…and Greenpeace was there to meet them.
The ship was carrying 650 tons for French nuclear giant AREVA. Where will it end up? Probably dumped in the open air in Siberia if past experience is anything to go by.
And even if you don’t agree with Greenpeace’s point of view, you have to admit we really know how to make a banner…
(More photos available here and more information is available on the Greenpeace Russia website.)
Remember earlier in the week when Greenpeace activists dismantled railway tracks near France’s Tricastin nuclear facility? The action was to stop nuclear waste from being exported to Russia.
Unfortunately the waste is on the move and now at sea on the Russian transport ship, Kapitan Kuroptev. That doesn’t mean Greenpeace has given up the chase…
Our colleagues managed to get alongside the ship displaying banners reading ‘Russia is not a nuclear dump’ before attempting to board it.
The Kapitan Kuroptev is carrying this waste to an uncertain future. Ninety percent of French nuclear waste shipped to Russia since 2006 has been dumped. Only 10% was returned. How much of the Kapitan Kuroptev cargo will be making the return trip and how much will be left to contaminate Russia for thousands of years?
(More photos and information in French is available at the Greenpeace France website.)
We’ve talked before about French nuclear waste being sent to Russia for reprocessing but very little of it coming back. Here’s some facts for you…
• France has sent 33,000 tonnes of nuclear waste to Russia for reprocessing since 2006. A mere 3,090 tonnes has returned. That’s less than 10%. The rest is dumped.
• The contracts for this arrangement were signed in violation of Russian law.
• Rostechnadzor – the federal agency that supervises nuclear production facilities – have acknowledged that the requirements for storing the waste are violated on a regular basis.
• Russia does not have the technology to process uranium hexafluoride (which makes up most of the waste). Nor does it have the funds to invest in conversion technology.
• The cost of disposing of 700 thousand tons of Russian uranium hexafluoride, stored at depots of the state owned Rosatom, may reach billions of euros. Under their contracts. Areva and other Western European companies will add about 130 thousand tons of dangerous materials to the existing stockpile.
• The overwhelming majority of Russians – 92% - are strongly against turning Russia into an international nuclear waste dump.
You can send a letter to Jean-Louis Borloo, the French Minister for Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development, telling him all this and demanding the French Government make a unilateral decision to stop imports of depleted uranium into the Russian Federation. You can send a letter in French here, or in Russian or English here.
(To send a letter in English, scroll down the Greenpeace Russia page and put your name in the upper box and your email address in the lower one. Click the button at the bottom of the letter and you will receive a confirmation email. Click the link in that email to confirm your letter to Mr Borloo.)
It certainly seems a week for crazy nuclear inventions. Yesterday we had Bill Gates and his sci-fi reactor. Today we have nuclear submarine reactors heading for dry land in Russia and nuclear reactors going mobile in Belarus.
The new trend in nuclear reactor design seems to be ‘small is beautiful’. The realities of the baseload myth and decentralized energy production seem to have finally occurred to nuclear boffins and they’re trying to catch up with the rest of us.
Unfortunately, just because you make a nuclear reactor smaller it doesn’t mean they don’t have the same problems as their larger cousins. Sometimes the problems are even worse.
Take the Russian idea of taking the reactors out of their Alfa-class nuclear submarines and plugging them into the grid. There’s just one big problem:
[I]n the Soviet submarine model currently advanced by a Moscow company, the spent fuel ends up frozen along with the reactor and stored away. No engineering solution has been devised yet to decontaminate the fuel.
Kirill Danilenko, director of the Russian company Akme Engineering, says his ‘vision’ is an industry that can ‘build power plants like Lego sets.’ We’d love to see a Lego nuclear reactor set although it’ll probably cost a fortune and have important pieces missing.
Even more bizarre (if that’s possible) than land-locked submarine reactors is the Belorussian idea of mobile nuclear reactors. It seems their blowing the dust off long abandoned blueprints and thinking of giving it another try. It’s a strange looking beast, to be sure. We dearly hope those caterpillar tracks are resistant to anti-tank weapons, landmines and Improvised Explosive Devices. We can imagine mobile nuclear reactors attracting terrorists like moths to a flame.
The thing is, does the nuclear industry need this right now? It’s got enough trouble trying to solve the problems it already has, what with runaway costs, mountains of nuclear waste, and endless safety problems without adding to that long list. Let’s be frank: these outlandish designs are extremely unlikely to be produced commercially and offer only another nuclear distraction from the far more urgent problem presented by climate change.
Of all the nuclear waste France has sent to Russia since 2006 for reprocessing, less than 10% has ever been sent back. That’s 3,090 tonnes out of 33,000. The rest is dumped in Russia, often in the open air. This is the ‘clean’ and ‘safe’ nuclear energy US President Barack Obama was mythologizing yesterday.
