It was announced yesterday that leading UK steel company Sheffield Forgemasters International Ltd (SFIL) are to be loaned £80 million by the British government to ‘install the country's first 15,000 tonne forging press to make ultra-large nuclear components’

We could ask why SFIL is borrowing from the government and not a commercial lender, but if we start looking at the nuclear industry’s inability to exist without cheap cash from it government sugar daddies we’ll be here all day.

Instead we’ll focus on SFIL’s excitement at the deal. That’s a lot of money we’re talking about and will, apparently, put the company ‘in pole-position to capitalise on huge international demand for safety critical forgings’.

There is, however, a slight problem. Right at the bottom of SFIL’s joyous press release we get…

Today's announcement is subject to final due diligence which will be carried out over the coming weeks.

Funny they should mention due diligence (that is, the investigation of a business before a contract is signed). Just last week, Craig A Severance, editor and founder of Energy Economy Online, outlined in a presentation to the GPPi - Global Public Policy institute Nuclear Conference the five core questions that the due diligence process should ask…

1. Does the proposal actually meet customer needs?

2. Can the company afford the project?

3. Are Cost Projections Reliable?

4. Assessment of the Competition

5. Are Revenue Projections Reliable?

Guess what? According to Mr Severance, ‘new nuclear power does not meet any of the five tests’.

So, with the core questions of due diligence laid down so clearly, we can now expect them to be addressed by the due diligence of SFIL’s forging press project and others like it, can’t we? What are we saying? Nuclear power hasn’t survived for 60 years by abiding by the standards applied to normal businesses. As Mr Severance says, ‘new nuclear power likely cannot succeed as a business proposal and thus would require massive government support’.

Posted by Justin at 3:08 PM | Permalink

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

Over in India, and in a fit of wild optimism, the Russian Ambassador to India Alexander Kadakin has declared his country plans to build ‘up 12 to 14 nuclear reactors in India’. He must have missed the news that ‘eleven of India's 17 nuclear power reactors are operating below optimum capacity due to a lack of sufficient supplies of indigenous uranium’. The fuel for those 12 to 14 new reactors is going to have to come from somewhere, Ambassador Kadakin. Still, there should be plenty to go around when the nuclear ‘renaissance’ finally takes off, yes?

Or maybe not. China ‘operates 11 reactors and has 17 under construction, but has 124 more on the drawing boards’. Unfortunately, this is ‘raising questions about its ability to find the uranium it will need, at home or abroad’. Sound familiar? Maybe they could ask Alexander Kadakin for some advice and reassurance. Goodbye Oil Crisis, Hello Uranium Crisis.

In the UK, the consortium looking to build new nuclear reactors at Sellafield in the North West of England have said that ‘a final decision on whether to build a 3,200 megawatt nuclear plant in the U.K. won't be taken before 2015’. 2015? If this is the nuclear industry moving with haste to help in the battle against catastrophic climate change we’d hate to see it moving slowly.

Never fear, however. In (another) fit of wild optimism, Ignacio Galan, Chairman of Spanish energy group and consortium partner Iberdrola SA said ‘the new nuclear plant in the U.K. won't be operational until 2018 to 2020’. That’s a decision made in 2015 and then two state-of-the-art nuclear reactors built and operational (if the designs get approval) three-to-five years later? That’s some weapons grade confidence Senor Galan has going on there. If only we could harness it to generate electricity we could close down the nuclear industry overnight.

Posted by Justin at 9:48 AM | 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

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)

The prominent British environmentalist Jonathon Porritt asks some hard questions following the death of the highly influential environmentalist, writer and philosopher, Edward Goldsmith…

Without Teddy, who is going to rub people’s noses in the continuing scandal of nuclear waste mismanagement, and remind people that this government promised time after time that there would be no expansion of nuclear power in this country until it had sorted out the problems of nuclear waste?

Who is going to hold to account politicians and industry leaders for whom secrecy remains the default mindset?

