Looks like the shockingly poor economics of nuclear energy may have killed two more two more reactor projects, this time in the US…

Entergy Corp Chief Executive J. Wayne Leonard said on Tuesday that the company is unlikely to pursue construction of new nuclear plant in its Southeastern U.S. utility territory. "It's not off the table, but the economics are really not supportive and not likely to be supportive in the near future," Leonard said from the sidelines of the Edison Electric Institute financial conference.

…and…

The estimated cost of two new nuclear reactors proposed by CPS Energy has gone up as much as $4 billion, prompting the [San Antonio] City Council to postpone Thursday's vote on the project's financing until January… CPS interim General Manager Steve Bartley said the utility's main contractor on the project, Toshiba Inc., informed officials that the cost of the reactors would be “substantially greater” than CPS' estimate of $13 billion, which includes financing.

This fear of the rocketing costs of new nuclear reactors isn’t merely confined to the US. Remember Turkey and Canada unveiling similarly ridiculous figures recently?

Other countries have different approaches to nuclear economics. France and Finland decided to rush headlong into building their own new reactors before for the full financial horror hit them. In the UK, government ministers refuse to even discuss the costs of new nuclear reactors in public. One doesn’t have to be a genius to wonder why – if the costs of nuclear power were even remotely acceptable, these pro-nuclear ministers would be shouting it from the rooftops.

The thing is, you don’t have to look very far under the surface of the industry’s hype to see all this. So why does it continue with the charade in the face of the evidence?

Read more: Forget Nuclear by Amory B. Lovins, Imran Sheikh, and Alex Markevich

Posted by Justin at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, we’ve all heard the hype and propaganda about the forthcoming nuclear ‘renaissance’ with its shiny and new so-called third generation of nuclear reactors. The thing is, it’s looking as if the biggest barrier to this ‘renaissance’ taking place might actually be that shiny and new so-called third generation of nuclear reactors.

You see, this latest generation of nuclear reactors are, to put it mildly, a little on the flaky side…

The design for Westinghouse’s AP-1000 has recently been rejected by the US’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission because ‘a key component might not withstand events like earthquakes and tornadoes’. The projected cost of building them varies wildly as well.

GE Hitachi’s Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) remains in the ‘early design stage’. Late last year, US energy corporation Exelon dropped plans to build a ESBWR in Texas because the ESBWR wouldn’t have earned them the vital government loan guarantees that keep the nuclear industry afloat. GE Hitachi also withdrew the design from the UK’s currently ongoing reactor evaluation process.

Canada’s Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL) also withdrew their ACR-1000 reactor design from the UK process. In July last year Canada’s own province of Ontario pulled the plug on plans to build two ACR-1000s after the project was priced at 26 billion Canadian dollars, three times what the province wanted to pay.

Which leaves us with French nuclear ogre Areva’s infamous European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) design. Two are currently under construction in the world – one in Olkiluoto in Finland and one in Flamanville in France. The EPR design has quickly become a symbol for everything wrong with the nuclear industry – expensive, late, unreliable, and farcical.

How are things going at those construction sites right now. Well, after it being announced that its anybody’s guess as to when the Olkiluoto OL3 reactor may be ready (it’s currently four years late), Areva said this week that the EPR at Flamanville is now running two years late as well. The company is also making a EUR 300 million provision on top of OL3’s rapidly expanding – and profit-killing - EUR 5.5 billion budget.

In fact, all you need to know about building an EPR reactor is summed up in this simple graph…

Click image for a larger version

The graph upturns at the precise moment construction began. How much higher will those lines reach?

The nuclear industry is starting to look like its own worst enemy.

Posted by Justin at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The nuclear industry has the world’s most powerful people believing its fairy tales. A compliant and gullible public are seemingly happy to have their pockets constantly rifled by these nuclear pickpockets in search of subsidies. The nuclear industry spends millions on propaganda and planting pro-nuke stories in the media, making sure we all buy into their empty promises and so allow this status quo to continue.

Then there are days when you have to wonder if the nuclear industry really doesn’t care how it looks to the rest of us.

How about the story that ‘nuclear experts are using household cleaner Cillit Bang to clean radioactive stains at a UK nuclear power plant after watching an ad that showed dirt being stripped from a 10p coin’? Surely that’s a sign of a nuclear industry no longer worried about looking terrifyingly insane or worried that the rest of us might think they’re terrifyingly insane. Hey guys, why not try a little bicarbonate of soda? We hear white wine’s pretty good for removing stains as well.

