Nuclear Safety
Public confidence in the safety of nuclear power received a series of blows this week as one power station was fined over radioactive leaks, it was reported that another nuclear waste-processing plant could close after fewer than seven years of operation, and it emerged that the Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee (NuSAC) was quietly scrapped last year.
Business Green 18th Feb 2009 more >>
Letter from HSE: Your article implies that HSE’s Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee was wound up because it raised inconvenient issues. In fact, NuSAC had reached the end of its term of office and the HSE board decided to defer any decision on future arrangements for providing independent technical advice on nuclear safety, pending various reviews. Any decision will need to take account of the arrangements, yet to be finalised, to implement the Stone review of nuclear regulation and to follow on from any resulting adjustments. In addition, the traditional advisory committee structure is not necessarily the only route to providing advice to HSE. Its nuclear directorate is staffed by experts and it calls on many external sources of advice on nuclear safety to supplement them. The “unpublicised” NuSAC report has, in fact, been published on the HSE website.
Guardian 18th Feb 2009 more >>
Bradwell
A British judged has fined the operator of a nuclear power plant 250,000 pounds ($365,000) for allowing radioactive waste to seep into the ground over a 14-year period. The judge also ordered Magnox Electric Ltd. on Tuesday to pay 150,000 in costs associated with the trial.
Business Week 17th Feb 2009 more >>
Metro 17th Feb 2009 more >>
Telegraph 18th Feb 2009 more >>
Daily Mail 17th Feb 2009 more >>
Essex Chronicle and Gazette 17th Feb 2009 more >>
Colchester and North Essex Gazette 17th Feb 2009 more >>
Mirror 18th Feb 2009 more >>
Nuclear Waste
In the ‘funny if it weren’t so scary’ category we have the advert which ran last week in the Whitehaven News, the local paper for west Cumbria where Sellafield is to be found. As reported in the Guardian at the weekend, LLW Repository Ltd – the company which has recently taken over managing the site – have found there are significant holes in records detailing what radioactive waste was dumped in the repository at nearby Drigg; so they’re appealing for people who worked at Sellafield in the 60s, 70s and 80s to rack their brains and fill in the gaps.
Greenpeace 17th Feb 2009 more >>
Sellafield
Union leaders today called for new investment in a nuclear reprocessing plant amid speculation over its future and warnings that up to 2,000 jobs were at risk. Environmental campaigners said the mixed oxide plant at Sellafield in Cumbria may have to close even though it had cost the taxpayer £472 million. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority confirmed that the future of the plant was under review, but said no decision had been made. Greenpeace said “For years we urged the Government to treat the industry’s predictions with the scepticism they deserved, but our pleas fell on deaf ears. Now we’re seeing the whole sorry saga repeated with nuclear new-build. Once again the same tired lines about sparkling new equipment are wrapped in make-believe financial forecasts, and ministers are swallowing it all hook, line and sinker.”
24 Dash 17th Feb 2009 more >>
Daily Express 18th Feb 2009 (not on web)
New Nukes
Azeem Ibrahim, Research Fellow at International Security Programme, Harvard University, says power and energy priorities must include the nuclear option.
Scotsman 18th Feb 2009 more >>
Letter from Pete Roche: Steuart Campbell has missed the point. As Dr Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says, nuclear power supplies only about 3.6 per cent of total UK energy used. Replacing nuclear reactors with gas and coal power stations by 2020 would raise carbon emissions only by about 4-8 per cent. We could compensate for that with increases in energy efficiency. The risk is that focusing on a new nuclear programme will divert resources, public and private, financial and political, away from what we should be doing on renewable energy and energy efficiency. If the nuclear programme falters because of public opposition or perhaps an accident somewhere, we will fail to meet our climate change targets. And we cannot afford to wait until 2020 or later to find out.
Scotsman 18th Feb 2009 more >>
Letter: Before we rule out nuclear, we need to make some calculations on predicted demand and how it will be supplied. Can we fill the gap with renewables or will we be forced to go nuclear? Scotland has a relatively small population for its land mass, so it has a better chance, but England and the UK have nowhere near enough potential without going nuclear. People tend to underestimate the colossal energy density of fossil fuels, and how difficult it will be to find a substitute.
Various other letters including: So the Secretary of State for Scotland, Jim Murphy, wants Scotland to join England and a number of other countries in building new nuclear power stations. These will all have to be fuelled with uranium, an increasingly scarce and difficult-to-extract element. Can he guarantee its availability, or cost?
Herald 18th Feb 2009 more >>
Scotland
Dr Richard Dixon, WWF Scotland, on why Labour is knocking the SNP so hard on nuclear: This is much more a political dispute than a technical one. Labour have decided that the SNP’s opposition to nuclear is something they can ridicule. At the same time the SNP are making great progress on renewable energy to demonstrate the alternatives are real.
Scotsman 18th Feb 2009 more >>
Companies
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd said it would spin off its nuclear fuel business on April 1 to form an integrated fuel design, production and service company together with France’s Areva and two other Mitsubishi group companies.
Yahoo 18th Feb 2009 more >>
US
New nuclear power plants must be built to ensure that a strike by a commercial airplane won’t result in a radioactive release, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.
Bloomberg 18th Feb 2009 more >>
Iran
Iran’s hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has said Washington’s relations with Tehran and the region can change if there is an effective policy shift by the United States, but the nuclear issue is closed.
Telegraph 18th Feb 2009 more >>
Iran is still not helping U.N. nuclear inspectors find out whether it worked on developing an atom bomb in the past but Tehran has slowed its expansion of a key nuclear facility, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Tuesday.
Reuters 17th Feb 2009 more >>
Yahoo 17th Feb 2009 more >>
Canada
Canadian power utility Hydro-Quebec has selected GE Energy to perform a turbine island refurbishment that will extend the reliable operating life of the 675MW Gentilly-2 nuclear generating station, which supplies power to Montreal and the Quebec City in Canada.
Energy Business Review 17th Feb 2009 more >>
NFLAs
ONE of Manchester’s longest serving councillors, former Lord Mayor Bill Risby, has died in a car accident. Mr Risby was one of the founders of the Nuclear Free Movement – and famously led the declaration of Manchester as a Nuclear Free city. It is thought Mr Risby, 78, who had suffered poor health for months, may have had a seizure while driving on Moston Lane. He collided with another car and died a short time later in hospital. Mr Risby’s opposition to nuclear power and support for renewable energy inspired local authorities across the country to follow Manchester’s `nuclear free’ example. He was also a leading figure in the city’s trade union movement and led several council committees.
Manchester Evening News 16th Feb 2009 more >>
