Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: The safety inadequacies of India's fast breeder reactor
’India's Department of Atomic Energy plans to build a large fleet of fast breeder nuclear reactors in the coming years. However, many other countries that have experimented with fast reactors have shut down their programs due to technical and safety difficulties. The Indian prototype is similarly flawed, inadequately protected against the possibility of a severe accident. India's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) is planning a large expansion of nuclear power, in which fast breeder reactors play an important role. Fast breeder reactors are attractive to the DAE because they produce (or "breed") more fissile material than they use. The breeder reactor is especially attractive in India, which hopes to develop a large domestic nuclear energy program even though it has primarily poor quality uranium ore that is expensive to mine.’

AFP: North Korean call for dialogue 'fails to meet' demands: US
’WASHINGTON - North Korea's call Monday for a dialogue "fails to meet" demands it return to nuclear disarmament negotiations with the United States and four other countries, a senior US official said Monday. North Korea's foreign ministry said there was a "specific and reserved form of dialogue" that Pyongyang would entertain over the nuclear impasse, in what observers said was a direct overture to the United States. But a senior State Department official told AFP the statement "fails to meet" US and international demands for North Korea to resume disarmament talks with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia. "We have a (six-party) framework and the North Koreans need to recommit to denuclearization through that framework and implement their obligations," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The United States has repeatedly refused to sidestep the multilateral negotiations and insisted there is no chance of direct talks.’

Reuters: RWE puts off Emsland reactor restart again
’FRANKFURT, July 28 (Reuters) - German utility RWE has put back the targeted restart of its Emsland nuclear reactor in northern Germany by another one or two days, the third envisaged delay to reopening after the unit went offline on July 24, its website showed on Tuesday. A spokesman for RWE's power generating unit said a faulty switch had been swapped for an alternative part, which now needed approval from nuclear supervisory authorities. The 1,400 megawatts plant in the state of Lower Saxony is now seen back online between July 30 and August 1, rather than between July 28 and 30, and between July 27 and 29, which were indicated at earlier successive stages.’

World Nuclear News: Long hard road to new build
’The process to qualify reactor designs is progressing in the UK. As part of this process, regulators there and in Finland have raised questions about EPR's instrumentation and control. Information from both countries' nuclear safety regulators has shed light on the tough task reactor vendors face in proving the safety of new designs ahead of use. The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) said it was making "good progress" in assessing Areva's EPR and Westinghouse's AP1000 and it remains confident of signing off the Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process on time in June 2011. During GDA, regulators have asked hundreds of technical questions of Areva and Westinghouse with the figure increasing exponentially in the last three months. This indicates that the pace of work has picked up dramatically since the HSE attained full staffing levels in recent weeks.’

Christian Science Monitor: Should Obama sign a peace treaty with North Korea?
’Lewisburg, Pa. - A rare opportunity has emerged for the United States and North Korea to directly engage in diplomatic dialogue. The Obama administration should quickly and firmly grab it. North Korea's Foreign Ministry issued a statement Monday saying that "there is a specific and reserved form of dialogue" with the US that can address the nuclear situation. The statement followed remarks over the weekend by Sin Son-ho, North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations, who said his government was "not against a dialogue" with Washington. These statements are apparently in response to US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's call for North Korea to return to the negotiating table. Secretary Clinton said last week in Thailand that if North Korea agrees to irreversible de-nuclearization, the US will move forward on a package of incentives, including normalizing relations with Pyongyang.’

GreenCarReports.com: France Punishes Peasants (And Entrepreneurs) For Saving Energy
’As the saying goes, if the French didn't exist, we'd have to invent them: A nation that reveres Jerry Lewis, builds cars with single-spoke steering wheels or names like Kangoo BeBop ZE, and threatens to blow up factories if strike demands aren't met (and then changes its mind). The latest evidence of Gallic gallantry? A decision punishing a startup company that invented a device letting consumers cut energy use. A decision, in fact, that actually requires it to pay power producers the full price of the energy they would otherwise have sold. Via the "distributed load-shedding" offered by Voltalis, consumers save up to 10 percent of their electric bill, and overall energy use falls. It works so well that RTE, the operator of France's grid, pays Voltalis to run the service--and expects to roll it out to tens of thousands of new homes. Except that the state energy regulatory commission has ordered Voltalis to compensate every power producer, including the giant Electricité de France (EDF), for all the power they didn't get to sell. EDF, by the way, just proposed a 20-percent rate hike.’

Trend News: Iran's nuclear reserves - claims & doubts: Trend News commentator
’The readiness demonstrated by Iran to supply the nuclear power plant which is under construction in Armenia's Armavir city with nuclear fuel once again raises the question concerning the Islamic Republic's nuclear potential. On Sunday the governor of the Iranian West Azerbaijan province Rahim Gurbani said that Iran is ready to export nuclear fuel to neighboring countries and other countries, "Tehran Times" reported. Perhaps, such a statement is purely propaganda. During a visit to Kazakhstan in early July, the Israeli President Shimon Peres asked his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev not to sell nuclear fuel to Iran. Nazarbayev assured the guests that his country, which has 15 percent of the world's uranium fuel, has not sold and will not sell it to Iran. In response, Iran in every possible way tries to prove that the country has enough nuclear capability and is not dependent on other nations.’