News August 2019

Businesses must prepare for the move to a low-carbon economy or risk being left behind, the climate action minister has said. Richard Bruton said Irish that enterprise had “failed to break the link” between “economic prosperity and damaging greenhouse gas emissions” as he and Heather Humphreys, the business minister, launched a government strategy to prepare businesses and workers for the transition.

Times 30th Aug 2019 read more »

Australia’s chilling Chernobyl warning: Real risk of ‘catastrophic failure’ if the country adopts nuclear energy.

Daily Mail 29th Aug 2019 read more »

Germany has seen a dramatic decline in the number of new onshore wind farms this year, raising fears that the country will fall even further behind its long-term climate and renewable goals. Only 290 megawatts of new capacity were installed in the first half of 2019, a decline of more than 80 per cent compared with the same period last year and the lowest total in almost two decades. In 2018, Germany installed wind farms with a total capacity of 2,800MW. That, too, was a sharp reduction from 2017, when Germany added more than 5,000MW of wind capacity on land. The fall in new wind farms has alarmed both industry and policymakers. “When it comes to expanding wind energy on land, Germany has fallen from the fast lane to the emergency lane,” Achim Dercks, the deputy director of the German chambers of commerce and industry, told journalists on Wednesday. “If this continues the government will fail to meet its self-proclaimed goals for climate protection and renewable energy.”

FT 28th Aug 2019 read more »

Radioactive Canada UPDATE: Dr. Gordon Edwards on RadWaste, SNC Lavalin.

Nuclear Hotseat 28th Aug 2019 read more »

Ed Lyman: After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) set up a task force to assess whether there were deficiencies in its oversight of nuclear reactor safety. The task force came back with twelve major areas for improvement. Its top recommendation: The agency needed to strengthen its fundamental regulatory framework to reduce the risk that a Fukushima-scale accident could happen in the US. But after dragging their feet for years, the NRC commissioners finally rejected the proposal in March 2016, with then-Commissioner William Ostendorff concluding that “the current regulatory approach has served the Commission and the public well.”

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 29th Aug 2019 read more »

The Flamanville EPR, a nightmare site for EDF. The third-generation Norman reactor, scheduled to be launched in 2012, will not start until the end of 2022 due to faulty welds on the site. Launched in 2007, the third generation EPR reactor was initially to be connected to the electricity grid in 2012, and cost around 3.5 billion euros. In practice, it will not start before the end of 2022, at the earliest, and the bill will rise to more than 11 billion euros. An amount likely to be further revised upwards depending on the work that remains to be done.

Le Monde 30th Aug 2019 read more »

The Astrid Fast Reactor Project is shut down by the Atomic Energy Commission. A blow to the future of the sector. This was to be the next step in the development of the French nuclear industry, one that would allow it to project into the future, but which is likely never to see the light of day. According to our information, the Astrid Fast Neutron Reactor (RNR) project is being abandoned by the Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA), which is nevertheless at the origin.

News1 29th Aug 2019 read more »

Astrid, the acronym for Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration, is a sodium-cooled fast reactor prototype project to be built at the Marcoule nuclear site in the Gard. The objective of this new generation is to use depleted uranium and plutonium as fuel, in other words to reuse the radioactive materials from the electricity generation of the current nuclear fleet and largely stored at the La Hague site. (Channel), operated by Orano (formerly Areva).

Le Monde 29th Aug 2019 read more »

French state nuclear agency CEA has abandoned research into so-called fourth-generation nuclear reactors, newspaper Le Monde reported on Friday. The CEA has done years of research and spent hundreds of millions of euros on developing a new sodium-cooled reactor in the ASTRID (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration) project. In November last year, the CEA had already said it was considering to reduce ASTRID’s capacity to a 100-200 megawatt (MW) research model from the commercial-sized 600 MW originally planned. Le Monde quoted a CEA source as saying that the project is dead and that the agency spends no more time or money on it.

Reuters 30th Aug 2019 read more »