Sellafield
The private consortium in charge of the clean-up of nuclear waste at Sellafield in Cumbria is closing in on a deal to extend its £22bn contract, despite widespread criticism of its performance over the past five years. The revised contract will include more onerous terms. It will, as before, include a “terminate at convenience” clause if progress at the site is not deemed sufficient, in order to underline that nothing is guaranteed. An announcement is expected this week. News of the extension is likely to prompt a backlash in some quarters. Nuclear Management Partners (NMP), which is led by URS of the US, has come under fire from the public accounts committee and the National Audit Office for failing to stem cost overruns and delays. Sellafield is deemed the most challenging and complex nuclear waste site in western Europe and the US. The committee made a stinging attack on the consortium – which also includes France’s Areva and Amec of the UK – after it earned £54m in performance-related fees last year even though only two of the 14 big projects undertaken were on track. Jamie Reed, Labour MP for Copeland where Sellafield is located, told the Financial Times: “If true, I await details of this extension. To date, NMP’s tenure at Sellafield has let down the taxpayer, the industry, the Sellafield workforce, my local community and the NDA. “A contract extension under revised and tightened conditions and fee structures is one of the options I asked the NDA to consider – but it’s now clear that NMP is drinking in the last-chance saloon.”
FT 1st Oct 2013 read more »
The taxpayer-funded consortium running Sellafield has been awarded a five-year extension to its £1.6 billion annual contract, despite being criticised for running behind schedule and over budget on nuclear clean-up work. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which owns the site in Cumbria, will announce on Friday that it will not carry out a threat to strip the Nuclear Management Partners consortium of the contract. The decision is likely to spark fury from unions and MPs, who have accused the consortium — led by URS, of the United States, and made up of Amec and Areva, of France — of ripping off taxpayers. The industry had expected that the contract would be broken up, at least, with parts being put out to tender to other companies. However, it is understood there were concerns that the authority does not have the resources to re-tender parts of such a huge contract and that it could disrupt the clean-up work on the site, one of the most contaminated in the world.
Times 2nd Oct 2013 read more »
Springfields
A nuclear alert at a fuel plant near Preston was lifted this afternoon after deposits from a chimney filter blow-out were found to be non-hazardous. Police cordoned off two roads near the Springfields site at Salwick after fragments of a paper filter were blown over the perimeter fence into nearby fields and gardens. Owners Westinghouse were quick to reassure the public that no dangerous material had escaped in the chimney stack failure.
Lancashire Evening Post 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Energy Costs
SSE: My solution to bringing bills down is therefore to put government policy costs into taxation. This will immediately take over £3 billion off UK energy bills and around £8 billion a year by 2020 – wiping £110 off the average person’s current bill and shifting the cost away from those who can’t afford to pay and on to those who can.
SSE 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Tens of thousands of pensioners face higher gas and electricity bills this winter after an energy giant today announced plans to scrap a tariff aimed at the over 60s. E.on blamed industry reforms backed by the PM David Cameron as it revealed it was pulling its discounted ‘StayWarm’ tariff – which offers fixed-price energy for pensioners based on their actual use over the past year. From next week, these customers will be “renewed” onto E.on’s standard EnergyPlan, which could be as much as £180 a year more expensive, unless they call up and try to find a different deal. E.on insisted it had no choice following proposals from the industry regulator Ofgem for energy suppliers to cut the number of tariffs they offer to just four per fuel.
Telegraph 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Andrew Simms: The Labour party under Ed Miliband – one of the few politicians who really understood climate change – has been seeking an issue to strengthen its challenge to the coalition. It settled on the cost of living in general, and energy prices in particular. In calling for a freeze on energy prices it won almost universal plaudits and seemed to reverse the party’s fortunes. But what was good short-term politics is a bad longer-term survival strategy. Fossil fuels are locked into our power generation system, and keeping high-carbon electricity cheap is about the worst thing you can do for climate change. As even the UN’s high commissioner for human rights said recently, the great challenge is to keep the carbon in the ground.
Guardian 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Energy Investment
So who’s scaring off investors more? Ed or George. This is one to puzzle over, especially with the emergence on Monday of a letter from a number of global ‘investors in the energy sector’ that George Osborne’s removal of a decarbonisation target from the Energy Bill risked the ‘£110bn overhaul of Britain’s energy network’. Well it looks like most investment will have to come from non-Big Six companies not primarily affected by a retail energy price freeze, but far more affected by larger instability and long term uncertainty. Long term uncertainty in an investment market which is seeking to finance the equipment and transmission that will need to sit alongside the different form of energy economy that we are all supposedly signed up to. And they seem to be the ones signing letters to the Chancellor right now.