Then there’s this:

Worsening working conditions, inadequate pay rises, pressure to work faster and safety concerns…

No,it’s not a description of 19th century working conditions as described by the likes of Charles Dickens in his novels. It’s the description of 21st century working conditions at France’s Tricastin nuclear power plant as described by independent experts. ‘We work on top of each other in the nuclear reactor which is very narrow and where it's hard to operate,’ said a 53-year-old worker. A hundred or so years ago we used to make children climb up chimneys to clean them. It seems the practices remain the same at nuclear reactors, only the ages of the workers have changed. When the nuclear industry is running its reactors as if they were factories in the early industrial revolution, you know it must think it can get away with anything…

…like contaminating enough soil at one nuclear reactor ‘to fill Yankee Stadium with radioactive sludge a foot deep’. That’s 1.63 million cubic feet of soil in case you were wondering. Yet Entergy, Indian Point nuclear power plant’s operators, want to extend its working lifetime by another 20 years. Such an attitude is admirable in a way – it speaks of an almost courageous a lack of vanity on the part of the nuclear industry. It looks a mess and just doesn’t care.

Somebody somewhere thinks this is all a price worth paying for ‘safe’, ‘cheap’, and ‘reliable’ electricity. That somebody? The industry with its propaganda, politicians who believe the propaganda, and you with your open wallet.

Posted by Justin at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Weird and whacky news from the nuclear industry continues to pour in, thicker and faster than George Bush on a skateboard. Let’s take look and see what’s been happening recently…

The Scottish National Party is calling for an investigation after it was revealed that there have been 165 leaks and fires at the UK’s nuclear plants over the last eight years.

A hundred and sixty-five leaks and fires? We don’t know about you but that gives us the mental image of the UK nuclear industry as a burning garden sprinkler. Spraying in all directions while on fire. Impossible and paradoxical, you say? It’s the nuclear industry we’re talking about here - it’s their job to attempt the impossible and paradoxical. They call nuclear power clean and safe for starters.

Elsewhere, Gwyneth Cravens, author of ‘Power To Save The World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy’ has been telling us just how convenient it is to store nuclear waste…

The world’s entire annual inventory could fit in one large townhouse.

Excuse our ignorance, but who in their right mind would want to store nuclear waste in a large town house? Even if you hid the stuff in the attic and the basement, in cupboards and under the bed, we doubt a townhouse could hold it all safely. Yes, if you were an idiot and piled the world’s entire annual inventory of nuclear waste into a big pile you probably could shovel it all into a townhouse. But it would be very, very wrong. There are lots of very good reasons why nuclear waste storage facilities are huge. For one thing, nuclear waste needs lots of space between the storage casks to allow the heat produced to escape. You don’t get townhouse architects to design these babies. We also liked this part…

Nuclear waste recycling, done abroad, drastically reduces volume, radioactivity, and the need for long-term disposal.

‘Done abroad’? Nice. She means it’s someone else’s problem. Out of sight, out of mind. In America it’s called ‘passing the buck’.

Meanwhile, the construction of the state-of-art fast breeder reactor being built in India is running as one would expect. It’s 40 per cent over budget, a year late and the taxpayer is paying the bill. Fast breeder reactors are supposed to herald a change in the way nuclear power works. It seems however, the more things change in the nuclear industry, the more things stay the same.

Have a great weekend!

Posted by Justin at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Don’t you find hindsight to be a wonderful thing? I shouldn’t have stepped in front of that truck. I shouldn’t have petted that mad dog. I shouldn’t have put that nuclear waste (sorry, spent fuel) in casks that hadn’t been properly tested. They’re all easy mistakes to make, don’t you find?

They realised – with hindsight of course – that they shouldn’t have put nuclear waste in casks that hadn’t been tested properly at the disaster-prone US nuclear reactor Vermont Yankee…

The concrete-and-steel "dry casks" used at the Vermont Yankee plant to store spent nuclear fuel were not tested as completely as they should have been, according to federal regulators.

But the decision by Holtec International, the New Jersey company that built the casks, to omit one set of tests does not pose a safety risk…

The decision ‘does not pose a safety risk’. Well, you can say that now with full confidence because on this occasion there was no accident or leak. We can all make lofty claims after the fact (although it is ‘unlikely the casks already loaded with spent fuel will be opened and their contents put into new receptacles’). We wonder if they’d have been so confident if they’d known the tests hadn’t been made before the waste had gone into the casks.

