a short circuit in another transformer caused the reactor to shut down once again. It is expected to be out of action for several months. In fact, the clock is ticking for the disaster-prone company in more ways than one…

Peter Harry Carstensen, State Premier of Schleswig Holstein - where the Krummel plant is located - said he would grant Vattenfall "one last chance" to get on top of the problems at the reactor.

"If there is one more incident like this, I will see to it that this power station is shut down," the Christian Democratic politician told Vattenfall head Tuomo Hatakka in Kiel on Tuesday.

He should have listened to Greenpeace Germany. This week the group staged another action at the Krummel reactor, welding shut five of the site’s entry gates and posting signs saying ‘Nuclear power plant Krümmel is closed because of the unreliability of Vattenfall’.

Finally the Swedish government are now asking questions. It is demanding ‘that state-owned power utility Vattenfall provide an account of its work on nuclear safety after problems at one of its plants in Germany and security concerns at another in Sweden’. The answer better be good.

‘If Greenpeace had said at the start that after four years of construction it’s going to be three and a half years late and 60% over budget everybody would have laughed at them.’

(Steve Thomas, Professor of Energy Policy at Greenwich University, speaking about the disastrous construction of the OL3 EPR reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland.)

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

LA Times: Marking the 50th anniversary of U.S.'s first nuclear meltdown
’On the morning of July 14, 1959, Sodium Reactor Experiment trainee John Pace received the bad news from a group of supervisors who had, he recalled, "terribly worried expressions on their faces." A reactor at the Atomics International field laboratory in the Santa Susana Mountains had experienced a power surge the night before and spewed radioactive gases into the atmosphere. "They were terrified that some of the gas had blown over their own San Fernando Valley homes," recalled Pace, who was 20 at the time. "My job was to keep radiation out of the control room." Pace set to work sealing doors and windows with clear packing tape and scrubbing the walls with sanitary napkins soaked with special chemicals because, he said, "soap and water wouldn't do the trick." Today, on the 50th anniversary of America's first nuclear meltdown accident, Pace will join federal regulators and former lab workers in a commemorative gathering at the Aerospace Cancer Museum of Education in Chatsworth.’

Nuclear reactors are hugely complex machines. What they do and how can be difficult to explain in terms easily understood by the average person. The nuclear industry can use this to its advantage.

Take the incident (rated level 2 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale) at the UK’s Dungeness B reactor that occurred on June 29 this year. Here’s the statement from the reactor’s owner, British Energy, describing what happened…

Whilst lowering a fuel plug unit in order to latch it to a new fuel stringer, it became apparent that the coupling had not latched correctly and that foreign material was trapped between the spring collet assembly and the neutron scatter plug. The debris appears to be a rubber sheet, the source of which is likely to be one of the three covers used to cover the maintenance tubes during earlier cell maintenance activities. The failure to correctly latch was identified during a procedural check as the assembly was being raised. Fuel handling activities were suspended, but the assembly remains suspended by approximately 3 metres.

"As part of the recovery process, polyurethane foam was injected below the suspended stringer to minimise the potential drop height in the event of it de-latching. The foam did not come in contact with the stringer. The subsequent analysis of the foam indicated that it was a material that could act as a moderator, and thus challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates.

Are you any the wiser as to what went on at Dungeness B? Stringers, collets, scatter plugs? This story has hardly had any exposure in the UK media and it’s not difficult to see why – a journalist would have to first be able to understand it and then explain it in a way so that his reader could also. The use of language works in the favour of Dungeness B’s operators – it’s a form of cover-up that takes advantage of people’s understandable ignorance of the complexities of nuclear power.

Take this passage:

The subsequent analysis of the foam indicated that it was a material that could act as a moderator, and thus challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates.

This means that the foam, had it been in the reactor during operation, would have become part of the nuclear reaction. You really don’t want foreign material inside a reactor acting as a moderator – moderation is the vital process whereby the nuclear reaction is controlled – it can make a dangerous nuclear accident more likely. So, ‘challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates’ means ‘break vital safety rules and put people in danger’.

The nuclear industry: they think they’ve made the atom their servant and now they’re trying to do the same with language.

