Nuclear News: The world's radioactive rubbish is piling up
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Today's big stories from the nuclear industry
The world's radioactive rubbish is piling up
The Pacific Sandpiper, a specially built cargo ship with safety features far in excess of those found on conventional vessels, left Britain's Barrow port bound for Japan the other day. The security surrounding its departure on Jan. 21 indicates that something out of the ordinary is aboard. The Pacific Sandpiper and several sister ships make no port calls on their voyages between Europe and Japan because they carry potentially lethal nuclear material. But the elaborate and costly arrangement casts light on two of the most problematic and controversial aspects of civilian nuclear power - how to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons material and knowhow to terrorists and rogue states, and how to store nuclear waste safely for the long-term when it can remain radioactive for hundreds of years. With the number of power reactors expected to rise from 435 in 31 countries to nearly 570 in 42 countries by 2020, and with much of this expansion expected to take place in Asia and the Middle East, the need for safeguards on uranium or plutonium processing that could be used to make nuclear weapons is obvious. High-level radioactive waste is accumulating at a rate of about 12,000 tons per year worldwide. Without a long-term solution, the pile of radioactive "rubbish" will become so big and so widely dispersed that it may be impossible to manage safely.
What if the federal government held a beauty contest for taxpayer-backed nuclear reactor loan guarantee bailouts ... and no reactor project "beauties" could be lined up for the runway? According to experts from around the United States, that is precisely the situation the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) faces today with the extraordinarily weak crop of four reactor project candidates vying for loan-guarantee bailouts. The four proposed projects at the top of the list for $18.5 billion in federal bailout support are: the Southern Company's Vogtle reactors in Georgia (widely believed to be the current front runner); the NRG reactor project in Texas; the VC Summer reactors in South Carolina; and the Calvert Cliffs reactor in Maryland. The local experts are far from being alone in their negative assessment of the viability of the four bailout candidates. According to the independent Taxpayers for Common Sense, the four finalists all exhibit some combination of "rising cost estimates, delays related to reactor designs, and credit downgrades." Making matters even worse: The four deeply flawed reactor projects are reputed to be the best of the options available, which means that there are no viable candidates in the pipeline to justify the tripling to $54 billion in nuclear reactor bailouts proposed under the White House budget released this week.
Britain's energy policy goes back to the future
Alistair Buchanan has set sail on the good ship Discovery to find a solution to Britain's twin needs of meeting energy-security and climate-change goals. But the Ofgem regulator might have better named his exploratory vessel Recovery, because this is a voyage to make up for lost time: it should have been launched years ago when North Sea supplies first started to run out and global warming began to be noticed. Buchanan has been the target of criticism because he is the man at the helm, but the reality is that those who have really directed the energy policies of this country – past, present and future – are the landlubbers in Whitehall. It is not so much Ofgem that has woken up to the dangers of the lights going out somewhat late in the day, but a government which has spent the last three winters insisting there will be no power blackouts. As we know, this December the rhetoric actually ran dry, as 100 factories and plants around the country were told they were having their gas switched off with almost immediate effect.
Sellafield's toxic challenge
There are few places in England that would make the construction of a seemingly ordinary concrete-shell building an extremely difficult logistical task. The top of Ben Nevis perhaps, or maybe even a tight site in the City of London. But arguably neither would prove as challenging as the one that is being built at Sellafield − home of the world’s first commercial nuclear power station and site labelled by Greenpeace “the most hazardous place in Europe”. But none of these concerns have put off contractor Costain’s team at the Cumbrian site for Evaporator D. This new structure will process nuclear waste known as highly active liquor (HAL) − a very concentrated source of radioactivity, which can pose a significant radiological hazard. Sellafield stakeholder for the Evaporator D project Emma Candy explains: “This type of project is very unusual for this site. Lots of the new builds [at Sellafield] generally take place on greenfield land. But Sellafield also has brownfield sites and we’re on one of those.”
Political risk for Italian nuclear
Italy's inter-regional body rejected the nuclear energy policy proposed by Silvio Berlusconi's government during a late January session. Meanwhile, regional elections are approaching, giving rise to fears for Italy's nuclear renaissance. The Conferenza Stato-Regioni consultation body exists for the discussion of issues where competence is shared between central and regional governments. While the regions of Lombardia, Friuli-Venezia and Veneto supported central pro-nuclear policies, all the rest as well as two autonomous provinces were in opposition, resulting in a vote of 18 to three rejecting the re-introduction of nuclear power. The opinion of this body is not binding under the Italian constitution, but it represents a clear political message to the central government, especially given that center-right governors were voting against their own party line a standstill.