This is doubly worrying because it turns out that Vermont Yankee’s operator ‘was not doing as much radiological monitoring of the dry casks as was required by an agreement with the state’. That is, the casks weren’t properly tested to make sure they wouldn’t leak and the operators weren’t properly making sure the casks weren’t leaking. One day this disregard for regulations and sloppy approach to safety (and Vermont Yankee’s operators are not, by far, the only ones) is going to cost someone dearly. These strict protocols exist for a very good reason – because radiation leaks can be terrible events. And yes, we’re saying that with the benefit of hindsight.

Posted by Justin at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Justin at 6:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

Continue reading "Nuclear News: Nuclear-Waste Dump Shored Up as Germany Buys Time" »

Posted by Justin at 12:56 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.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: Church Rock - The best-kept nuclear secret" »

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

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.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: Russian vessel with radioactive cargo holed in collision" »

Posted by Justin at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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."’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: Obama: Iran cannot be permitted to be nuke power" »

Posted by Justin at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: Cost Concerns Loom Over US Nuclear Revival" »

Posted by Justin at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.)

Posted by Justin at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: Exelon delays plan for Texas nuclear plant" »

Posted by Justin at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Financial Times: French government forces Areva's 'iron lady' to bend
’Areva's board meets today to rubber stamp what was always inevitable - the sale of the nuclear group's transmission and distribution business and its stakes in a number of blue-chip companies. This is what Areva's main shareholder, the French government, has long wanted to fund the rising investment needs of its nuclear champion. This is what Jean-Cyril Spinetta, its new chairman - also the chairman of Air France-KLM - is going to recommend. He is also expected to confirm that the government, which, through different state or state-controlled institutions, owns more than 90 per cent of Areva, has agreed to open up the company's capital to new investors, although perhaps not the investors Anne Lauvergeon, Areva chief executive, would have wanted. Ms Lauvergeon, sometimes called France's "iron lady", has long campaigned for a market flotation to open up the group's capital, which is only traded through investment certificates. However, the government has always regarded Areva as a strategic national asset. It now wants to raise funds which are urgently needed not just for investments, but also to finance the â‚2bn ($2.8bn) Areva needs to buy out Siemens, its German engineering joint venture partner.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: French government forces Areva's 'iron lady' to bend" »

Posted by Justin at 8:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

AFP: Funds to shut nuclear plants fall short
’VERNON, Vt. (AP) - The companies that own almost half the nation's nuclear reactors are not setting aside enough money to dismantle them, and many may sit idle for decades and pose safety and security risks as a result, an Associated Press investigation has found. The shortfalls are caused not by fluctuating appetites for nuclear power but by the stock market and other investments, which have suffered huge losses over the past year and devastated the plants' savings, and by the soaring costs of decommissioning. At 19 nuclear plants, owners have won approval to idle reactors for as long as 60 years, presumably enough time to allow investments to recover and eventually pay for dismantling the plants and removing radioactive material. But mothballing nuclear reactors or shutting them down inadequately presents the most severe of risks. Radioactive waste could leak from abandoned plants into ground water or released into the air, and spent nuclear fuel rods could be stolen by terrorists. During the past two years, estimates of dismantling costs have soared by more than $4.6 billion because rising energy and labor costs, while the investment funds that are supposed to pay for shutting plants down have lost $4.4 billion in the battered stock market.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: US reactors to be abandoned as decommissioning cost rocket" »

Posted by Justin at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

AFP: EPA to rebuild uranium-contaminated Navajo homes
’FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) - The federal government plans to spend up to $3 million a year to demolish and rebuild uranium-contaminated structures across the Navajo Nation, where Cold War-era mining of the radioactive substance left a legacy of disease and death. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its Navajo counterpart are focusing on homes, sheds and other buildings within a half-mile to a mile from a significant mine or waste pile. They plan to assess 500 structures over five years and rebuild those that are too badly contaminated. "These families, with the resources they have, they would not be able to put up a new home for themselves," said Lillie Lane, a spokeswoman for the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection
Agency. "We don't know how radiation in the home affected these families, but in the end people will be living in safe homes." Between the 1940s and the 1980s, millions of tons of uranium ore were mined from the 27,000 square-mile reservation that spans Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Many Navajos, unaware of the dangers of contamination, built their homes with chunks of uranium ore and mill tailings.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: EPA to rebuild uranium-contaminated Navajo homes" »

Posted by Justin at 6:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Spiderman comics and movies, mild-mannered photographer famously gains arachnid superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider. We were wondering what superpowers you’d gain if you were stung by a radioactive wasp…

If workers cleaning up the nation's most contaminated nuclear site didn't have enough to worry about, now they've got to deal with radioactive wasp nests. Mud dauber wasps built the nests, which have been largely abandoned by their flighty owners, in holes at south-central Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation in 2003.

