Continue reading Nuclear News: Obama Makes Nuclear Compromise to Pass Clean Energy Bill...

Reuters: British Energy probes incident at nuclear plant
LONDON (Reuters) - An incident in late June at the Dungeness B power station near London has been provisionally rated at level two on the seven-tier International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), the EDF-owned operating company said on Tuesday. While connecting new fuel to a fuel plug unit on June 29, a piece of rubber was found to have become trapped, threatening the integrity of the connection. "The coupling did not fail, there was no plant damage, no staff were injured and there was no release of radioactivity," plant operator British Energy said in a statement. Operations in the fuel building at the power station in southeast England ceased immediately and foam was injected under the fuel assembly as a precaution. But a subsequent review confirmed that the foam used was not permitted under the rules.

Continue reading Nuclear News:British Energy probes incident at nuclear plant...

Here's a blog from Julien, one of our climate campaigners who is posting updates live from the top of a coal smokestack!

I'm standing here, 200 metres above Italy's most greenhouse-polluting coal power plant and I don't know what I feel most overwhelmed by: the gargantuan scale of this greenho|use Goliath, or the bravery and ingenuity of the activists around me.

Not only are we preventing the feed of coal into the power plant here, but we are preparing to "write" "Stupid" on the massive chimney stack. Given that we are teetering on the verge of triggering catastrophic climate change, and coal is the single biggest source of greenhouse pollution, continuing to burn coal is a pretty stupid thing to do, especially when there are ready-made solutions such a renewable energy ready to replace coal.

We are here because the heads of the G8 are meeting here in Italy, and we are urging them to demonstrate real leadership on climate change by committing to strong targets to cutting greenhouse pollution.

The G8 have the responsibility, the ability, and influence to lead on climate change.

Right now the G8 nations have proposed such weak actions on cutting greenhouse emissions it would allow for many more coal-fired power stations to be built, and almost guarantee triggering catastrophic climate change. This is sending completely the wrong signal to the rest of the world.

We need the G8 to use their clout and influence. Politicians talk, but leaders act, and this G8 meeting must deliver action to prevent catastrophic climate change and rescue the global climate negotiations.

Half of our activists are on top of the chimney stack, where just above our heads, 40 tonnes per second of greenhouse pollution spews forth. The others are dangling underneath the conveyer belt that, due to our intervention, is no longer feeding the station with coal. Less coal going in means less greenhouse pollution going out. Yay!

This is one of four power plants that Greenpeace is taking direct action on, and my hat goes off to those people climbing ladders, occupying perches, dangling under conveyors or on the side of smokestacks, paintbrush in hand, getting our message out loud and clear.

Truly inspiring.

I'll keep you updated as events unfold.

J.

The reason we ask is that Mr Zapatero appeared to be completely spineless this week when he gave the go ahead for the Garona nuclear power plant’s operational lifetime to be extended by four years.

Lacking in backbone, the Spanish government has broken its election promise and will not now close the aging and dangerous reactor this year but in 2013 instead. At 38 years old Garona is more than ready for decommissioning. The reactor has suffered from severe cracking and corrosion has affected various components in the reactor vessel.

‘We have no experience with plants more than 40 years' old,’ said Zapatero himself recently before he misplaced his spine. So why is he asking his country to nursemaid a 42 year-old one? He’s barely had a good word to say about Garona until now, saying, ‘it has safety conditions, but it is an old plant, designed with decades-old technology and we have to very much bear that in mind when thinking of our country's future’. The national grid operator in Spain, REE, also says closing Garona ‘would pose no supply problems’. It provides a mere 1.4 per cent of Spain’s electricity.

So why the complete reversal of promises and viewpoints? Why the lack of courage when it came to Mr Zapatero making this step for the good of his country? Only he can tell us and we look forward to hearing whatever weak excuses he can give in the coming days. One reason could be that by extending the date to 2013 and with the current government being elected until only 2012, Zapatero is passing the responsibility to a future government. How’s that for leadership?

You can also have aplasia of other parts of the body, most notably shown in the absence of internal organs. Does Mr Zapatero have the condition throughout his body? He’s certainly gutless, that’s for sure.