Alan Whitehead 1st Oct 2013 read more »
The head of energy giant Scottish Power has warned that a pledge by Labour to freeze tariffs could jeopardise billions of pounds-worth of investment and thousands of jobs. Keith Anderson, the Spanish-owned firm’s chief corporate officer, said the policy would sow “doubts and fears” about whether to plough money into the sector as it faces costly modernisation and renewable energy programmes. In a letter to Ed Miliband, who set out plans last week to freeze gas and electricity prices for 20 months if Labour were to win the 2015 general election, Mr Anderson spelt out how this might affect the company’s plans for investment of up to £15 billion in the UK.
Herald 2nd Oct 2013 read more »
Politics
Profound structural change is an area of active and current debate within the political sciences. A variety of different conceptualisations of how and why change as a process occurs have been offered, albeit usually constructed with the benefit of hindsight. We are currently, however, living within a period of profound crises within, and changes and challenges to, existing political institutions. There are a range of current crises ongoing, economic, financial, hegemonic, welfare and environmental, but this paper is concerned in particular with the growing political recognition of anthropogenic climate change and of the need to act to mitigate its effects. Given the close relationship between energy use and climate change emissions transition to a low carbon energy system is widely understood to form a central part of the solution to climate change. This paper provides both specific and contingent explanations of the politics of low carbon energy transition from the starting point that, despite varying degrees of political debate and activity in this area, fossil fuels still provide 87% of global energy consumption and are predicted to dominate significantly for decades to come.
IGov 1st Oct 2013 read more »
This paper examines one aspect of the political dynamics of the transition to a more sustainable energy system in the UK. The focus is on ‘smart grids’, which involve innovation in regulated monopoly electricity networks. The smart grids agenda is central to more sustainable electricity systems, as it will be essential for facilitating more flexible demand, needed for balancing variable renewable generation, as well as incorporating local small-scale technologies such as solar PV, and new technologies such as electric vehicles.
IGov 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Sweden
A huge cluster of jellyfish forced the Oskarshamn plant, the site of one of the world’s largest nuclear reactors, to shut down by clogging the pipes conducting cool water to the turbines. Operators of the plant on the Baltic coast in south-east Sweden had to scramble reactor No 3 on Sunday after tons of jellyfish were caught in the pipes. By Tuesday, the pipes were cleared of the jellyfish and engineers were preparing to restart the 1,400MWe boiling water reactor, said Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for OKG, the plant operator. All three Oskharshamn reactors are boiling-water types, the same technology used for Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, which suffered a catastrophic failure in 2011 after a tsunami breached the facility’s walls and flooded equipment.
Guardian 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Telegraph 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Engineering & Technology 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Mirror 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Sky 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Japan
A Yale Professor is compelling the world to wake up from its nuclear slumber and face some cold-hard facts, “All of humanity will be threatened for thousands of years” if the Fukushima Unit 4 pool can’t be kept cool. Your worries about eating cesium-contaminated fish from the Pacific Ocean are grounded in fact, but this is a world-wide disaster of the most epic proportions just waiting to happen. If nothing else, it points to the necessity of nuclear-free power to fuel the planet, but in the meantime, more than 1,535 fuel rods must be meticulously removed from Unit 4, which in all likelihood is crumbling.
Natural Society 28th Sept 2013 read more »
Fukushima Nuclear Crisis Update for September 27th to September 30th. TEPCO has discovered yet another new leak of contaminated water at its Fukushima Daiichi power plant, this time in a tank holding low-level radioactive water near reactor #6. Workers discovered water seeping out of joints between the tank’s stainless steel panels. It has a capacity of 500 tons, but workers were not able to determine how much water had escaped.
Greenpeace 1st Oct 2013 read more »
THE operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant said four tonnes of rainwater contaminated with low levels of radiation leaked during an operation to transfer the water between tank holding areas. Tokyo Electric Power Co, known as Tepco, has been trying to contain contaminated water at the Fukushima site after it found 300 tonnes of radioactive water had leaked from a tank at the plant.
