Emergency Planning
A SECRET plan to deal with a Chernobyl-style nuclear emergency in central Scotland has finally been revealed in a dossier which has been kept under wraps for decades. The classified documents which show how the government would have responded to a full-scale atomic crisis have been opened and placed in the National Archives. The files outline the steps that would have been taken if lethal substances had leaked from the twin Hunterston A and B nuclear plants on the Ayrshire coast. They reveal that staff at Scotland’s largest hospital were primed to treat victims suffering from burns and radiation sickness, a community centre would have been converted into a decontamination zone and residents would have been issued with anti-radiation tablets.
Scotsman 12th Jan 2015 read more »
Hinkley
Heavy machinery has been arriving at the site of Hinkley Point C, the nuclear power station in Somerset that will cost an estimated £24.5bn.
BBC 8th Jan 2015 read more »
2015 will be a crucial year for the nuclear industry across the world. Japan is expected to start bringing its nuclear reactors back on stream — four years after the Fukushima disaster. Elsewhere, a dozen different countries are considering whether or not to commit to new plants, with the decisions further complicated by the fall in the price of competing fuels such as coal and natural gas. Much depends on what happens in the UK, where the progress of proposed new developments will signal whether nuclear can be competitive as a long term source of energy. The EU has approved, with only minor changes, the structure of subsidies and guarantees for the first proposed new plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset. There is an outstanding legal challenge from Austria, but the lawyers involved seem confident that the challenge will be swept aside. The bigger problem is that the financing of the deal has yet to be settled. It is beginning to look as if the UK government itself might have to fund a large part of the £16bn capital requirement (part of a total construction cost estimated by the EU to amount to £25bn). That sounds grim, especially given the shaky state of the UK’s public finances. But in reality such a solution would reduce costs and allow a sensible reappraisal of the whole deal. The problem, as things stand, is that several potential investors have backed away. Why? How can any investor resist a proposition which includes a 35-year index-linked price guarantee backed by the UK taxpayer — a deal which creates, in effect, a long-term inflation-proof government bond? The answers are slightly different in each case, but come down to one very uncomfortable reality. EDF, the company leading the Hinkley development, has still not taken the final investment decision which would allow the project to go ahead. The underlying reason for this reluctance seems to lie not in the terms, but rather in the deep uncertainty which now exists in the nuclear industry about the EPR reactors — the type that is to be used at Hinkley — and the complexity of construction of the plants in which they will be housed. As well as the problems in Finland, the EPR reactor being built by EDF at Flamanville in Northern France is also years late. EDF and Areva have to convince people not just in the UK but across the world that their technology can actually be brought on stream, and at a reasonable cost. Until that happens, proceeding blindly would be a very risky step not just for UK consumers and taxpayers but also for the companies themselves, and for the whole future of the nuclear business.
FT 11th Jan 2015 read more »
Energy Costs
Ed Miliband has unveiled plans for new powers allowing the energy regulator to force companies to pass on the benefits of cheaper crude oil to customers, emphasising the UK Labour party’s focus on the cost of living in the run-up to the general election. The proposal, to be debated this week in an opposition day motion, comes days after chancellor George Osborne’s review into the alleged failure of suppliers to cut consumer bills after the plunge in oil prices. The Labour leader argued on Sunday that his debate would give ministers the opportunity to “put their money where their mouth is”. “The government should bring forward fast-track regulation to make sure we give the regulator that power [to cut bills]”, he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show. “We’ll give the regulator the power to cut prices to bring immediate relief let’s, in the last three months of this parliament, do something that will actually make a difference.
FT 12th Jan 2015 read more »
Times 12th Jan 2015 read more »
Telegraph 12th Jan 2015 read more »
Electricity Markets
Walt Patterson: We need urgently to revise our assumptions about the regulation of electricity. We need to recognize explicitly that electricity is not a commodity but a whole-system process in infrastructure. What matters is not short-term trading in some putative ‘electricity market’ but long-term investment in this infrastructure. The most important place for such investment, moreover, is at the point where the system is doing what we want to do – the buildings, lamps, motors, electronics and other user- technology. But we need investment everywhere, to replace traditional generation and networks with the innovative technical options now burgeoning, especially decentralized generation and smart networks. To foster this investment we need new regulation, new business models and new revenue streams. What we have is outmoded, unable to cope with the transformation now under way. US network operators, for instance, face a mounting threat from decentralized generation that does not pay, or pay enough, for network access. Yet the more you have to pay for the network the keener you are to leave it and install your own generation, as is now happening hectically in Australia. In Germany the feed-in tariff has dramatically altered the balance between local generation, often owned by communities and individuals, and traditional large-scale remote generation owned by the major German companies. The companies are now in trouble, opposing Germany’s ‘Energiewende’ while struggling frantically to adapt. In the UK the government’s so-called ‘electricity market reform’ is effectively reforming it so that it is hardly a market at all, with so-called ‘contracts for differences’ that essentially offer generators fixed electricity prices even out to 35 years from now, in the case of the controversial Hinkley Point C nuclear plant.
