When he announced the UK’s nuclear ‘renaissance’, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government insisted it would create 100,000 new jobs. That figure has since fallen to by 10% to 90,000 but that’s still a big promise.

Thanks to French nuclear company AREVA, however, we’re now getting an idea of how those numbers break down and the spin around nuclear job creation is revealed.

AREVA’s EPR reactor is one of two designs the UK government is looking at building and is also being considered in the US...

…a new U.S. EPR™ would create up to 11,000 direct and indirect jobs during component manufacturing (including AREVA’s Newport News heavy component facility in Virginia) and plant construction. On top if this, construction and operation would also create more than 400 permanent jobs and spur billion of dollars in investment in the local economy.

The UK government wants ten new reactors, so that would create 110,000 ‘direct and indirect’ jobs according to AREVA's numbers, wouldn’t it? Well, it might. That number is in the same ballpark as the UK government’s figures of 90,000-100,000 but it assumes that all ten reactors are built at the same time.

It also assumes there will be no overlap between the people working on one reactor and the people working on another. Do we expect that there will be no transfer of skills between reactor projects especially in a time when nuclear expertise is scarce? Are there enough contractors with enough experienced workers and resources to provide 110,000 of them simultaneously?

If anything, these jobs will be highly transient. As the campaign group Shepperdine Against Nuclear Energy found when it visited the Okiluoto 3 EPR construction site in Finland late last year, ‘4,300 workers work on the site, but a total of 16,300 people have worked on site between 2005 and to date’. That doesn’t sound like job security to us.

Also, can the UK government guarantee that all those jobs will go to British workers? It looks like Westinghouse, the other company whose reactor design is being considered by the UK, would rely on thousands of workers from overseas. As Bulgaria found with its Belene reactor when it had to import foreign expertise, these promises of new jobs are not always kept.

Then there’s the final sting in the tail of the nuclear jobs spin. According to AREVA building an EPR creates only around 400 permanent jobs. The rest will, by any definition, be temporary jobs. That falls a long way short of the ‘100,000 jobs’ hype. No wonder the workers at Olkiluoto are taking their time.

Posted by Justin at 4:52 PM | Permalink

To Dounreay now, on the north coast of Scotland, a place so contaminated thanks to the nuclear reactor there, the beach is closed and they have robot submarines combing the ocean floor in search of radioactive particles.

In July this year, two people working on the decommissioning of the reactor ‘were treated for exposure to radioactive material’. Earlier this month, weapons grade uranium previously ‘given up for lost’ at the site was found ‘in "nooks and crannies" of scrapped pipes that had been packed into containers’.

Closed beaches, robot submarines, contaminated workers and missing uranium. Sounds like one of the more ludicrous James Bond movies. What future for the Dounreay site? Suggestions from the public include a recreation centre, a tourist attraction, and… a hotel. Maybe the robots can be reprogrammed to serve breakfast once they’ve finished cleaning the beach.

Meanwhile in Bulgaria, we wonder what’s happening with the plans for the Belene nuclear reactor since German utility RWE withdrew its funding in October. The project’s website has been down, cancelled or otherwise missing since the beginning of December. If they can’t keep a simple website up and running, what hope for the reactor? No wonder the Bulgarian government has had to go to Moscow with their begging bowl.

Posted by Justin at 2:05 PM | Permalink

© Greenpeace / Rastislav Flesh Prochazka

After staunch opposition from the likes of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Bankwatch, Urgewald and BeleNE!, it looks like the long and ignominious history of Bulgaria’s Belene nuclear power plant might be finally drawing to a close. Citing ‘funding issues’, German utility RWE has walked away from its 49 per cent in the disaster-prone project. Those funding ‘issues’? That there isn’t any funding - it’s a bit like saying there are ‘food issues’ when you’re hungry.

If OL3 in Olkiluoto, Finland is supposed to be the nuclear industry’s poster child then Belene is the nasty and ugly younger brother nobody wants to talk about. Belene was a naughty little boy from the outset…

The construction has been stop-start since the go ahead was given in way back in 1981. Belene was abandoned once before in 1990 due to – wouldn’t you know it? - ‘funding issues’. The project was restarted in 2002 and it’s been downhill all the way since then. Like all nuclear reactors the costs quickly spiralled out of control and now stand at seven billion euros.

The financing of Belene has been suspicious to say the least. ‘For the past 18 months, we’ve been pointing out to RWE that Belene is a high-risk
project in terms of safety, economics, environment and corruption,’ says Heffa
Schücking from the German environment NGO Urgewald. The Bulgarian government found itself faced with accusations that it had given millions of euros in illegal state aid to the Belene project in violation of the EC Treaty.

On top of that the initial environmental impact assessment did not ‘contain adequate information on the seismic conditions, nor does it address beyond design basis accidents’ and its authors were forced, following legal action, to admit it was flawed. The reactor site is just 14 kilometres from where an earthquake killed over 120 people in 1977. The Austrian Institute of Ecology described the AES 92 reactor being built at Belene as ‘The Mystery Reactor’, there being no ‘reliable technical facts’ or ‘operational experience’ for it.

Reliable facts are things that have been scarce when it comes to Belene. The jobs promised by Prime Minister Stanishev were destined for Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese workers because of a lack of nuclear skills in Bulgaria. ‘I am proud of Bulgarian power engineers, who are capable of developing such a complicated design,’ he boasted when the reactor is actually of Russian design. His statements that nuclear could replace Bulgaria’s reliance on oil are revealed as nonsense (unless he has a secret plan for nuclear cars) when you consider the country relies on oil mainly for transport and hardly at all for electricity generation.

So where does Belene go from here now that RWE has woken up to reality? The Bulgarian government has said it will press on with the reactor. But with no credible investors left it’s difficult to see how the poor creature can limp on.

Posted by Justin at 6:18 PM | Permalink