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

St Petersburg Times: Captain Lus, a Russian vessel with radioactive cargo holed in collision
’The Captain Lus, a Russian vessel that regularly delivers radioactive cargo to St. Petersburg from abroad for subsequent reprocessing in Siberia, has collided with The Sundstraum, a Norwegian tanker, that was carrying chemicals. The Russian ship was en route from St. Petersburg to the French port of Le Havre. According to the preliminary investigation into the incident, the vessels share responsibility for causing the collision. Rashid Alimov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of the international environmental organization Bellona, told The St. Petersburg Times that The Captain Lus, which was holed in the collision, was carrying 9 containers of urainum ore concentrate on board. The cargo totalled 182 tons in weight, but no radioactive leaks were registered.’

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.

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.’

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.

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.’

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?

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.

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.

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

AFP: Merkel slams Swedish nuclear operator
’BERLIN - German Chancellor Angela Merkel hit out at Swedish nuclear operator Vattenfall on Sunday over a series of problems at an ageing reactor near Hamburg. "I am very, very unhappy with what Vattenfall has done and the way that they have acted," Merkel said in an interview on public television. "It is possible to get angry thinking about what has happened and how it has been managed." The Kruemmel reactor near Hamburg, one of Germany's oldest, underwent earlier this month what Vattenfall called an "emergency shutdown" after a short circuit in one of its transformers. It was the second such incident in several days at the plant, which had only just re-opened after two years of repairs following a malfunction in a transformer that had caused a fire and a shutdown. Embarrassingly, Vattenfall has since admitted that it failed to install a vital safety sensor, and it then said most of Kruemmel's 80,000 fuel rods had to be checked. One has since found to be damaged.’

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Washington Post: Is Myanmar going nuclear?
’BANGKOK -- The recent aborted voyage of a North Korean ship, photographs of massive tunnels and a top secret meeting have raised alarm bells that one of the world's poorest nations may be aspiring to join the nuclear club - with help from its friends in Pyongyang. No one expects military-run Myanmar, also known as Burma, to obtain an atomic bomb anytime soon, but experts have the Southeast Asian nation on their radar screen. "There's suspicion that something is going on, and increasingly that cooperation with North Korea may have a nuclear undercurrent. We are very much looking into it," says David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, D.C. think tank. The issue is expected to be discussed, at least on the sidelines, at this week's ASEAN Regional Forum, a major security conference hosted by Thailand. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with representatives from North Korea and Myanmar, will attend.’

It began in Finland where the first case was discovered. It took hold slowly but is causing widespread concern among the public and scientists despite government assurances. It spread to France and is causing the same alarm there. Both countries seem to be suffering quite badly.

Other countries across the world – the United Kingdom, the US, China, India, the United Arab Emirates and Italy – may also be affected as it looks set to spread. It was announced today that Brazil may be the latest nation to succumb.

Yes, the world is in the grip of EPR fever.

The Finnish and French governments made terrible mistakes when trying to control the disastrous outbreak of these so-called third generation state of the art nuclear reactors in their countries. Instead of quarantining the carrier, French nuclear pariahs Areva, the Finnish and French governments instead allowed Areva to leave taking EPR fever with it.

It now looks as if EPR fever may be spreading to the rest of the world. At this stage, scientists are unable to say how many more will fall victim but it is hoped that other countries will learn the lessons of Finland and France and work hard to prevent outbreaks of their own.

Without wishing to alarm the public, we are nonetheless urging everyone to be vigilant. Although very slow moving, EPR fever may strike at any time and, while it can be easily stamped out with the correct treatment, once it takes hold it can be very difficult to get rid of. It may already be too late for Finland and France but other countries may yet escape if care is taken. The rest of the world should wash its hands of EPR fever.

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

The Media Line: Israeli Nuclear Waste 'Leads to Palestinian Cancer'
’Radiation from Israel's nuclear facility in Dimona is being buried in Palestinian territory and causing an increase in cancer cases among West Bank Palestinians, a Palestinian doctor and anti-nuclear activist says. "The waste from Dimona is buried west of Dahriyya and the radiation from this buried waste reaches the people and causes cancer," said Dr. Mahmoud Sa'ada, a Palestinian general practitioner and head of the Middle East division at International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, referring to a small West Bank Palestinian village just north of Hebron and just over 12 miles from the Dimona nuclear reactor. What's new over the past two months is that the radiation has reached Tul Karem," he told The Media Line, referring to a Palestinian city in the northern West Bank over 100 miles from the Dimona site.’

