Reuters: Early count shows Niger's Tandja extending power
’NIAMEY, Aug 5 (Reuters) - Niger's President Mamadou Tandja looks set to secure another three years in power after this week's controversial referendum on changing the constitution, partial returns indicated on Wednesday. Niger citizens voted on Tuesday in a plebiscite to give Tandja, whose second and final term in power expires in December, three extra years in office without an election. Tandja's allies say that will allow him to oversee multibillion-dollar investment projects in the poor Saharan country, a producer of uranium. International bodies, other countries and domestic rivals have criticised the power bid as undemocratic and a potential cause of national instability.’

African Manager: Rossing South poised to become world's largest uranium mine
’Australian uranium miner, Extract Resources, said preliminary cost estimate study has confirmed its Rossing South uranium deposit in Namibia as one of the world's largest uranium mines. Extract owns the now world acclaimed uranium resource, known as Rossing South, which is adjacent to Namibia's oldest uranium mine, Rio Tinto, owned Rossing mine. London listed Kalahari Mineral plc, which owns a controlling 40 per cent stake in Extract, said on Monday that the estimate for its Namibian deposit indicated annual production of 14.8 million pounds of uranium oxide, with capital costs of US $ 704 million and production cost estimates of US$ 23.60 per pound of uranium oxide. Kalahari Minerals chairman Mark Hohnen said the Rossing South deposit could support a profitable, long life, low cost, low technical risk uranium mine, with an annual production of 14.8 million pounds of yellow cake.’

Pennlive.com: New steam generators for TMI on the way from France
’Steam generators that will give Three Mile Island Unit 1 another 25 years of service left a port in Nice, France, on Saturday for shipment to Baltimore, the Londonderry Township supervisors were told Monday night. Bill Noll, senior vice president of Exelon, owner of TMI, gave the supervisors an update on this fall's outage at the plant, in which the new generators will be installed in a $330 million update of the plant. The 500-ton generators, which are 70 feet high and 12.5 feet in diameter, will land at Port Depot, Maryland, in a few weeks, Noll said. They will be transported over land on a huge carrier that moves 2.5 mph.’

Bloomberg: U.K. Told to Triple Nuclear Share of Power Generation
’Aug. 5 (Bloomberg) -- The U.K. should aim to triple the share of electric power it gets from nuclear plants by 2030 as a way to limit the nation's dependence in imported oil and gas, a report commissioned by Prime Minister Gordon Brown concluded. Former Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks, who is Brown's special adviser on the issue, said the government should aim to get 40 percent of its electric power from nuclear sources. Last year atomic plants supplied 12.5 percent of the U.K.'s electricity, half the level prevailing in the 1990s. "Nuclear is a dangerous distraction from the real solutions to climate change and energy security," Greenpeace's climate and energy spokesman, Robin Oakley, said in an e-mailed statement. "With the costs of nuclear reactors soaring and the only plants being built in the western world plagued with safety, financial and construction problems, it's clear where Miliband's priorities should lie."’

JoongAng Daily: [Viewpoint] Northeast Asia's other nuclear crisis
’It is known that Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso said, at the Korea-Japan summit meeting in June, "If the North Korean nuclear problem develops to a more serious stage, the voices demanding nuclear armament will grow louder in Japan." It is unique that the Japanese prime minister personally brought up such a subject at the summit meeting, but the idea of Japanese nuclear armament to cope with North Korea's nuclear development program is nothing new. Japan has strictly adhered to the "three principles of denuclearization," which pledge no production, possession or introduction of nuclear weapons, since 1967. But it has internally studied the possibility of nuclear armament regularly.’