Yesterday morning at 8am CET, eight Greenpeace activists dismantled the railway tracks between the Tricastin nuclear facility and Pierrelatte in order to stop a shipment of nuclear waste being shipped to Russia. The Russian ship, Kapitan Kuroptev, is waiting at Le Havre to receive the shipment.

French nuclear companies AREVA and EDF say depleted uranium is sent to Siberia to be enriched and then returned to France. This is spin and deception. This isn’t ‘recycling’ or ‘reuse’. This is making nuclear waste somebody else’s problem. It only demonstrates once again the industry’s complete inability to deal with the dangers of nuclear waste.

Official figures published in December 2009 show that AREVA and EDF are
not telling the truth. Since 2006 33,000 tons of uranium have been exported to Russia, while only 3,090 tons have returned. Where are the missing 30,000 tons? It’s dumped in places like Seversk.

So frightened are AREVA of Greenpeace shining a light on their dirty dealing they’ve taken us to court in France in an attempt to gag us. If they’ve got nothing to hide, they’ve got nothing to fear.

In France, Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo has already received more than 29,000 petitions for a moratorium on the export of nuclear waste In Russia, people can write directly to Mr Borloo here.

(For more information in French, visit Greenpeace France’s website and follow them on Twitter.)

Posted by Justin at 2:32 PM | Permalink

When it comes to the people making promises on behalf of nuclear power, can any of them be taken at their word? When it comes to Ed Miliband, the UK’s environment minister, we’re not so sure.

Speaking in Parliament last month, Miliband said…

…we are not going to provide public subsidy for the construction, operation and decommissioning of nuclear power stations.

That sounds pretty definite to us. But if that’s the case, why has he refused to answer the ‘question on whether the nuclear power industry would be given an insurance indemnity subsidy from taxpayers’? As Paul Flynn, the Member of Parliament who asked the question, says: ‘The only sensible conclusion to draw is that there will remain, probably huge, hidden subsidies in the form of insurance underwriting.’ If the minister has nothing to hide surely he’d give a straight question a straight answer?

The same applies to decommissioning and waste disposal costs. Nobody knows how much those will cost but the budget is exploding (it's currently around the £73 billion mark). So in order to keep industry and investors comfortable with predictable costs, the UK government now proposes to introduce a flat, fixed payment from the industry. This shifts all the unpredictability to the public, and socializes all the risks attached to it. Whatever the final costs, our grandchildren will have to pay to clean up our mess with public subsidies.

Then we look at the news that the UK taxpayer is giving £25 million to build the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (NAMRC) and we ask: surely that is a public subsidy to the nuclear industry?

The centre will ‘bring together university research and industrial expertise to develop manufacturing techniques’. That means the £25 million to build NAMRC is, in the words of Ed Miliband, a ‘public subsidy for the construction, operation and decommissioning of nuclear power stations’

In July, Rolls Royce was given £45 million of public money to help build four new factories in the UK, including one to manufacture ‘components for nuclear power plants’. That is a public subsidy to the nuclear industry. Also, the government ‘is investing £8 million to expand existing civil nuclear research facilities within The University of Manchester’. That is a public subsidy to the nuclear industry.

In June this year Vincent De Rivaz, the Chief Executive of EDF Energy, said…

I’ve always said we don’t ask for taxpayers’ money. We don’t ask for government subsidy.

When it comes to the UK government and taxpayers’ money, one thing is clear: the nuclear industry doesn’t have to ask.

Posted by Justin at 1:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Do you know many companies like the nuclear industry who have only one product in their catalogue? There was Ford and the Model T, but that was 100 years ago, and they at least knew how to build and sell it.

We wish we’d come up with that joke. The honour however goes to Henri Proglio, the new chief executive of the French nuclear giant EDF. When even the nuclear industry is mocking the nuclear industry, you know things aren’t right.

So how is the nuclear ‘renaissance’ going this week? Not well, in actual fact…

The UK’s safety regulators, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), have just released the third stage of their assessment for the designs of AREVA’s EPR and Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactors. It’s grim reading.

There are a significant number of issues with the safety features of both designs. The regulators still don't have a complete design yet from either Areva or Westinghouse. The HSE will not approve the designs unless this is addressed.

The EPR design has a long list of problems. There are "significant concerns" about the lack of separation between the safety protection and control systems. The HSE says "you could have the same fault occurring on both, so your protection system won't do what it's supposed to do. The company has proposed a way to fix the problem, but has yet to provide details". Concrete reactor shielding may not meet UK standards (the question is whether it meets any standards at all). There are problems with the structural integrity of the reactor but it’s "too early to say whether they can be resolved solely with additional safety case changes or whether they may result in design modifications being necessary". Unbelievably, even simple, fundamental things such as fire doors and alarms are not properly sited.

(You can take a look at some of the many safety failings of the EPR reactor being built at Olkiluoto here.)

Things with the AP1000 are little better. According to the HSE, Westinghouse has significant additional work to prove its reactor is safe across "the majority of the technical topic areas.". The safety case on internal hazards has "significant shortfalls." The regulator criticises Westinghouse for a "lack of detailed claims and arguments". There are major concerns about the reactor design’s new cooling valve but there has been, says the HSE, "minimal progress in addressing our concerns. There is a significant risk that the depth of the issue and the resources and effort that are needed to address it have been underestimated.". On top of all that aspects of the civil and mechanical engineering plans are being questioned, as well as the structural integrity and "human factors".

