Sellafield
Margaret Hodge says Nuclear Management Partners’ contract should be terminated if performance does not improve. The American-led consortium presiding over the clean-up of hazardous nuclear waste at Sellafield must be stripped of its contract if it does not improve a performance that has seen the bill rise to more than £70bn, according to a committee of MPs. A report from the public accounts committee said progress at the nuclear complex in Cumbria had been poor, with missed targets, escalating costs, slipping deadlines and weak leadership. The MPs made a series of recommendations focusing on the role of the private consortium, Nuclear Management Partners (NMP), which was brought in by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) six years ago to help improve the plant’s performance. The report concluded that the consortium was to blame for many of the escalating costs and the MPs said they could not understand why the NDA extended the consortium’s contract last October.
Guardian 11th Feb 2014 read more »
The bill faced by taxpayers for the clean-up of Sellafield will spiral above the £70 billion official estimate because of continuing project delays and budget overruns, MPs have warned.
Times 11th Feb 2014 read more »
Mirror 11th Feb 2014 read more »
Telegraph 11th Feb 2014 read more »
Nuclear decommissioning work at Sellafield has been slammed by MPs, who will today criticise “big delays and huge cost overruns” on a number of projects in a new report that warns taxpayers’ interests are not being protected.The Committee of Public Accounts (PAC) today takes aim at the decision to renew a £230m contract with Nuclear Management Partners (NMP), a consortium of private sector companies, for a further five years despite the company’s “poor performance”. It also challenges the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s strategy for dealing with the plutonium stored at Sellafield, the UK’s largest and most hazardous nuclear site.
Business Green 11th Feb 2014 read more »
Utility Week 11th Feb 2014 read more »
A government agency extended the contract with a private sector consortium to decommission the Sellafield nuclear plant despite its poor performance and ‘astonishing’ cost increases, MPs have said today.
Public Finance 11th Feb 2014 read more »
House of Commons Public Accounts Committee Report.
House of Commons 11th Feb 2014 read more »
Heysham
On the third anniversary of the nuclear incident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, all concerned people are invited to join a one-hour vigil on Saturday, 8 March at Heysham Nuclear Power Station to say: ‘No more Fukushimas; No more nuclear waste; No nuclear weapons!’
Independent Catholic News 9th Feb 2014 read more »
Scotland
The question of whether energy bills would rise in the event of Scottish independence has come into sharp focus. Shadow Energy Secretary Caroline Flint has insisted householders would pay more post-yes, but the Scottish government’s Energy Minister Fergus Ewing hit back saying her claim was about “making political threats”. Both politicians spoke to BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme. Here, Euan Phimister, professor of economics at Aberdeen University with expertise in energy markets, looks at their claims and counter claims.
BBC 5th Feb 2014 read more »
Energy Policy
What passes for energy policy in the UK took another turn for the worse yesterday when Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, waded into the debate about energy prices by suggesting that both Centrica and SSE are profiteering from gas sales and should possibly be broken up. It’s only right and proper that politicians should have their say but to be treating energy providers as a political football when there is already an independent investigation by regulators going on, and at a time when we desperately need rational debate over the trade-offs between affordability, reliability and the environment, is extraordinarily irresponsible. The political opportunism of the opposition leader, Ed Miliband, in promising to freeze prices is one thing but Mr Davey is a senior member of the Government and should understand the damage his interventions do better than any. Few will invest in a market where what little political certainty there was is being cynically squandered in pursuit of the populist vote. Evidence of an investment strike grows by the day. We may be just years away from brown-outs and other emergency measures to ration energy use, so serious is the looming deficit in supply. This is not just a British problem; it is European wide. Right across the EU, an ill-managed rush to renewables is causing energy prices to sky rocket. Perversely, it is also causing coal-fired electricity generation to come roaring back in a desperate bid to plug growing gaps in supply. As a consequence, emissions are going up rather than down.
Telegraph 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Ministers are free to pick fights whenever they wish, but this is a strange moment for the Liberal Democrat energy secretary, Ed Davey, to wonder aloud if British Gas ought to be broken up.Didn’t the prime minster order an independent review – indeed, an annual competition test – to determine what action is needed in the energy market? And isn’t that review, conducted by the Office of Fair Trading, Ofgem and the Competition & Markets Authority, due to be published in about six weeks’ time? Yes and yes. The timing of Davey’s intervention looks, at best, like an act of party political positioning and, at worst, like an attempt to influence an independent inquiry. It’s not as if Davey has unearthed new material that needs to be announced with great fanfare to emphasise its importance. The fact that British Gas’s profit margin in gas was 11% in 2012 has been public knowledge since last June because the company had to make the disclosure in its segmental accounts submitted to Ofgem.