Herald 2nd Oct 2013 read more »
A Japanese fast-food chain has set up a joint venture to produce and market food from the Fukushima prefecture a region badly affected by the nuclear accident that followed the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Yoshinoya will provide funds through a joint venture held with local farmers who will grow rice and vegetables in the region, produce which could then make it on to the tables of the 1,175 restaurants the chain operates in Japan.
FT 1st Oct 2013 read more »
While the continuing environmental disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has grabbed world headlines — with hundreds of tons of contaminated water flowing into the Pacific Ocean daily — a human crisis has been quietly unfolding. Two and a half years after the plant belched plumes of radioactive materials over northeast Japan, the almost 83,000 nuclear refugees evacuated from the worst-hit areas are still unable to go home. Some have moved on, reluctantly, but tens of thousands remain in a legal and emotional limbo while the government holds out hope that they can one day return.
New York Times 2nd Oct 2013 read more »
Video: Losing hope: More than two years after the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima Prefecture, thousands of refugees, desperate to return home, are losing confidence in the Japanese government’s cleanup efforts.
New York Times 1st Oct 2013 read more »
US
The Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) on Tuesday approved recovery of $43.4 million for construction of planned nuclear generation and improvements to existing nuclear units for NextEra Energy Inc’s Florida Power & Light Co unit.
Reuters 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Iran
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has urged the international community not to be deceived by the moderate tone of the new Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, calling him a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, as intent as his bellicose predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on developing a nuclear bomb.
Independent 1st Oct 2013 read more »
A nuclear-armed Iran would be as dangerous as “50 North Koreas” and the country’s new president is trying to “fool the world”, Benjamin Netanyahu has declared.
Telegraph 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Settling the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear programme is a diplomatic minefield.
Telegraph 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Trident
A senior Danish MP has claimed that Scotland would be immediately invited into Nato after independence — and that forcing the removal of Trident would have “absolutely no impact”. The nation would have to reapply to join the EU, it was predicted, but the process could be “very fast” and complete in the two years between the referendum and becoming independent.
Courier 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Energy Efficiency
Nosey neighbours will be able to find out if householders near by are using less electricity and gas. E.ON customers who sign up to the new online service can compare the monthly energy use of 100 other anonymous customers of the German-owned energy supplier living in similar homes in the area. The scheme is designed to encourage people to cut their energy consumption — and bills — by engaging in a spot of healthy, albeit anonymous, competition with their neighbours.
Times 2nd Oct 2013 read more »
Climate
The BBC has been criticised for its coverage of the most comprehensive scientific study on global warming yet published. Prominent climate experts have accused the corporation of bias towards “climate sceptics” at the expense of mainstream scientists. According to John Ashton, formerly the top climate-change official at the Foreign Office, the BBC’s coverage of last week’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was “a betrayal of the editorial professionalism on which the BBC’s reputation has been built over generations”. Writing in the Guardian on Wednesday, he says the BBC had given “the appearance of scientific authority to those with no supporting credentials”. He questions why a senior corporation figure had long meetings about climate change with Nigel Lawson and Peter Lilley, both prominent UK sceptics. His criticism was echoed by other green campaigners, and academics.
Guardian 1st Oct 2013 read more »
The IPCC’s report on the state of the climate spells out for the first time how much of the greenhouse gases available to humanity we can afford to burn. The answer is not good news. The IPCC has now set a total for the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases which it has concluded can safely be burnt during this century while offering at least a 50% chance of staying below the 2°C figure. The total is somewhere between 820 bn and 1,445 bn tonnes. The quantity of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere each year is now around 50 bn tonnes, so without sustained reductions there must be a fair chance – on present trends – of reaching the IPCC’s lower limit around 2030. If emissions continue to rise, though, there will be less time left to ensure the world remains within the IPCC’s frame.
Climate News Network 1st Oct 2013 read more »
Fossil Fuels
A government fact-finding trip to the US to study the impact of fracking was switched at the last minute away from a state where floods at drilling sites had caused oil and gas leaks. Greg Barker, the Energy Minister, had been due to visit Colorado a fortnight ago to learn about the environmental impact of fracking and judge whether Britain could license hundreds of drilling sites safely. Noble Energy, the company hosting his visit, moved the location 1,500 miles away to Pittsburgh after finding leaks at some of its Colorado wells and shutting them down.
Times 2nd Oct 2013 read more »