Greenpeace are demanding a moratorium on the export of nuclear waste from France to Russia. That’s why yesterday Greenpeace France activists blockaded the Tricastin nuclear facility to prevent a shipment of nuclear waste leaving for its Russian dumping ground.
Nuclear waste reprocessing in France is a scam. AREVA and EDF claim that 96% of nuclear waste can be reprocessed. However just 1% finds its way in to MOX (Mixed Oxide fuel). The rest is sent to Russia where most of it is simply dumped and never reprocessed. Nuclear industry claims about ‘recycling’ are simply spin, hype and propaganda. Forget about ‘safe’ and ‘clean’.
(More information and photographs are available in French from Greenpeace France’s website)
While the nuclear industry and its supporters are working their very hardest to greenwash nuclear power as ‘clean’ energy, the latest findings at Chernobyl are creating new uncertainties about nuclear’s radioactive legacy…
Reinhabiting the large dead zone around the accident site may have to wait longer than expected. Radioactive cesium isn’t disappearing from the environment as quickly as predicted, according to new research presented here [in San Francisco] Monday at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Cesium 137’s half-life — the time it takes for half of a given amount of material to decay — is 30 years, but the amount of cesium in soil near Chernobyl isn’t decreasing nearly that fast. And scientists don’t know why.
Boris Faybishenko, a nuclear remediation expert at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says, ‘There are a lot of unknowns that are probably causing this phenomenon’. It makes you wonder about other assurances given by the nuclear industry over the years.
But nuclear energy is ‘clean’ energy insist the US Environmental Protection Agency, the World Nuclear Agency, and French nuclear corporation AREVA, to name but a few.
We’d like to see these people try to define ‘clean’ in this context and how it compares to an ordinary person’s definition of the word. How, for example, do the radioactive contamination on the streets of Akokan in Niger and the nuclear waste being stored in the open air in Siberia classify as ‘clean’?
The nuclear industry likes to make a big song and dance about reprocessing nuclear waste (or ‘recycling spent fuel’ as they’re currently greenwashing it).
Did you know, for instance that France has sent 33,000 tonnes of nuclear waste to Russia for reprocessing since 2006? How much of that has come back to France? A mere 3,090 tonnes. That’s less than 10%. The rest is dumped and abandoned in places like the ‘closed’ city of Seversk, the nuclear waste storage facility in Siberia. Some of it is even stored in open air car parks. This is the fabled nuclear safety we’ve heard all about.
After these revelations in October this year, along with it emerging that plutonium had been ‘forgotten’ at the Cadarache nuclear plant, the French government announced a moratorium on nuclear waste shipments to Russia while the High Committee for Transparency and Information on Nuclear Safety conducts a full inventory of France’s nuclear waste products. The results are expected in January.
So when the French government decided to pre-empt the inventory’s findings and break the moratorium this weekend, resuming nuclear waste shipments to Russia, Greenpeace France sprang into action. Nuclear campaigner Yannick Rousselet chained himself to the railway line along which the nuclear waste was to be transported, delaying the shipment.
It’s a strange coincidence that French nuclear giant AREVA would choose to resume nuclear waste shipments exactly when attention is focussed on the opening of the Copenhagen climate change summit. Thanks to Yannick and his colleagues, however, AREVA’s dirty little secret is in the public eye once more.
(More information is available in French at Greenpeace France’s website)
Russia’s space agency is turning the clocks back to the 1950s. In a move straight from a bad Cold War-era science fiction movie, it is ‘planning to build a new spaceship with a nuclear engine’. Yes, (*big, serious film-announcer’s voice*) an ATOMIC ROCKET! Russian space chief Anatoly Perminov said a ‘preliminary design’ for an ATOMIC ROCKET! could be ‘ready by 2012’. It will ‘then take nine more years and 17 billion rubles ($600 million, 400 million euros) to build’ the ATOMIC ROCKET! Let’s ignore for the moment the wisdom of throwing megawatt-class nuclear reactors into the sky (the thought of one re-entering the atmosphere at 25,000 feet per second is certainly a sobering one). Instead, if we factor in the usual nuclear projections and predictions, the ATOMIC ROCKET!’s design should be ready sometime around 2020. It should be built sometime around 2035 and maybe, possibly, fly sometime around 2040. All for a cost of 75 billion rubles.
Meanwhile, the public and the private came together for French president Nicholas Sarkozy this week. Nicholas is famed for his tireless globe-trotting as the nuclear industry’s most ruthless salesman (rumours that he’s about to star as Ricky Roma in a remake of Glengarry Glen Ross have been denied). He just loves seeing tons of public money being wasted on useless white elephants. We did wonder where he got the idea for his nuclear boondoggles until we read about his personal presidential shower. It cost 245,000 euros of public money and he never used it. It’s a dirty business, the nuclear industry. When will Nicholas come clean?