Here’s a nice little round up of the state of the nuclear industry from the UK’s Daily Telegraph…

Is the long-awaited "nuclear renaissance" starting to run out of steam even before it has got under way? It is too early to be sure, but there are disconcerting signs. Intriguingly, the nuclear industry itself is beginning to behave as if it is in trouble.

Far from being the confident global saviour of popular myth, it looks as if the nuclear industry is begging for its very survival. From demanding the UK government fix the price of CO2 emissions, put a cap on the payments for storage of nuclear waste, and limit liabilities for potential damages - all to make nuclear power more competitive - right through to publicly admitting renewable energy programmes are a threat to the nuclear ‘renaissance’, there’s every sign that the nuclear industry is losing its nerve.

Politicians have been convinced by smooth PR and slick presentations - from a propaganda perspective, the industry can certainly talk the talk. But the doubts are growing fast that it can walk the walk.

Here’s ISN Security Watch's senior correspondent in Italy, Eric J Lyman, on the country’s nuclear ambitions…

It will be a major step in Italy's desire to become more energy independent. Both Italy and France are relatively poor in terms of natural resources…

…including, in case it’s escaped everyone’s notice, uranium. You know, the stuff they put in nuclear reactors?

But projections are that the four Italian plants will produce about as much power as Italy currently imports from France…

…and so Italy will no longer import French power, but will instead import French/Russian/Chinese/American/Japanese/whoever’s nuclear fuel. How’s that for being more energy independent?

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Canada.com: Russia should have quarter of nuclear power market: Medvedev
’MOSCOW - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that Russia should hold a quarter of the international nuclear energy market, as he announced an ambitious development program. "With ultra-modern technologies and the ability to guarantee the complete cycle, from the production of uranium, to the maintenance and decommissioning of nuclear power plants, Russia can count on a minimum of a quarter of the international market," Medvedev said at a meeting in Sarov in the Volga region. Medvedev said more than 120 billion rubles ($3.8 billion US) was going to be made available between 2010 and 2012 for the development of a new generation of nuclear power technologies.’

The world’s greatest nuclear salesman has found himself of a spot of trouble of late. It seems that, while France’s president Nicholas Sarkozy has been traveling the globe trying to sell nuclear technology to anyone who wants it, he’s been forgetting to pay the bills back at home...

The Court of Accounts investigated expenses at the presidential Palais de l'Elysée - for the first time since the 18th century - and found that taxpayers' money had been used to pay €2580.23 ($3670) in fines for late payment of electricity bills.

Naughty, naughty Nicholas. The thing is, all he’s doing is following the example set by his beloved nuclear industry. After all, what with tax credits, subsidies, loan guarantees and liability assurances and decommissioning costs, taxpayers’ money has been paying the nuclear industry’s bills for years.

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Eco Worldly: Save Amazon With Nuke Waste, Says Environmentalist
’James Lovelock - - who is one of the leading environmentalists on the planet has made a startling proposal: that the best way to save the Amazon from being destroyed is to turn it into a repository for nuclear waste. He argues in "The Revenge of Gaia" that animals and plants don't perceive radioactivity as a danger. What is far more threatening to ecosystems are people - who create extensive farming or mining and construction sites. So to keep humans out of valuable ecosystems, we could dump our nuclear waste there. That will keep people out.’

The nuclear industry's much-vaunted "renaissance" is playing out like a bad vampire flick.

Every time it tries to crawl out of the grave it dug with earlier cost over-runs and the Chernobyl disaster, nuclear gets staked through the heart by an accountant.

The latest staking of the industry is the McGuinty government's decision to suspend the purchase of new reactors. They were supposed to cost a mere $6 billion and have suddenly been exposed as $26 billion monsters.

These monsters are the latest in a long line of untested reactors Atomic Energy of Canada Limited hopes will keep it alive.

