Nuclear Supply Chain
LORD MANDELSON is close to sealing a £170m government-backed deal for a nuclear manufacturing facility just days after Corus mothballed its steel plant on Teesside. The business secretary has been leading talks between Sheffield Forgemasters, the engineering firm, and Westinghouse, the nuclear reactor maker, for months about arranging a financing package for a 15,000-tonne press that would be used to make pressure vessels and castings for nuclear reactors. Today these are made by a handful of highly specialised facilities, all located in Japan. The deal with Sheffield, which gained notoriety in the 1990s when it was embroiled in the “Supergun affair” over arms sales to Iraq, would secure a critical piece of infrastructure for a new generation of nuclear reactors in Britain. The first new reactor is not expected before 2017 and industry experts say the timeline is already slipping. This is due in part to wrangling between industry and government over subsidies. Utilities are lobbying for a mechanism that ensures a minimum price for power so they can be sure they will be able to recoup the large upfront building costs. The government has said from the outset that it will not subsidise the industry.
Sunday Times 21st Feb 2010 more >>
Dungeness
The Labour Government has now refused to assess the suitability of Dungeness and vicinity for new renewable energy projects, following its earlier decision not to build a new nuclear power station on the site.
Nick Perry 20th Feb 2010 more >>
Fast Reactors
The International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) has condemned Fast Breeder Reactors. ‘After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars,’ it says, ‘the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries.’ In a damning judgement, the IPFM report says that the reactors are ‘plagued by high costs, often multi-year downtime for repairs (including a 15-year reactor restart delay in Japan), multiple safety problems (among them often catastrophic sodium fires triggered simply by contact with oxygen), and unresolved proliferation risks’.
Greenpeace Nuclear Reaction 19th Feb 2010 more >>
New models for nuclear reactors have been attracting a lot of interest recently, with all sorts of ideas touted as the solution to the problems of the standard designs in use today. The huge cost, and delays and budget over-runs in construction, of third generation reactors such as Areva’s EPR, along with concerns about their safety, has inspired a search for new smaller designs, including some that are only the size of a garden shed. There is also renewed excitement over fourth-generation reactor technology that can use spent uranium fuel as its feed-stock. One version of fourth generation technology that is decades old, but is earning a new lease of life as a potential solution to the problem of dealing with nuclear fuel waste is the fast reactor. The IPFM, however, is sceptical. The report argues that the use of these reactors as a global solution to the problem of nuclear waste, suggested as part of the Bush administration’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership in 2006, had already been shown to be ineffective.
FT 18th Feb 2010 more >>
EDF
Energy company EDF plans to build France’s biggest solar-power plant at the Euro Disney theme park resort on the outskirts of Paris. A sweeping structure would see solar cells cover huge canopies built above Euro Disney’s 11,000-space car park, which is one of the biggest in Europe. The canopies could also collect rainwater to reduce Euro Disney’s water consumption, and the solar energy they generate would be used on-site or sold back into the grid.
Independent on Sunday 21st Feb 2010 more >>
Energy Policy
The Conservatives’ flagship energy paper may not appear until April – six months after its original planned publication – leading to industry fears of policy disagreements in the run-up to the election.
Sunday Telegraph 21st Feb 2010 more >>
Fusion
BRITISH scientists have drawn up plans to build the world’s first nuclear fusion power station. They say it could be pouring electricity into the National Grid within 20 years. Nuclear fusion, the power that lies at the heart of the sun, offers the prospect of clean, safe, carbon-free power with a minimum of radioactive waste. But despite decades of research the technical problems have seemed insurmountable. This weekend, however, Research Councils UK (RCUK), which oversees the British government’s spending on science and technology, has said it believes that many of those obstacles are close to being overcome. It wants to commit Britain to a 20-year research and construction plan that would see a fusion power station in operation around 2030. Didcot in Oxfordshire is among the sites under consideration for the so-called Hiper project.
Sunday Times 21st Feb 2010 more >>
Companies
Babcock runs three naval dockyards and is a big player in nuclear services. VT is out of dockyards but does nuclear, trains air-force pilots and is branching out into waste management and schools. Personality-wise they are cut from the same cloth driven, old-fashioned managers who push themselves and their companies hard. All that counted for nothing last week, when Babcock told the world it wanted to buy VT and made a £1.1 billion offer to its board.
Sunday Times 21st Feb 2010 more >>
Climate
Leading scientists in Britain and America have warned that recent controversies over research into climate change are damaging the public’s faith in science. The group – which included Lord Rees, head of the Royal Society and Ralph Cicerone, president of the US National Academy of Sciences – believes the fallout will continue as sceptics keep up their attacks on climate science. Only fundamental changes in the structure of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would bring an end to the problem and improve public confidence, they said.
Observer 21st Feb 2010 more >>
President Barack Obama’s climate change policy is in crisis amid a barrage of US lawsuits challenging government directives and the defection of major corporate backers for his ambitious green programmes.
Sunday Telegraph 21st Feb 2010 more >>
Renewables
A LANDMARK £2 billion green energy plant will be scrapped and moved abroad unless the government reverses its decision to limit subsidies, Dorothy Thompson, chief executive of Drax, has warned.
Sunday Times 21st Feb 2010 more >>