And so to Iraq. ‘The Iraqi government has approached the French nuclear industry about rebuilding at least one of the reactors that was bombed at the start of the first Gulf war.’ This week, in continuing violence, 150 people were killed in two suicide bombings which raised questions about the competence of the country’s security services. The government has called for international support to help it combat terrorism. The country’s politicians are divided on laws needed to conduct national elections in January next year, and so threatening the country’s constitution. A new nuclear reactor? What could possibly go wrong?
(You can read more exciting Tale of Nuclear Insanity here, here, here, here and here.)
Some news that French energy giant EDF might have preferred to keep quiet has emerged in French newspaper, Liberation…
The paper said 13 percent of French radioactive waste produced by power group EDF could be found in the open air in a town in Siberia to which access is forbidden. The paper said it based its information on an investigation due to be broadcast on TV channel Arte on Tuesday.
Access to the UF6 nuclear waste storage facility in Seversk, Siberia might be forbidden (in’s known as a ‘closed city’) but in this hi-tech age, very few things remain hidden…
Look at all those rusty storage tanks. The city was formerly known as Tomsk-7 and in 1993 was the site of one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents. In 2000 contamination of rivers around the facility was said to have reached ‘staggering levels’ and the ‘worst ever recorded’.
EDF has finally admitted that a large part of its nuclear waste is sent to Russia…
An EDF spokeswoman declined to confirm the 13 percent figure, or that waste was stored in the open air, but confirmed EDF sends nuclear waste to Russia. "We send waste to Russia for treatment, and they send 10 to 20 percent of it back to us to be used in French power plants," she said.
A whole 10 to 20 percent? Wow. So what happens to the other 80 to 90 percent? Sounds very much as if it’s in Seversk somewhere. This, however, is how the nuclear industry likes things – out of sight and out of mind. Like the beginnings of the nuclear reaction – in dangerous and contaminating uranium mining – they don’t want you to think about what happens at the end either.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was in Turkey this week to talk energy with the country’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan:
Energy companies in both countries agreed to a joint venture to build conventional electric power plants, and the Interfax news agency in Russia reported that Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin offered to reopen talks on Russian assistance to Turkey in building nuclear power reactors.
Greenpeace activists revealed nuclear matryoshka dolls of Putin and Erdogan in Ankara’s Kizilay Square. There are certainly surprises waiting inside the Russian-Turkey energy deal, not least Turkey losing energy security by relying on Russian nuclear fuel for any reactor built by Russia’s Atomstroiexport. Add to that the risks of cost and construction over runs, waste management problems, high decommissioning costs, and the distractions from renewable energy sources and energy efficiency programmes, and you have to ask, do we really want to see what’s inside Turkey’s nuclear matryoshka?
(In an attempt to sweeten the nuclear deal and bring down the extortionate construction costs, the consortium bidding to build Turkey’s first nuclear reactor ‘has revised down its price to $0.1235 per kilowatt hour from a previous price of more that $0.15’. That the announcement was made the day before Putin arrived in Ankara was, no doubt, a coincidence. $0.1235 per kilowatt hour is still five cents more expensive than the current average price of electricity in Turkey.)
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" »
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" »
Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:
Bloomberg: Gulf’s Push for Nuclear Experts May Delay U.K. Plans
June 15 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. utilities risk falling behind with plans to build nuclear power plants because Middle East nations may use higher salaries to lure skilled workers, reactor builder Westinghouse Electric Co. said. “These nations have no legacy program to use as a source for nuclear expertise,” said Adrian Bull, U.K. stakeholder relations manager at Westinghouse, a unit of Japan’s Toshiba Corp. “If you have literally nothing to go on, you have to be the Chelsea or Real Madrid and buy in the people from elsewhere.” Oil-producing nations including the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait plan nuclear plants to meet growing energy demand at home while exporting fuel abroad. The U.A.E. plans to select companies to develop an atomic power program by the end of this year and has a 2017 target date for completing its first reactor, the same year Electricite de France SA plans to start a new British nuclear plant.
Continue reading "Nuclear News: Gulf’s Push for Nuclear Experts May Delay U.K. Plans" »
Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:
Whitehaven News: 'Rogue' radioactive material to be sent to France
’This is the batch of eight Mox fuel assemblies made at Sellafield and later found to be "falsified" in its specification data after being shipped out to customers in Japan. The faked pellets scandal led to loss of business confidence in BNFL and for a time Japan refused to strike any further deals with Sellafield. The fuel, a mixture of plutonium and uranium, was sent back to Sellafield - seven years ago. Now, after several years "evaluating the best options", agreement has been reached with the government that the "rogue" fuel batch, along with a another eight, will be shipped to France for treatment - but not until 2014/15.’
Continue reading "Nuclear News: 'Rogue' Sellafield radioactive material to be sent to France" »
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