Guardian 10th Feb 2014 read more »
The biggest problem hanging over the energy sector in the UK and across Europe is uncertainty. There is doubt about price support levels, about the role if any of new nuclear and offshore wind, about future commitments on decarbonisation. There is doubt about the outcome of the Scottish referendum, and whether this could affect the UK renewables subsidies on which Scottish wind farms depend. There is doubt about about the price freeze promised if Labour wins the next election. Not all of these doubts can be settled quickly and business as ever has to live with some measure of uncertainty. But Mr Davey has now thrown another spanner in the wheel.
FT 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Energy secretary Ed Davey’s attack on British Gas and SSE for making double digit profits will win him support from hard pressed consumers but it ignores the fundamental issue that is driving up the cost of energy in the UK: As a nation we increasingly depend on expensive imports of natural gas to keep us warm in the winter.
Telegraph 10th Feb 2014 read more »
British Gas has defended its profit margin by saying its parent company Centrica “does more than any other organisation to secure gas and power for British consumers”, after Ed Davey, energy secretary, suggested it could be broken up to curb a monopoly.
Telegraph 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Europe
The European Commission’s proposal for 27% of electricity to be generated by renewables by 2030 — with no reponsibility for individual countries to meet the target — has been dismissed as a “sham” by the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). Austria’s wind federation IG Windkraft says the EC package is a homage to the nuclear industry, which lobbied hard for a single greenhouse gas target because this could also be reached with nuclear power. The recent flurry of new nuclear project announcements across the continent now seems no coincidence despite nuclear’s expense and problems that include operational safety, security and the cost of long term radioactive waste storage.
Windpower Monthly 10th Feb 2014 read more »
France
France has entered into a national debate about its energy transition to meet its long range target to reduce CO2 emissions by 75 per cent by 2050, while maintaining security of supply and the competitiveness of French industry. It is a muddled debate, because the trigger for it is an electoral commitment made by President François Hollande to reduce the nuclear share in the country’s electricity mix from over 70 per cent today to around 50 per cent by 2025, a commitment that few people in France – and maybe not even the president himself – regard as sensible or feasible to carry out to the letter. There is, however, a real nuclear issue to debate: how far is France content to rest on its laurels of a nuclear industry that has produced some of the cheapest and certainly the most de-carbonised electricity in Europe, rather than to confront the long term cost challenge of replacing current reactors, the systemic risk of operating a nuclear fleet of 58 reactors, and the prospect of one day having to re-carbonise its electricity system if it cannot replace today’s generations of reactors with similar amounts of zero-carbon electricity?
Renew Economy 11th Feb 2014 read more »
Balkans
If assessment studies are even roughly accurate, the countries of the Western Balkans – Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia – have enormous potential to exploit renewable energy resources. The region abounds in year-around sun, untapped hydro, gusty coasts, and rich agricultural land. Moreover, the first undersea transmission cables from the Adriatic coast to Italy will be operational by 2015, long before the transmission network envisioned for the Desertec project links Northern Africa to continental Europe. Could the Balkans export renewable energy to mainland Europe in the near future? Would western European investment and the resources of South Eastern Europe create a win-win situation for everyone involved?
Renew Economy 11th Feb 2014 read more »
Japan – geothermal
Construction plans for mid-sized geothermal plants is becoming a boom energy concern across Japan in the wake of the 2011 “Great East Japan Earthquake” that effectively destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi six nuclear reactor complex. As a significant milestone on Japan’s increasing diversification of energy sources, in April Chuo Electric Power Co. will open a new geothermal plant in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan’s first geothermal power plant opened since 1999. The move toward renewables by the world’s third largest economy is not insignificant.
Oil Price 5th Feb 2014 read more »
US – Radwaste
The Department of Energy is conducting a pilot project to solve one of the most intractable energy problems – a solution to a storage site for radioactive nuclear waste. Using salt beds in New Mexico, the project is studying whether or not salt beds provide the answer. DOE is carving out space deep in these salt beds and packing them with boxes and barrels of nuclear waste, according to an article by Matthew Wald of The New York Times.
Oil Price 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Nuclear Weapons
A new analysis published today reveals the total UK government spending on research and development for nuclear weapons to be over £320 million per year. The estimate includes R&D spending on: nuclear warheads at the Atomic Weapons Establishment; early development work for new ‘Successor’ submarines, planned to carry nuclear weapons well into the 2040s; and the nuclear propulsion system for those submarines. The figure covers the three financial years from 2008 to 2011, and is the latest that is publicly available.