Renew Economy 8th Jan 2015 read more »
Westminster MPs on the Energy and Climate Change Committee will tomorrow (Tuesday) take evidence on Implementation of Electricity Market Reform from: Mark Ripley, Director of Regulation, National Grid; Neil McDermott, Chief Executive, Low Carbon Contracts Company; Matthew Hancock MP, Energy Minister; Jonathan Mills, Director of Electricity Market Reform, Department of Energy and Climate. This session will explore a number of themes, including: The ongoing CfD allocation round; The Capacity Market auction; Lessons learnt and monitoring of EMR implementation; The cost of EMR.
Scottish Energy News 12th Jan 2015 read more »
Finland
Finnish utility Teollisuuden Voima Oy (TVO), which owns and operates the Olkiluoto nuclear power station, is to restructure its operations in an effort to find savings of €15 million a year, saying it is coming under pressure from subsidised energy sources. The company said it will begin a six-week consultation process with employees to find ways to improve “cost efficiency”. It also said delays to the Olkiluoto-3 EPR reactor project have caused “remarkable” additional costs leading to the need to start with these “regrettable” measures. According to preliminary estimates, the planned restructuring will include job cuts of up to 110 staff. The cuts will exclude staff who operate the Olkiluoto nuclear power station, safety engineers and those authorised by Finland’s nuclear regulator to work for the company.
Nucnet 9th Jan 2015 read more »
India
There could be progress on U.S.-India civil nuclear cooperation, solar power and climate change when U.S. President Barack Obama visits India in two weeks, U.S. officials said on Sunday.
Reuters 11th Jan 2014 read more »
Syria
What the German magazine describes as a ‘secret’ Syrian military site has been known to military analysts for some time, and is generally viewed as a weapons depot or communications hub.
Christian Science Monitor 11th Jan 2015 read more »
South Korea
The hacking of South Korea’s nuclear operator means the country’s second-oldest reactor may be shut permanently due to safety concerns, said several nuclear watchdog commissioners, raising the risk that other aging reactors may also be closed.
Reuters 12th Jan 2015 read more »
North Korea
North Korea has told the United States that it would consider a pause in nuclear testing if Washington scraps military drills planned with South Korea this year. Washington hit back calling the linking of the military drills with a possible nuclear test “an implicit threat,” but said it was open to dialogue with the country lead by Kim Jong-un, the North’s official news agency announced yesterday.
Independent 11th Jan 2015 read more »
Iran
Iran and the US will explore ways to give impetus to nuclear talks when their chief diplomats meet in Geneva on Wednesday, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Sunday.
Guardian 11th Jan 2015 read more »
Nuclear Weapons
A bomber pilot from Northamptonshire – who was on standby to drop a nuclear weapon on Russia during the Cold War – is to reveal all in an extraordinary new memoir.
Northampton Chronicle 12th Jan 2015 read more »
Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, has warned that the world is at risk of a “nuclear war” because of the tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine. In an interview with the German magazine Spiegel, Mr Gorbachev said that if either side lost its nerve in the current stand-off, it could lead to nuclear war, and spoke of his fears that the world “will not survive the next few years”.
Telegraph 11th Jan 2015 read more »
Renewables – solar
Investment bank Deutsche Bank is predicting that solar systems will be at grid parity in up to 80 per cent of the global market within 2 years, and says the collapse in the oil price will do little to slow down the solar juggernaut. In his 2015 solar outlook, leading analyst Vishal Shah says solar will be at grid parity in most of the world by the end of 2017. That’s because grid-based electricity prices are rising across the world, and solar costs are still falling. Shah predicts solar module costs will fall another 40 per cent over the next four to five years.
Renew Economy 12th Jan 2015 read more »
Climate
The oil price crash coupled with growing concerns about global warming will encourage at least one of the major oil companies to turn its back on fossil fuels in the near future, predicts an award-winning scientist and former industry adviser. Dr Jeremy Leggett, who has had consultations on climate change with senior oil company executives over 25 years, says it will not be a rerun of the BP story when the company launched its “beyond petroleum” strategy and then did a U-turn. Leggett, now a solar energy entrepreneur and climate campaigner, points to Total of France as the kind of group that could abandon carbon fuels in the same way that E.ON, the German utility, announced plans before Christmas to spin off coal and gas interests and concentrate its future growth on renewables. Pressure on the energy industry to pull out of fossil fuels has grown in recent months with a campaign for pension funds to disinvest from coal, oil and gas.
Guardian 11th Jan 2015 read more »
Fossil Fuels
The rout in the global oil industry caused by plunging prices was driven home this weekend when the chancellor promised “more action” to help the North Sea and latest figures from the United States showed that the number of drilling rigs had fallen by the most in 24 years. Oil exploration is grinding to a halt in Britain and new projects are unlikely to be sanctioned unless taxes fall or there is a recovery in the oil price, which has more than halved since the summer to $50 a barrel.
Times 12th Jan 2015 read more »
North Sea oil and gas companies are to be offered tax concessions by the Chancellor in an effort to avoid production and investment cutbacks and an exodus of explorers. George Osborne has drawn up a set of tax reform plans, following warnings that the industry’s future of the industry is at risk without substantial tax cuts. But the industry fears he will not go far enough. Oil & Gas UK, the industry body, is urging a tax cut of as much as 30pc and an overhaul of what it says is a complex, unfriendly and outdated tax structure.
Telegraph 11th Jan 2015 read more »
Scotsman 12th Jan 2015 read more »
