Sellafield
Amongst a raft of Cumbrian ventures to have won funding last week from the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) is the proposed Nuclear Technology Innovation Gateway. £1.5M of taxpayers’ money has been secured for the new facility by Cumbria’s Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and, over the next 2 years, will go towards the £26.5M total cost of the facility. The cash injection, through the Government’s Local Growth Fund, was welcomed by LEP’s Board Chairman George Beveridge who is also Sellafield Ltd’s Deputy Managing Director and Chief Business Officer. The Nuclear Technology Innovation Gateway, to be built at Westlakes – Sellafelds’s satellite science park close to Whitehaven – is billed as being the centrepiece of the Cumbria Centre of Nuclear Excellence programme. With ‘remainder funding’ earmarked from the University of Manchester, the National Nuclear Laboratory and Europe to meet the total £26.5M cost, construction of the facility is scheduled for completion by 2017. Yet the project will only create 60 jobs by 2020 – a fraction of those projected to be created by all the other Cumbrian ventures to have secured funding from BIS last week. For example a £2M cash injection from BIS for an Opportunity Connectivity project which is designed to improve sustainable travel and access to visitor destinations within Cumbria is projected to create 450 jobs by 2020. Equally as contentious as the poor return on jobs is the LEP claim that the Nuclear Technology Innovation Gateway will ‘showcase UK excellence in fuels, computing, reprocessing and remote engineering’ – a claim hardly borne out by Sellafield’s well documented record of project failures, poor commercial performance and accidents.
CORE 13th July 2014 read more »
Energy Supplies
Our current electricity system cannot accept much wind and solar power because they lack the ‘inertia’ of spinning turbines that stabilises grid voltage, writes Marek Kubik. But that’s no reason to limit renewables – there are new, smart solutions ready for deployment. It’s inefficient to hold back zero-carbon, zero-fuel-cost electricity for the sake of running expensive and carbon-intensive fossil fuel power plants. Politically, it’s embarrassing, but there are ways around this – and some countries are taking the lead.
Ecologist 13th July 2014 read more »
Fissile Material
Most people would agree that keeping track of dangerous material is generally a good idea. So it may come as a surprise to some that the arrangements that are supposed to account for weapon-grade fissile materials—plutonium and highly enriched uranium—are sketchy at best. The most recent example involves several hundreds kilograms of plutonium that appear to have fallen through the cracks in various reporting arrangements. Earlier this year, Masafumi Takubo, a Japanese researcher (and member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials), was putting together a report on the use of plutonium-containing MOX fuel in Japan’s nuclear reactors. What he discovered in the process was that the public record of Japan’s plutonium holdings failed to account for about 640 kilograms of the material. The error made its way to the annual plutonium management report that Japan voluntarily submits to the International Atomic Energy Agency (these are known as INFCIRC/549 reports). The 640 kg in question—not a trivial amount by any measure—were not included in the two most recent reports that Japan sent to the IAEA.
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 7th July 2014 read more »
Waste Transport
Too much high-level nuclear waste is already being stockpiled at the Savannah River Site, an ecologically sensitive location that wasn’t designed for long-term storage of the dangerous material. So the last thing we should be doing is importing more nuclear waste into the site from Germany. But that’s the plan the federal government is working on. The State newspaper reported that at a hearing in Columbia Thursday, federal officials said the German government is paying researchers at the site to study the waste.
Group State 13th July 2014 read more »
Utilities
Ovo Energy, one of the fastest-growing independent energy suppliers and a poster child of the industry, has been accused of potentially putting customers’ money at risk by demanding that they pay upfront. Ecotricity, a rival independent supplier, has complained to Ofgem and says that it is considering referring the company to the Financial Conduct Authority, the City watchdog. Ovo, which denies the allegation, has also been accused of breaching a licence condition that Ecotricity claims gives it an unfair advantage and discriminates against lower-income households.