But we don't even know if they'll work…

Read the rest

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Las Vegas Review Journal: RADIOACTIVE REMNANTS: Scientists monitoring groundwater from Nevada Test Site area for contamination
’Radioactive groundwater laced with remnants of Cold War nuclear weapons tests is inching its way beyond the Nevada Test Site boundary where scientists expect they will soon find it for the first time. The concentration of tritium is much higher than safe drinking water guidelines, but Department of Energy officials note it will be found within the surrounding Air Force range in an area not accessible by the public. A recently completed well upstream of that one near a cavity of the powerful Benham nuclear test has produced field results 3,000 times in excess of the safe drinking water limit for tritium, said Bill Wilborn, director of the federal agency drilling campaign and groundwater characterization strategy. "Under our strategy we don't do any remediation. The only thing we can do at this point is adopt a long-term monitoring plan," he said, discussing in a telephone interview a 687-page report on the effort to figure out where the tainted water is traveling.’

When is comes to supervillains Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi makes Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor look like Lex Loser. He’s changed his appearance at least once. He has several lavish and secluded hideouts. He is the country’s richest man and controls vast parts of its media. His government has passed bills making him immune from prosecution. Next up, Berlusconi wants to revive Italy’s nuclear industry 22 years after a national referendum voted to reject nuclear power. In a flourish we’ve come to expect from one of the world’s top supervillains, there are reports that Berlusconi may allow a new fleet of reactors to be built on military sites meaning they are unaccountable regional and local authorities. Can an announcement about Italy’s first satellite made of diamonds or plans to build a fleet of space shuttles to poison the Earth be far behind?

Meanwhile, in America, a new tourist attraction has opened – the first nuclear weapons production facility in Hanford, Washington is now open to the public. It’s an interesting choice of holiday destination to say the least. ‘Did you go away this year, Fred?’ ‘I did indeed, Bob. I took the wife and kids to the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States.’ How do you beat that, we wonder. A tour of Dante’s Inferno, perhaps?

And there’s more bad news for the nuclear industry’s risible claims that nuclear power is safe. Tim Murphy, federal facilities bureau chief for the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, says of the nuclear contamination from the Nevada nuclear weapons test site creeping ever closer to local drinking water supplies: ‘Unfortunately, today there is no technology to clean this up.’ The Department of Energy’s Bill Wilborn agrees: ‘The only thing we can do at this point is adopt a long-term monitoring plan’. That’s the spirit! A ‘fingers crossed’ approach should do wonders for building public trust in nuclear power. Reports that the nuclear industry’s new slogan is ‘Nuclear power: Because we’re all dead in the long term’ were denied by a spokesman.

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Reuters: U.S. nixes USEC loan guarantee; project derailed
’NEW YORK (Reuters) - USEC Inc said on Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Energy had denied it a loan guarantee, derailing its plan to build the nation's second uranium enrichment facility. The uranium processor also said it had engaged outside advisors to evaluate its strategic alternatives. The Department of Energy denied USEC's application for a loan guarantee to complete construction of the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio. USEC said it would be forced to start demobilizing the project. "We are shocked and disappointed by DOE's decision," USEC Chief Executive John Welch said in a statement. "We deeply regret the impact this decision will have on all those affected, but as we have stated in the past, a DOE loan guarantee was the path forward to completing financing for the project."’

Treehugger has unearthed a quote from venerable UK environmentalist James Lovelock. In his 2007 book, Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock makes the following suggestion…

[T]he natural world would welcome nuclear waste as the perfect guardian against greedy developers, and whatever slight harm it might represent was a small price to pay… One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife… The preference of wildlife for nuclear-waste sites suggests that the best sites for its disposal are the tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by hungry farmers and developers.

Before we start drilling holes in the Amazon basin and shovelling nuclear waste into them, it might be worth doing a little more research. In fact research into the effects of radiation on wildlife has already been conducted near Chernobyl and the results aren’t good. In fact, they flatly contradict Lovelock’s assertion of ‘the preference of wildlife for nuclear-waste sites’…

The idea that the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has created a wildlife haven is not scientifically justified, a study says...

…and…

Two decades after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, radiation is still causing a reduction in the numbers of insects and spiders.