Who is going to expose the near-fraudulent accounting practices endemic within the nuclear industry that continue to blind people to the true economic costs and penalties involved in nuclear power?

Who is going to interrogate the philosophical and moral implications of one generation imposing on the next a set of problems and security hazards for which they themselves have absolutely no solution?

And who is going to take on those sincere but utterly misguided environmentalists who’ve “gone nuclear” over the last few years because they feel there’s no alternative?

It would be nice if the nuclear industry and its supporters could also address these issues with a degree of honesty and transparency. We won’t hold our breath.

Posted by Justin at 11:19 AM | Permalink

©Jiri Rezac/Greenpeace

So, let’s talk about the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system. Can you aim it Osama bin Laden? Can you use it against suicide bombers? Is it an effective deterrent against the builders of Improvised Explosive Devices? Can you fight the effects of climate change with nuclear weapons? So what use are they in these times of post-Cold War threats?

For the British government to renew its nuclear weapons arsenal, it’s going to cost £97 billion. Just think what else you could do with all that money. Think of the world class renewable energy and energy efficiency programmes you could build with it. It’s not as if the UK’s defence industry – one of the government’s pets – is going to starve.

The missile in last night’s Greenpeace projection onto Big Ben is heading in the right direction. It’s time to bury Trident. It’s time for Alistair Darling, the UK’s finance minister, to cut the crap and cut Trident.

(Click here to see how the projection was done. More information is available on the Greenpeace UK website.)

Posted by Justin at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, in July 2007, there were these two contractors working at the Sellafield nuclear plant in North West England. They were drilling through a concrete floor in a nuclear waste storage facility that was being converted into offices.

They were wearing protective masks and suits, and had equipment to monitor radiation levels.

When two radioactive ‘hot spots’ were detected, the men decided to keep working.

One of the men removed his mask.

One of the pair received a dose of radiation of 17 milli-sieverts. The statutory annual dosage limit is 20.

Mark Bassett, the UK Health and Safety Executive's (HSE) superintending nuclear inspector, said: ‘Although the radiation doses in this case were below the statutory dose limits, they could potentially have been higher. They should have been zero.’

The operating company Sellafield – which is jointly owned by Amec, AREVA and URS Washington – was fined £75,000 in the ensuing court case which delivered its verdict last week. The consortium was also ordered to pay £26,000 in court costs.

Amec, Areva and URS Washington operate Sellafield under the consortium name Nuclear Management Partners Ltd. Last year it was awarded the contract to operate Sellafield for up to 17 years. The contract is worth £22 billion.

So, that’s a £101,000 penalty over a £22,000,000,000 contract. We’re sure Nuclear Management Partners Ltd felt suitably chastised as they handed over 0.00046% of their money. Mark Bassett of the HSE described the punishment as ‘relatively high’. That’s quite some exaggeration. He must think ants are ‘relatively enormous’.

Posted by Justin at 1:04 PM | Permalink

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

Work for the nuclear industry? It seems your private life is no longer private…

Thousands of staff at UK nuclear power stations have been told to spy on the private lives of workmates and inform on colleagues who might be “vulnerable” to blackmail or bribery by terrorists intent on getting access to Britain’s nuclear secrets and stocks of weapon-grade plutonium. As part of the “security measures” nuclear power station staff are being asked to keep a watch on their colleagues’ love lives. They are also being told to keep tabs on colleagues they think may be using illegal drugs and even those travelling abroad.

How’s that for fostering team spirit and camaraderie? Would you like to go for a night out with a work colleague if you thought he was counting the number of drinks you were having with a view to reporting back to your boss? How about confiding in him or her that you were having money trouble or relationship problems? Your work mates must now be regarded with suspicion and distrust. You are all potentially guilty in the eyes of your employer.