Times 14th July 2014 read more »
Consumers have lodged a record number of complaints against energy companies with thousands saying they had not received bills and others condemning poor customer service. The number of complaints made to the Energy Ombudsman doubled to more than 10,000 in the first six months of 2014 compared to the previous six months. The majority of the complaints were about bills with thousands saying they had not received them. Others complained that switching accounts was difficult – in total 2,988 people complained about transfers, up 146 per cent.
Telegraph 13th July 2014 read more »
Japan – Fukushima
In fading light and just a stone’s throw from the most terrifying scenes during Japan’s worst nuclear accident, engineers resumed their race against time to defeat the next big threat: thousands of tonnes of irradiated water. If all goes to plan, by next March Fukushima Daiichi’s four damaged reactors will be surrounded by an underground frozen wall that will be a barrier between highly toxic water used to cool melted fuel inside reactor basements and clean groundwater flowing in from surrounding hills. But now there are doubts over ice wall to keep Fukushima safe from damaged nuclear reactors.
Guardian 13th July 2014 read more »
Iran
Britain must establish a diplomatic presence in Iran to capitalise on a potential deal on the the country’s nuclear programme or lose out on global race to trade with Tehran, an influential Commons committee has said.
Telegraph 14th July 2014 read more »
JOINT efforts by US Secretary of State John Kerry and three other Western foreign ministers yesterday failed to advance faltering nuclear talks with Iran, with the target date for a deal only a week away.
Scotsman 14th July 2014 read more »
John Kerry joined a last ditch effort to settle the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear ambitions on Sunday as the clock ticked towards a deadline for a final agreement.
Telegraph 13th July 2014 read more »
Guardian 13th July 2014 read more »
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Sunday that any nuclear deal leaving Iran with the capability to enrich uranium would be “catastrophic.”
Middle East Online 13th July 2014 read more »
Five unresolved issues.
Guardian 13th July 2014 read more »
Renewables
Why are renewables moving so slowly? Of course the output of renewable energy is growing in absolute terms and in terms of market share in most countries in the world. But the growth starts from a very low base. On the International Energy Agency’s latest numbers, renewables provide just 13 per cent of total global energy needs at the moment, and will provide only 18 per cent by 2035. If traditional biomass is excluded the figures are 7 per cent and 14 per cent. The problem is cost. Electricity produced from offshore wind and solar costs somewhere between 50 and 100 per cent more per MW/hr than power from natural gas and, with some variations, will continue to do so for the next decade unless one makes the assumption that gas prices are going to increase. Onshore wind is cheaper and in the US in particular is the closest of all the renewables to being competitive without subsidies. Som e of these costs are falling but not by enough. Solar in particular is seeing some cost reductions but the costs of other renewables are stubbornly high. The result is that the sector remains a subsidy dependent business. Reliance on subsidies creates a public policy risk, particularly if climate change slips down the political agenda. The second problem is that the need for subsidies is growing. International market prices for gas and coal in particular are falling – driven down by the impact of US shale gas production, a general excess of supply and limited demand growth. And there is no prospect, even in the European Union, of a carbon price on the scale necessary to make renewables competitive. Ten years ago when I worked at BP we came up with the idea of creating a renewables multinational by combining BP’s alternative energy business with that of Shell as part of a wider combination of the two companies. The overall deal, as described in John Browne’s book Beyond Business, never happened but I think this specific idea remains valid, and of course need not be limited to those two companies. A multinational could also be created by the combination of some of the more successful companies in the renewables sector, or by a set of determined external investors.
FT 13th July 2014 read more »
Renewables – offshore wind
A PROJECT to reduce the cost and time it takes to establish offshore wind farms is to benefit from £2.2 million of Government funding. Nine developers with around 70 per cent of the UK’s offshore energy capacity will work to share knowledge and best practice in areas such as building foundations, maintenance of turbines, electrical systems and cable installation. The Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) programme will receive £200,000 in the 2014/15 financial year and £2,000,000 in 2015/16.
Scotsman 13th July 2014 read more »
Click Green 13th July 2014 read more »