What do you think? An uncanny ability to spoil picnics?

Posted by Justin at 6:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Guardian: US nuclear industry tries to hijack Obama's climate change bill
’America's nuclear industry and its supporters in Congress have moved to hijack Barack Obama's agenda for greening the economy by producing a rival plan to build 100 new reactors in 20 years, and staking a claim for the money to come from a proposed clean energy development bank. Republicans in the House of Representatives produced a spoiler version of the Democrats' climate change bill this week, calling for a doubling of the number of nuclear reactors in the US by 2030. The 152-page Republican bill contains just one reference to climate change, and proposes easing controls for new nuclear plants. In the Senate, Republican leaders, including the former presidential candidate John McCain, also called this week for loan guarantees for building new reactors to rise from $18.5bn (£11.2bn) to $38bn. Other Republicans have called on the administration to underwrite the $122bn start-up costs of 19 nuclear reactors, whose applications are now under review by the department of energy. If Republican efforts in Congress for a nuclear energy bill and a clean energy bank fail, the US nuclear renaissance is likely to be restricted to new reactors already being built. Jim Riccio, Greenpeace nuclear analyst, said: "The renaissance is on hold or maybe dead on arrival."

Continue reading "Nuclear News: US nuclear industry tries to hijack Obama's climate change bill" »

Posted by Justin at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From top to bottom, the nuclear industry is built on uncertainty. If a representative of company building a nuclear reactor gives you a firm answer to the questions ‘how much will it cost?’ and ‘when will it be finished?’ they are lying to you. The only truthful answers to those questions are ‘I’ll tell you when it’s finished’ and ‘I’ll tell you when it’s finished’.

The latest example is this story about how…

…the U.S. Energy Department is negotiating with the Tennessee Valley Authority and at least one other potential client to use mixed oxide fuels from a $4.86 billion facility under construction at Savannah River Site.

It’s a story couched in so many ‘might’s and ‘potential’s as to be practically worthless. The mixed oxide (MOX) plant production plant at Savannah River is scheduled to open in 2016. Would you put money on the plant opening that year? Remember that the facility is being built by Areva of Olkiluoto and Flamanville infamy, and that the Savannah construction has already been issued with a ‘notice of violation’ for multiple failings in quality control evaluations, construction procedures and safety testing.

So we have the Tennessee Valley Authority which ‘might’ take MOX fuel for six existing reactors - and three reactors that ‘might’ be built some time in the future – from a production facility that ‘might’ be ready in 2016.

This is just another demonstration of the danger and deceit inherent in the nature of nuclear power. We have renewable technologies ready to go today that are cheaper, safer, quicker and easier to construct, and will make a significant impact on climate change. And yet governments around the world would rather rely on the ‘might’ of a nuclear industry which offers none of those promises.

Posted by Justin at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The transportation of the enormous (and we mean HUGE) components required to build nuclear power plants is really a metaphor for the nuclear industry as a whole: huge, lumbering, slow-moving, a logistical nightmare, and causing a massive inconvenience to all concerned.

Take the two steam generators being built in France by Areva for the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in America. Seventy feet long and weighing 510 tons each, the generators will sail across the Atlantic and up the Chesapeake Bay to Port Deposit. The 70-mile journey from Port Deposit to Three Mile Island will take 20 days as the 26-axle self-propelled flatbed trailers have a top speed of just three miles an hour.

‘A small army of 100 workers is expected to accompany the generators in a column about a mile long…[T]he trip will take the generators over 20 bridges that either will have to be braced to carry the 850-ton combined weight of each generator and transporter, or, in three cases, bypassed altogether… Eighteen traffic signals along the proposed travel route will have to be temporarily lowered, along with numerous utility wires, and trees will have to be cut, all to give the generators the vertical clearance they need to pass.’

See? It’s a metaphor. Will the nuclear industry, moving at a snail’s pace like these generators, get there in time? Are you, like the bridges of Lancaster County, braced for what a nuclear ‘renaissance’ will take? The environmental damage, the uncertainty, consultations and concerns bypassed altogether?

Or will the nuclear industry end up like the nuclear turbines that were destined for Canada’s Point Lepreau reactor a few months back? That’s sunk. Here’s hoping.