And why stop with staff at nuclear reactors? There are people right across the industry with access to nuclear materials, information and influence. The Prime Minister of the UK Gordon Brown’s brother Andrew is head of media relations at EDF who are looking to build nuclear reactors in the UK. Just what discussions has he had with his brother on the subject of nuclear power? Isn’t anyone spying on him?

The other French nuclear giant AREVA are currently causing chaos across the nuclear industry with their botched reactor construction projects and incomplete reactor designs. Is anyone keeping tabs on AREVA CEO Anne Lauvergeon? AREVA are doing such an unbelievably poor job of the nuclear ‘renaissance’ you could almost imagine they’re double agents working for various environmental campaigns.

The logic of this takes us to all kinds of unpleasant places. Are the partners and children of these reactor workers being followed? Their phones bugged? If not, why not? We assume that the armed police forces who escort nuclear waste shipments are spying on each other? The people who arrange the shipments? The guys who load, unload and drive the transport trucks? If not, why not? Aren’t all these people open to kidnap and coercion, blackmail and duress?

We don’t want to see this kind of awful paranoia and divisiveness but it is, unfortunately, the price you pay when you embrace a dirty, dangerous and discredited energy source like nuclear power which has the potential for such terrible consequences as nuclear proliferation and sabotage. We doubt very much that they’re spying on each other at the wind and solar energy farms across the world.

Posted by Justin at 3:34 PM | Permalink

As we’ve discussed before, there are two questions asked about building a nuclear reactor – ‘How much will it cost?’ and ‘When will it be operational?’- to which there is only one, honest reply: ‘I’ll tell you when it’s finished.’

This week, however, lumbering French nuclear ogre AREVA added a third question to the list: ‘What will the design look like?’…

In an unprecedented step, the UK nuclear safety regulator (HSE’s ND), the French nuclear regulator (ASN), and the Finnish nuclear regulator (STUK) released a joint statement on their respective evaluations of the design of AREVA’s shiny all-singing, all-dancing state-of-the-art third generation EPR Pressurised Water Reactor. You see, all three have discovered the same problem with the reactor’s design…

The issue is primarily around ensuring the adequacy of the safety systems (those used to maintain control of the plant if it goes outside normal conditions), and their independence from the control systems (those used to operate the plant under normal conditions).

Independence is important because, if a safety system provides protection against the failure of a control system, then they should not fail together. The EPR design, as originally proposed by the licensees and the manufacturer, AREVA, doesn’t comply with the independence principle, as there is a very high degree of complex interconnectivity between the control and safety systems.

In short: the EPR’s safety system isn’t independent from its control system. The safety system is there, in case the control system fails, to prevent catastrophic accidents. In EPR’s case, if the control system fails, the currently non-independent safety system could fail as well. And AREVA wants to sell the EPR all over the world.

Needless to say, AREVA responded with an awesome piece of denial, spin and downright fantasy…

The safety of the EPR™ reactor has not been called into question…

Really? So clearly ‘The issue is primarily around ensuring the adequacy of the safety systems’ and ‘The EPR design… doesn’t comply with the independence principle’ actually means ‘there’s nothing to worry about’. Silly us. Need we remind you that the OL3 EPR reactor in Olkiluoto, Finland has been under construction since 2004, the EPR at Flamanville, France has been under construction since 2006. And there are still questions about the ‘adequacy’ of the EPR’s safety systems.

AREVA then move straight to the fantasy…

The EPR™ reactor is currently the most powerful reactor in the world...

(No it isn’t – it hasn’t been built yet.)

AREVA guarantees the safety of its reactor…

(It could guarantee snow in Summer but that wouldn’t make it any more likely. AREVA can make as many guarantees as it likes but what will those guarantees be worth after a major accident? Can you clean up nuclear contamination with a guarantee? Figures vary as to the cost of the Chernobyl disaster but a quarter of a trillion dollars is a conservative estimate. Does AREVA have that kind of money? It will be governments and taxpayers who will be paying for any clean-up.)