AP: Plant shutdown reignites German nuclear spat
BERLIN (AP) - Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-left rivals made it clear Monday they will make nuclear power a major issue in the September national election, following a weekend shutdown at a troubled German nuclear plant. The plant at Kruemmel, near Hamburg, shut down automatically on Saturday following a short-circuit in a transformer. The plant had reopened only last month after a two-year closure that followed a fire in another transformer in 2007. That offered the center-left Social Democrats - currently the conservative Merkel's partners in a "grand coalition" of Germany's biggest parties that both hope to end in Sept. 27 elections - a chance to highlight a key policy difference. The Social Democrats have fiercely defended the decision by Germany's previous government, which they led, to phase out Germany's 17 nuclear power plants by 2021. Merkel's Christian Democratic Union opposes abandoning nuclear energy and wants to extend some reactors' lives.

Continue reading Nuclear News: Plant shutdown reignites German nuclear spat...

Another example of how the tiniest faults can bring a reactor to a grinding halt has been seen at the Diablo Canyon power plant in California last week. ‘A blown fuse caused a loss of power’ and now the number 2 reactor is shut down while the cause of the fault is found.

Between them the two reactors at Diablo Canyon produce ‘about 10 percent of all electricity generated in California’. Or, rather, they now produce about 5 percent of all electricity generated in California. And ‘there was no immediate word on when the reactor would be operating again’. All for a blown fuse. Have you ever heard the proverb ‘For Want of a Nail’?

Times of India: Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano is new IAEA chief
NEW DELHI: Veteran Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano was elected new director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in a closely contested election this week. Widely seen as a candidate for the developed world, Amano's election would have been difficult without the support of one crucial country: India. Amano wasn't India's first choice. It was South Africa's Abdul Samad Minty who won India's support as the premier developing country candidate. As 2009 rolled around, the developed and developing worlds were split in their choice of IAEA chief. The developed countries chose Amano, and openly expected him to get tough with countries like Iran as well as on non-proliferation issues. The `poor' countries wanted Minty, a person who would understand their quest for nuclear power.

Continue reading Nuclear News: Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano is new IAEA chief...

In a world enjoying a growing energy thirst, we have in our hands nuclear energy: a formidable asset to build an energy sustainable future. It means that one of the answers to the issues of achieving security of supply, competitiveness and the fight against climate change is already available to us.

Nuclear energy can already help us against climate change?

Oh really?

Tell that to the French government who are this summer are being forced to import electricity from the UK because its inland nuclear reactors cannot operate properly in the summer heatwave…

Fourteen of France’s 19 nuclear power stations are located inland and use river water rather than seawater for cooling. When water temperatures rise, EDF is forced to shut down the reactors to prevent their casings from exceeding 50C […] One power industry insider said yesterday that about 20GW (gigawatts) of France’s total nuclear generating capacity of 63GW was out of service.

Yes, this amazing, cheap, reliable and safe technology that is going to save us from rising global temperatures can’t work when the temperature rises. Really. The world’s major exponent of nuclear power, the one that is supposedly going to lead us the promised land of a nuclear ‘renaissance’, is having to import electricity because its own reactors aren’t up to the job. Nuclear power is supposed to save us from climate change but can’t work when the climate changes. That’s what they call a Catch-22.

With temperatures only set rise in the coming years, it looks like France has a big problem. And they’re not alone. There are over 400 nuclear power plants across the world. How many are inland and rely on river water for coolant? Not that coastal reactors are any better. Look for example at the CanDU facility in Ontario, Canada which is actively contributing to climate change.

So what’s the solution? In France, desperate times demand desperate measures when a country is so reliant on nuclear power…

EDF must also observe strict rules governing the heat of the water it discharges into waterways so that wildlife is not harmed. The maximum permitted temperature is 24C […] In 2003, the situation grew so severe that the French nuclear safety regulator granted special exemptions to three plants, allowing them temporarily to discharge water into rivers at temperatures as high as 30C.

Can these strict rules governing reactors’ discharges survive in the face of rising global temperatures? One would imagine not. In other words the nuclear industry will be allowed to damage the environment more than it already does.