Scientists for Global Responsibility 10th Feb 2014 read more »
What sort of a nation would spend five times more on developing weapons of mass destruction – including delivery systems – than on the R&D for renewable energy that is so central to tackling climate change? Figures just published reveal one such nation to be the UK.
New Scientist 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Britain’s nuclear weapons are irrelevant to any existing and foreseeable threats posed by foreign states and there is an urgent need for a wider and more informed public and parliamentary debate about their use, according to an authoritative independent report to be published on Tuesday. There must be a much deeper debate about whether to retain or modernise the Trident nuclear ballistic missile fleet given its expense – estimated to be be £100bn over its lifetime – at a time of austerity, and the risks of accident and proliferationit creates, it adds. “Britain’s nuclear weapons should be subject to the same cost-effectiveness test and public scrutiny that all public expenditure has to be subjected to,” says the report by the Nuclear Education Trust, an independent charity.
Guardian 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Hundreds of workers at the Faslane and Coulport naval and armament bases on the Clyde are to hold a mass meeting to discuss potential strike dates. The Unite union said Tuesday’s meeting was in response to operator Babcock Marine refusing to enter conciliation talks.
BBC 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Submarine Dismantling
The leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats has demanded the Ministry of Defence (MoD) give a guarantee not to turn Rosyth Dockyard into a “nuclear submarine dump”. Mid-Scotland and Fife MSP Willie Rennie’s latest call comes amid renewed fears that an MoD plan to start dismantling seven defunct nuclear submarines at Rosyth will lead to hundreds of tonnes of radioactive waste being dumped in Scotland. Mr Rennie is concerned the waste will be stored at the yard for decades after the submarines are dismantled because the UK Government has not established a new nuclear waste storage site.
Dundee Courier 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Renewables – Caribbean
Aruba in the southern Caribbean has 107,000 people, a lot of wind and sun and, until very recently, one very big problem. Despite the trade winds and sunshine, it was spending more than 16% of its economy on importing 6,500 barrels of diesel fuel a day to generate electricity. People were furious at the tripling of energy prices in 10 years and the resulting spiralling costs of imported water and food. That changed at the Rio earth summit in 2012, when the prime minister, Mike Eman, announced that the former oil-producing Dutch island close to Venezuela planned to switch to 100% renewables by 2020. Working with the independent US energy group the Rocky Mountain Institute and the business NGO Carbon War Room, Aruba ditched its old steam turbines for more efficient engines and changed the way it desalinated seawater.
Guardian 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Fuel Poverty
A coalition of businesses and NGOs has accused the Treasury of hypocrisy over its refusal to use proceeds from carbon taxes to insulate the UK’s housing stock. A new report, authored by an ex-Treasury economist for campaign group Energy Bill Revolution, which is made up of nearly 200 UK charities, businesses, unions, consumer, and health groups, highlights how the Treasury’s decision to retain proceeds from emissions trading and the carbon floor price is something of an anomaly. Revenues from other policies classed as environmental taxes are set aside to be reinvested in specific programmes. For example, the Renewables Obligation funds green energy incentives and the London Congestion Charge is reinvested in Transport for London.
Business Green 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Energy Efficiency
The European Union will be urged to scrap the confusing A+, A++ and A+++ energy labels for washing machines, refrigerators and other appliances over fears the additional grades are failing to drive up standards among white goods manufacturers. Consultancy Ecofys is currently reviewing the EU’s Energy Labelling Directive and Ecodesign measures on behalf of the Commission to ensure they are being implemented in a way consumers can understand.
Business Green 10th Feb 2014 read more »
Fossil Fuels
The Board of Supervisors recently passed a resolution urging The City’s Retirement Board to divest municipal pension funds of $583 million in fossil fuel stocks. The Retirement Board didn’t take up the recommendation, opting instead to join shareholder resolutions promoting change in the fossil fuel industry and to continue to study the possibility of full divestment. This result is not ideal, but it does pave the way for a historic discussion. As the board studies divestment, I believe it will discover a powerful financial argument for selling off fossil fuel stocks. It will also highlight a question with major implications for our city: After we divest, how do we reinvest? San Francisco would be the largest institutional investor to divest from fossil fuels, but it’s far from the first. Universities, religious organizations, insurers and other municipalities are all dumping their dirty energy stocks.
Energy Collective 7th Feb 2014 read more »