So what does this mean? What it always does: more cost, more delays, more uncertainty, more spin, more fantasy, and more distraction from the fight against climate change. It means more of the same from AREVA and those who support them.

Posted by Justin at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The UK government is to allow nuclear reactor operators to dump low level nuclear waste in ordinary refuse landfill sites accessible by the public. The move comes as part of an attempt to reduce the massive costs of decommissioning old nuclear reactors (currently £73 billion and rising).

Needless to say…

..the move has triggered a swath of applications around the country from big corporations trying to cash in on this potential new business…

The trouble with all this is the fact that, when it comes to dumping its waste, the nuclear industry simply cannot be trusted. Regulations are flouted and scrutiny is avoided. How can we be sure that other, more dangerous waste won’t find its way into these sites? There are, after all, so many past examples.

Take the so-called Low-Level Waste Repository at Drigg in the north-west of England. The facility’s current managing director, Dick Raaz, says he hates the word ‘dump’. Yet, that is exactly what Greenpeace found when it visited the site in 1994…

A lot of that waste was certainly not of the low level variety. Have things improved at Drigg since then? Could Dick Raaz give assurances that the waste in that video is now properly catalogued and stored? How about restoring some trust, Dick?

You see, it’s all about trust or, rather, the lack of it. The UK nuclear industry is still misplacing its waste fifteen years later. In 1998, at the Tricastin nuclear facility in France, it was revealed that military nuclear waste was being secretly stored at the site in mounds of dirt. Only last week it was found that nuclear waste is being stored in an open air car park in Siberia. In 2006 it was reported that nuclear waste had been dumped in secret pits on the Scottish coast and the official records of the dumping destroyed.

Look at the French Atomic Energy Commission keeping secret for five months the fact it had massively underestimated the amount of plutonium in its possession. How about Europe’s gift to Africa’s west coast? ‘Unusual skin infections, bleeding at the mouth, acute respiratory infections and abdominal haemorrhages’ all caused by nuclear waste and other toxic materials, dumped at sea. We could go on and on and on.

The weight of history is against the nuclear industry on this issue. It would take an unprecedented turnaround in its attitudes towards accountability and transparency for there to be even the tiniest amount of trust and confidence in the UK government’s latest announcement.

As history shows, again and again, the industry has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards proper regulation and scrutiny – a regulation and scrutiny they often ignore or circumvent. Why should we believe any differently this time?

Posted by Justin at 6:00 PM | Permalink

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

Calder Hall, the world’s first industrial scale nuclear reactor to produce electricity on a commercial basis, began operating at what is now Sellafield in the UK on August 20 1956. Of course, producing electricity at Calder Hall was secondary to producing plutonium for the country’s nuclear weapons programme. Nuclear power and weapons have walked hand in hand ever since.

As Stephanie Cooke in her nuclear history, In Mortal Hands, says, Calder Hall was…

…designed and built to produce plutonium for weapons; electricity was only an added extra. ‘We needed the nuclear deterrent and in order to get it you needed the by-product of peaceful nuclear energy,’ said Eric Price… a government energy economist.

[…]

As Price soon realise, the government’s nuclear game plan required economic inventiveness and the perpetration of another myth, that nuclear electricity would prove both less expensive and more reliable than alternative energy sources.

[…]

‘The decisions were not economic. In fact they were far from economic. In fact I would say they were gravely distorted,’ Price said.

In 1956 that alternative energy source was coal. Five decades later the sources have changed to wind, solar and the rest. The economic inventiveness, the perpetration of nuclear myth, and the grave distortions, however, remain the same. From these small beginning in the UK (and the US and Russia), the dirty technology and the equally dirty tactics spread out over the globe.