‘In order to save the planet we must destroy it,’ should be its new slogan.

Washington Post: Obama: Iran cannot be permitted to be nuke power
’WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama says he is "not reconciled" to the idea of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon within a year. The president told The Associated Press in an interview that U.S. government planning is running in precisely the opposite direction. He said a nuclear-armed Iran would likely trigger an arms race in the already volatile Mideast and said that would be "a recipe for potential disaster."’

Continue reading Nuclear News: Obama: Iran cannot be permitted to be nuke power...

Bunny McDiarmid, executive Director of Greenpeace in New Zealand, talks about her memories of life on board the original Rainbow Warrior as a deckhand...

I can still see in my mind's eye and often do, the grain of the wooden decks of the old Warrior, I can remember their feel underfoot, and the smell of the black tar when the sun hit them. I first joined her as a deckhand in 1984 in Jacksonville, Florida in a godforsaken boat yard in the backofbeyond. We were turning her from a motor boat into a sailing boat. And she turned beautifully. And it was the 'we', the 12 crew and 5 or 6 dedicated volunteers that did it all over the course of 4-5 months. The doing of this welded us to her and to each other. I remember Ulla the 24 year old danish fitter and turner who redid all the welding on the chain plates after the yard guys buggered it up.

I remember Henk skill sawing the aluminum bridge wings off so we could mount winches for the main sheet, I remember all of us walking the stays of the main mast as she swung over the yard into her sleeve on the main deck. I remember sitting braced on the main deck as we sailed through the night repairing the mainsail on an old sewing machine and I remember how fast we could unscrew all the bolts holding down the benches in the mess and push them into the companionway so that we had enough room for dancing. No campaign office, there was just the mess and the radio room off the bridge. No email just a clamour for the mail when we arrived in Hawaii after two weeks at sea.

The crew of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 - Bunny is second from the right

I did not know much about Greenpeace when I joined the Warrior, I just liked what she was going to do - an anti nuclear campaign in the Pacific. The first stop was helping 350 Rongelap islanders move from their home island to another island 40 miles away because of the radiation contamination from US nuclear testing.

Continue reading Rainbow Warriors - past, present and future...

And so it happens. The recriminations over just who is to blame for the world’s largest prototype reactor being massively over budget and over schedule, which doubts over its design and construction, have begun. Areva are now engaged in a very public and childish game of he-said-she-said with the reactor’s owners, Finnish utility TVO and nuclear safety agency, STUK.

Jukka Laaksonen, director general of STUK says…

They (Areva) started planning when they won the contract, which was of course too late. They should have used two years for planning (in advance)… The French did not understand at first the Finnish system, that no important device can be built before the plan is approved.

Areva weren’t going to take that lying down and managing director of Finnish operations, Osmo Kaipainen, argued back…

"Authorities are never satisfied" when it comes to meeting safety regulations, he said. He added that TVO was slow delivering Areva-Siemens' documents to STUK for validation, needed before moving from one building task to another.

Those pesky safety agencies and their fussy ways about… safety. Whatever next? We’re not sure if we’d like to eat a meal cooked by an Areva executive – let’s hope they wash their hands and cook the chicken properly.

TVO managed to confuse things further by saying Areva had spent "significantly more time on planning" than the contract asked for. STUK say not enough time was spent by Areva on planning, TVO say too much time was spent. You’d feel sorry for Areva if they hadn’t made a complete disaster of the OL3 construction from the very start and were capable of giving a straight answer to a straight question themselves.

On the whole, Areva, TVO and STUK all look and sound like children squabbling over which of them gets the biggest piece of cake. If it was up to us the three of them would be sent to bed without any supper.

(Apparently Areva have declared the OL3 EPR as the first child of the ‘rebirth of the nuclear industry’. Boy, it’s going to be an ugly baby.)