Wow. That’s quite a list. If the EPR was a car with a list of concerns like that, would you drive it? If the AP1000 was a plane, would you fly in it?

Meanwhile, UK government ministers are complacently unconcerned…

Posted by Justin at 5:01 PM | Permalink

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

In May we told you that the review being conducted by the UK’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate into new reactor designs had issues with EDF and Areva’s European Pressurised Reactor (EPR). Further details are now coming out about how the Inspectorate regards the EPR design as ‘significantly compromised’…

The Health and Safety Executive, which oversees the NII, said that the EPR design could be rejected for use in Britain if its concerns could not be satisfactorily addressed. “It is our regulatory judgment that the control and instrumentation architecture appears overly complex,” the NII letter [to EDF] said. “We have serious concerns about your proposal which allows lower safety class systems to have write access [the ability to override] to higher safety class systems,” it continued.

The letter also highlighted concerns about the absence of safety display systems or manual controls that would allow the reactor to be shut down, either in the station’s control room or at an emergency remote shutdown station.

In other words, the NII don’t trust the designs of EPR’s control and safety systems. Areva is apparently ‘scrambling to produce revised plans’, a situation mirrored in Finland where plans for the control system for the massively late and over-budget EPR being built in Olkiluoto have been described by Finland nuclear watchdog STUK as ‘without a proper design that meets the basic principles of nuclear safety’.

Apparently, in the UK’s case, ‘the design assessment phase could be delayed well past its expected completion in 2011.’ So in Finland, so in the UK. Areva and EDF are nothing if not consistent.

Posted by Justin at 3:33 PM | Permalink

On Wednesday evening last week, Vincent De Rivaz, Chief Executive of EDF Energy, was interviewed on the UK’s Sky News channel. It was the same day as the UK government announcing its latest nuclear power strategy.

The interview is worth watching because of the evasions and contradictions in what Mr De Rivaz said that are common in nuclear power propaganda. Unfortunately they weren’t challenged by the interviewer so, in a short series, we're going to challenge them instead ( - part one is here, part two is here).

What about the highly dangerous waste produced by nuclear reactors? Here’s Mr De Rivaz’s entire response to the question, ‘there is the legacy of waste, isn’t there? That can be very dangerous for many years…’

The biggest challenge that we are facing all of us, we know it and we know it more and more, is climate change. We need to de-carbonise electricity and if we as a country to deliver what is our plan in 2050, 80% reduction of C02 emissions we need to de-carbonise electricity. So nuclear is part of the solution for sure.

Do you think he answered the question or singularly failed to address it? We know what we think. The biggest problem of nuclear power, it’s toxic, deadly legacy that will be with the human race for hundreds of thousands of years to come, is the waste it produces. And yet the CEO of EDF, lacked the courage to give a straight question on this vital issue with a straight answer.

According to writer H. Michael Sweeney there are 25 Rules of Disinformation. The number one rule? Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

Posted by Justin at 1:17 PM | Permalink

On Wednesday evening, Vincent De Rivaz, Chief Executive of EDF Energy, was interviewed on the UK’s Sky News channel. It was the same day as the UK government announcing its latest nuclear power strategy.

The interview is worth watching because of the evasions and contradictions in what Mr De Rivaz said. Unfortunately they weren’t challenged by the interviewer so, in a short series, we're going to challenge them instead ( - part one is here).

Mr De Rivaz said, ‘I am very open to debate and discussions’ with the like of Greenpeace on the matter of nuclear power and climate change. Debate? What debate? How is this debate to conducted? Where will these discussions take place?

What about the debate at the European Commission’s European Nuclear Energy Forum (Enef) from which ‘Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Sortir du Nucléaire, the only groups invited into the industry-dominated body, have walked out, accusing Enef of stifling critical voices, ignoring their concerns and riding roughshod over alternative scientific evidence’? EDF is part of that industry-dominated body. Where was Mr De Rivaz’s openness to debate and discussion at those meetings?

Posted by Justin at 5:05 PM | Permalink

On Wednesday evening, Vincent De Rivaz, Chief Executive of EDF Energy, was interviewed on the UK’s Sky News channel. It was the same day as the UK government announcing its latest nuclear power strategy.

The interview is worth watching because of the evasions and contradictions in what Mr De Rivaz said. Unfortunately they weren’t challenged by the interviewer so, in a short series, we're going to challenge them instead.

Answering the question about how his nuclear ‘renaissance’ will be funded (‘Will it happen with government subsidy?’), he said:

I’ve always said we don’t ask for taxpayers’ money. We don’t ask for government subsidy. I’ve always said that. I’m still saying that. I will continue to say that.

That’s pretty definite. And it’s a nice little piece of spin. Mr De Rivaz isn’t asking the British government to directly support EDF. No, he’s a little more subtle than that. What he actually asked in May this year was for the British government to fix the energy markets to make financial life easier for EDF…

New nuclear power stations will not be built in Britain unless the government provides financial support for the industry, the head of the country’s biggest nuclear generator has warned.

Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of the UK subsidiary of EDF, told the Financial Times that a “level playing field” had to be created that would allow the nuclear industry to compete with other low-emission electricity sources such as wind power.

‘We believe nuclear is competitive,’ he said in the Sky News interview when he actually doesn’t believe anything of the kind. He believes it could be competitive but only with serious government intervention.

Posted by Justin at 7:51 PM | Permalink