Posted by Justin at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Today’s Zaman: Turkey's nuclear dreams face uncertain future
’Turkey's long-running dream of having a nuclear power plant is surrounded by uncertainty despite the fact that a recently concluded tender on the construction of the country's first nuclear power plant is about to be finalized. Energy and Natural Resources Minister Taner Yildiz said the final decision on the tender would be made in June, but it seems that incertitude about the matter will not be cleard up easily even if the tender is discussed at a Cabinet meeting. As only one company entered the tender and the price offered is considerably high, the Cabinet will not be able to make an easy decision. Moreover, the global economic crisis has taken its toll on funds that were to be allocated to the nuclear power plant contract.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: Turkey's nuclear dreams face uncertain future" »

Posted by Justin at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Nuclear N-Former: Indian reactor shuts down for the third time in three weeks
’The Indian Point nuclear power plant is struggling to keep its reactors running. Plant operators shut down reactor Unit 3 again Sunday night to address more problems on its main boiler feedwater pumps. This is the third time the reactor has been forced offline in three weeks. Officials with Entergy Nuclear, the company that owns and operates Indian Point, said the hitches pose no threat to its workers or the public. "The plant is designed to shut down at the slightest hint that something may not be working optimally," said spokesman Jerry Nappi.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: Indian reactor shuts down for the third time in three weeks" »

Posted by Justin at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

...maybe. But weird for sure. On Wednesday and Thursday this week, your eye might have caught something strange among the nuclear news. Let's see...

How often has it happened to you that you send an email to the wrong person, or say something nasty in the wrong Skype window, or even to upload some information on the internet when you shouldn't have? This is something likely to happen to any of us, at least to me.

Now, what are the possibilities of this happening to the federal government of the United States? Yes, mistake like this can happen anytime, we are all humans after all. But what is the probability of the US federal government uploading a 266-page 'highly confidential' report onto the internet? I'd say slightly less probable. Especially when the document gives ‘detailed information about hundreds of the nation's civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons’ and the US government leaves it online for two full days before withdrawing it. Ok. So big mistakes can happen even to professional experts and even when it might jeopardize the security of a whole nation... unless.... unless they just wanted to try their luck. Yes, that must be it.

Yesterday it was the turn of Canada to try its own luck and test the national media and public opinion: according to Reuters, some Canadian officials "left a binder full of confidential nuclear documents in a television studio". The funniest part is that they did not try to retrieve the documents. Not even after six days. Alright, it might be some political manoeuver, but still the message is pretty clear to me: Greenpeace is not the only one to want an open public debate on Nukes.

So who's next? Let's see what info we mistakenly receive tomorrow...

(This is a guest post by Anne-Laure Meladeck, GPI Climate & Energy Assistant for Greenpeace International)

Posted by Justin at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There’s more hype and spin on AREVA’s North America blog today as it tries to sell the idea that the company is on the frontline against nuclear proliferation.

As part of this commitment to remove weapons-grade material from stockpiles, AREVA has partnered with the Shaw Group to build the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This facility when complete with convert the weapons-grade plutonium into MOX fuel for use in commercial nuclear power plants. This $4.9 billion project now under construction employs some 1,000 workers and is being built for DOE.

We’ll move swiftly over the fact that the construction at the Savannah River Site was recently issued with a ‘notice of violation’ for multiple failings in quality control evaluations, construction procedures and safety testing.

Instead we’ll focus on AREVA’s claim that MOX somehow helps in the battle against nuclear proliferation. In reality, MOX presents a greater proliferation risk than even conventional nuclear fuel. The plutonium required to create MOX could be stolen by terrorists and can be diverted to nuclear weapons programmes by countries. Once the MOX fuel is produced, the plutonium content is also easier to extract than from other varieties of nuclear fuel.

So, AREVA’s MOX plant may well remove ‘weapons-grade material from stockpiles’ but it certainly doesn’t remove the dangers.

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

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Reuters: Secret Canada nuclear papers left in TV studio
’OTTAWA, June 3 (Reuters) - Senior Canadian officials left a binder full of confidential nuclear documents in a television studio and made no attempt to retrieve them, the TV network involved said on Wednesday. The incident is likely to increase pressure on the minority Conservative government, already under fire for its handling of the economic crisis. The main opposition Liberal Party said on Tuesday it would decide next week whether to try to bring down the Conservatives in Parliament. The binder was found in a CTV television studio after a visit by Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt. CTV, which kept the binder for six days before breaking the news, said the documents showed the government would spend far more money on a troubled nuclear reactor than it had acknowledged.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: Secret Canada nuclear papers left in TV studio" »

Posted by Justin at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)