The decommissioning of Calder Hall is ongoing, dangerous and slow. As Ewan Hutton, a decommissioner at Sellafield says in this video, the reactors were ‘built in a great hurry and they didn’t really think about how we were going to take them apart’.
When it was closed for decommissioning after 47 years in 2003 (its cooling towers were demolished in 2007), Calder Hall was the world’s oldest nuclear reactor.

The same year the UK government published a policy paper describing ‘nuclear power as "economically unattractive", and focussed on the potential for renewable energy.’ And yet, from that forward-looking thinking, the UK government, like others, with their new calls for a nuclear ‘renaissance’ have slipped back. Back to 1956.

Posted by Justin at 3:45 PM | Permalink

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)

Here’s a nice little round up of the state of the nuclear industry from the UK’s Daily Telegraph…

Is the long-awaited "nuclear renaissance" starting to run out of steam even before it has got under way? It is too early to be sure, but there are disconcerting signs. Intriguingly, the nuclear industry itself is beginning to behave as if it is in trouble.

Far from being the confident global saviour of popular myth, it looks as if the nuclear industry is begging for its very survival. From demanding the UK government fix the price of CO2 emissions, put a cap on the payments for storage of nuclear waste, and limit liabilities for potential damages - all to make nuclear power more competitive - right through to publicly admitting renewable energy programmes are a threat to the nuclear ‘renaissance’, there’s every sign that the nuclear industry is losing its nerve.

Politicians have been convinced by smooth PR and slick presentations - from a propaganda perspective, the industry can certainly talk the talk. But the doubts are growing fast that it can walk the walk.

Posted by Justin at 8:05 PM | Permalink

Another of the nuclear industry’s wild boasts is about its ability to create huge numbers of jobs. It’s often a promise it can’t keep. Just ask Bulgaria whose Prime Minister Stanishev said of the Belene nuclear reactor, "I am proud of Bulgarian power engineers, who are capable of developing such a complicated design". The reactor is of Russian design and with Bulgaria lacking ‘sufficiently educated and skilled specialised construction personnel’ plans were made ‘to bring over hundreds of Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese workers’.

These boasts are also being revised downwards in the UK. Under plans to build ‘up to’ ten new nuclear reactors, the then business minister John Hutton said in September last year that ‘up to’ 100,000 jobs would be created – ten thousand jobs per reactor. Keep an eye on those ‘up to’s – they don’t constitute a promise or a guarantee but merely an aspiration. They work hard at obfuscating, like a magician’s assistant distracting you from what the magician is really doing.

In April, the UK environment minister Ed Miliband said each new reactor now would employ 9,000 people – a drop of 1,000 jobs per reactor on the 2008 ‘up to’. We wonder how much further that jobs-to-reactor figure will fall if the UK government and nuclear industry win the propaganda battle and no longer have to rely on big, unprovable promises to win their case – especially if the builders, finding themselves over budget or behind schedule (as we can fully expect), have to cut costs.

We also wonder how many of those jobs will be only short-term construction jobs just for the duration of build process and how many of those will be imported technicians and labourers rather than local workers as is the case with the EPR reactor construction at Olkiluoto in Finland.

And if – if – the nuclear industry were to create these thousands of jobs, who is going to train them, considering the majority UK’s nuclear experts and builders are now retired or no longer with us?

Take for example, Energus (formerly known as The Nuclear Academy), which has just opened as part of the National Skills Academy for Nuclear in the north-west of England. David Barber, head of training for British Energy, which is part of EDF Energy, who want to build four reactors in the UK (and so create ‘up to’ 36,000 jobs) said:

With the increase in demand for quality skills across all sectors of the nuclear industry it is absolutely essential we have the confidence in our capability to meet this, both for our own workforce and that of our supply chain. We see the National Skills Academy for Nuclear as the key enabler to broker the provision of both provider capacity and quality skills.

Energus is funded by the European Regional Development Fund, The Learning and Skills Council via National Skills Academy for Nuclear, North West Development Agency, Northern Way, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Sellafield Sites and West Lakes Renaissance. That is, not by EDF, who won’t have to pay the bill for training those experts it doesn’t import from France. No wonder they’re so keen on the idea.