The researchers have also found that far from having a ‘preference' for nuclear-waste sites some species of birds ‘significantly avoided nest boxes in heavily contaminated areas’. Shouldn’t this make us wonder whether Lovelock is right in being so unequivocal? The world’s rainforests, need we be reminded, are home to our closest living relatives, the apes (as if they don’t have enough problems without nuclear waste), as well as a vast abundance of other animals, while being a source for many pharmaceutical ingredients.

It’s said that ‘2,000 tropical forest plants have been identified by scientists as having anti-cancer properties’ and ‘less than one percent of the tropical rainforest species have been analyzed for their medicinal value’. Dumping nuclear waste in the Amazon would risk destroying cures for cancer and other diseases or putting them off-limits for thousands of years.

Which all feeds into Lovelock’s doom-laden view of the future. ‘If you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan’ and ‘the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,’ he says. Are the rest of us going to give in that easily?

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Daily Mirror: Makings of a nuclear nightmare
’In 1990 the inland Inuit of Nunavut, a vast autonomous native region of northern Canada, voted almost unanimously to prohibit the prospecting and mining of uranium on their lands. They knew well the hazards of uranium from the experience of the Dine and other neighbouring tribes devastated by previous mining ventures on their homelands. Uranium at the time was about US$7 a pound on the world market. Before I left the barren, windswept reaches of the far north, I visited Sheila Watt-Cloutier, former President of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, a multinational council representing the 150,000 Inuit living in Alaska, Canada, Russia and Greenland. She was a nominee for the Nobel Prize in 2007. Her modest Iqaluit home is perched on the shoreline of Frobisher Bay, which was still frozen solid in May. As we chatted about Inuit culture and circumpolar politics. No matter what form it takes, one thing seems clear: if the nuclear renaissance is going to happen, uranium mining is going to expand, and indigenous people like the Inuit of Nunavut will bear a considerable pro portion of its ill effects.’

Nuclear power is safe say its supporters. Safe, safe, safe.

Tell that to the family of Duncan Ball…

Duncan Ball, who worked in the [Sellafield] Magnox plant for 20 years, died on July 17. He was 49.

In 2007 Mr Ball was diagnosed with a bone marrow cancer (multiple myeloma) and The Whitehaven News understands he received an interim payment from the nuclear industry scheme to compensate workers or their dependents for diseases which may be radiation-linked.

So how are things going at the construction site of the OL3 EPR reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland? The builders, Areva, can update us…

Sounds like it’s all going perfectly well. No mention of the three year delay until the reactor is completed or the nearly two billion euro cost of that delay. Funny that.

There’s also a curious figure on Areva’s blog concerning the number of people working to complete the OL3 EPR: 3,500 to be precise. That’s quite a different number from the 9,000 UK environment minister Ed Miliband said each new EPR in the country will provide. Who’s right? As ever when it comes to nuclear power, don’t trust the numbers.

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Environmental Leader: U.S. Renewable Energy Exceeds Nuclear Power
’Two new reports reveal that the renewable energy industry continues to grow in the United States. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's latest report, renewable energy accounted for 11.1 percent of U.S. production in April 2009, exceeding nuclear power. Contributing to the increase is the U.S. wind energy industry's installation of 1,210 megawatts (MW) of new power capacity in the second quarter of 2009, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). With the additional 1,210 MW of new power, the total capacity added this year is just over 4,000 MW, according to the AWEA's second quarter market report. This amount is larger than the 2,900 MW added in the first six months of 2008.’

Hello, and welcome to Nuclear Reaction’s Nuclear Glossary. In this occasional series we’ll be bringing you a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to what the nuclear industry says and what the nuclear industry actually means. Never again will you be confused, fooled or otherwise misled by nuclear industry propaganda, greenwash and false promises.

What they say: ‘Safe’
What they mean: ‘Produces vast amounts of dangerous waste that will be a burden for the next 240,000 years to while dispersing dangerous radionuclides into the environment.’

What they say: ‘Cheap’
What they mean: ‘Hardly affordable even with government subsidies and loan guarantees.’

What they say: ‘We believe nuclear is competitive.’
What they mean: ‘New nuclear power stations will not be built in Britain unless the government provides financial support for the industry.’

What they say: ‘Learning curve’
What they mean: ‘Massive cost and schedule overruns, safety violations, design concerns, and thousands of construction defects.’

What they say: ‘Reliable’
What they mean: ‘Unreliable’