Posted by Justin at 5:21 PM | Permalink

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

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

Nuclear reactors are hugely complex machines. What they do and how can be difficult to explain in terms easily understood by the average person. The nuclear industry can use this to its advantage.

Take the incident (rated level 2 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale) at the UK’s Dungeness B reactor that occurred on June 29 this year. Here’s the statement from the reactor’s owner, British Energy, describing what happened…

Whilst lowering a fuel plug unit in order to latch it to a new fuel stringer, it became apparent that the coupling had not latched correctly and that foreign material was trapped between the spring collet assembly and the neutron scatter plug. The debris appears to be a rubber sheet, the source of which is likely to be one of the three covers used to cover the maintenance tubes during earlier cell maintenance activities. The failure to correctly latch was identified during a procedural check as the assembly was being raised. Fuel handling activities were suspended, but the assembly remains suspended by approximately 3 metres.

"As part of the recovery process, polyurethane foam was injected below the suspended stringer to minimise the potential drop height in the event of it de-latching. The foam did not come in contact with the stringer. The subsequent analysis of the foam indicated that it was a material that could act as a moderator, and thus challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates.

Are you any the wiser as to what went on at Dungeness B? Stringers, collets, scatter plugs? This story has hardly had any exposure in the UK media and it’s not difficult to see why – a journalist would have to first be able to understand it and then explain it in a way so that his reader could also. The use of language works in the favour of Dungeness B’s operators – it’s a form of cover-up that takes advantage of people’s understandable ignorance of the complexities of nuclear power.

Take this passage:

The subsequent analysis of the foam indicated that it was a material that could act as a moderator, and thus challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates.

This means that the foam, had it been in the reactor during operation, would have become part of the nuclear reaction. You really don’t want foreign material inside a reactor acting as a moderator – moderation is the vital process whereby the nuclear reaction is controlled – it can make a dangerous nuclear accident more likely. So, ‘challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates’ means ‘break vital safety rules and put people in danger’.

The nuclear industry: they think they’ve made the atom their servant and now they’re trying to do the same with language.

Posted by Justin at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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

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

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

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

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" »

Posted by Justin at 2:08 PM | Permalink

It’s difficult to know whether to laugh at or use a long series of very rude words about this story from the UK’s Sizewell A nuclear reactor.

The reactor is currently being decommissioned. On Sunday January 7 2007 one of the contractors went to the site’s laundry room to wash some clothes. He noticed water leaking into the room. It was found that the water was leaking from the pond holding the site’s 5,000 highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods. A 15 feet-long crack in a pipe leading from the pond had leaked up to 40,000 gallons of radioactive water, some of it into the North Sea.

The site’s safety monitoring systems did not detect the drop in the water levels in the pond. A report by the UK’s Nuclear Installation Inspectorate estimated, had the leak not been found, the pond would have been drained in around ten hours exposing the fuel rods to the air.

This could have caused to the rods to catch fire sending radioactivity material into the atmosphere. The report say ‘that there was significant risk that operators and even members of the public could have been harmed if there had not been fortunate and appropriate intervention of a contractor who just happened to be in the right plant area when things went wrong.’

By sheer chance and luck, a potentially serious nuclear accident was avoided. Who knows what might have happened had that contractor not gone to wash his clothes this day? We imagine he certainly had to wash his underwear once he realised where the water he was standing in was coming from.

Can we believe the spin? Will Sizewell A’s operator’s excuses wash? The Nuclear Installation Inspectorate was financially under-resourced meaning it didn’t have the funds to prosecute the reactor’s operators. One thing’s for sure, nuclear power’s reputation certainly isn’t whiter than white.

Posted by Justin at 7:11 PM | Permalink

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" »

Posted by Justin at 5:01 PM | Permalink

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