CNN: POWER POINTS: Cost Concerns Loom Over US Nuclear Revival
’For U.S. utilities gearing up to build new nuclear-power plants, the rewards could be great, but the risks of cost overruns, delays and regulatory battles persist. Expanding the nation's use of nuclear power is seen by many as a key component of any strategy to fight climate change, and utilities are lining up to provide it. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received applications from 14 companies to build and operate new nuclear power plants. Energy Secretary Steven Chu last week told utility executives that nuclear power, along with renewable energy and conservation, will be an important way to meet growing U.S. energy demand while cutting emissions of greenhouse gases. The companies behind these projects, including Southern Co. (SO) and Duke Energy (DUK), are upbeat on their prospects, noting guaranteed long-term returns on investment and increasing acceptance of a need to replace coal-fired power plants and their emissions. History sounds a cautionary note, however. Nuclear-power plants under development in Europe have come under fire for exceeding previously estimated costs, a fate that led developers to abandon several nuclear-power projects during the last U.S. nuclear build-out that ended in the early 1990s.’

Continue reading Nuclear News: Cost Concerns Loom Over US Nuclear Revival...

was there, talking about nuclear power, and specifically what he calls a PRISM reactor — a fourth-generation nuclear power station which runs on the nuclear waste generated by all the previous generations of nuclear power stations.

Wow! That sounds fantastic, safe, carbon-neutral and most importantly cheap! So, tell me more about this "Integral Fast Reactor", of which you speak…

They’re super-safe: if they fail they just stop working, they don’t melt down. And they can even literally replace coal power stations:

This sounds even better than the old breeder reactors, the last miracle technology to come out of the nuke industry that was going to solve all our energy needs without any of that nasty "radioactive" (wiggles fingers) stuff. And you say that this runs on waste material?

Fast reactors also solve at a stroke the problem of what to do with the vast amounts of nuclear waste which are being stockpiled unhappily around the world.

So, you can just take that nasty toxic waste and basically shovel it into your new IFR reactor and it works!

... (tumbleweeds, crickets)

The answer is unfortunately no. You have to reprocess the waste before it can be used in the IFR. Specifically, you have to reprocess a hell of a lot of it, via a process that has never been made to work on a commercial scale[1] before you can even get started. That's why the only country that's ever had a serious look at this technology (France) decided that this was a technology way too expensive and speculative even for them.

Ahhh, nukemen.

[1] Lots and lots of things work in labs but can't be scaled, basically because the size and number of blemishes and cracks in an item scales roughly as a power of its size, while the size of atoms doesn't. Very big things, made to very high tolerances, are very expensive.

(This is a guest post by Daniel Davies who writes for the Guardian’s Comment in Free, Crooked Timber and his own blog, D-Squared Digest. More of his thoughts on nuclear power can be found here and here.)

The Health and Safety Executive, which oversees the NII, said that the EPR design could be rejected for use in Britain if its concerns could not be satisfactorily addressed. “It is our regulatory judgment that the control and instrumentation architecture appears overly complex,” the NII letter [to EDF] said. “We have serious concerns about your proposal which allows lower safety class systems to have write access [the ability to override] to higher safety class systems,” it continued.

The letter also highlighted concerns about the absence of safety display systems or manual controls that would allow the reactor to be shut down, either in the station’s control room or at an emergency remote shutdown station.

In other words, the NII don’t trust the designs of EPR’s control and safety systems. Areva is apparently ‘scrambling to produce revised plans’, a situation mirrored in Finland where plans for the control system for the massively late and over-budget EPR being built in Olkiluoto have been described by Finland nuclear watchdog STUK as ‘without a proper design that meets the basic principles of nuclear safety’.

Apparently, in the UK’s case, ‘the design assessment phase could be delayed well past its expected completion in 2011.’ So in Finland, so in the UK. Areva and EDF are nothing if not consistent.

AP: Exelon delays plan for Texas nuclear plant
’COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Power generator Exelon Corp. said Tuesday it has called off plans for now to build a new nuclear plant in Texas because of worries over the economy and the limited availability of federal loan guarantees. The Chicago-based company, the largest nuclear power generator in the U.S., is the second company in the past two months to postpone work for a new nuclear plant. St. Louis-based AmerenUE said in April that it was suspending work on a reactor in Missouri. "We just aren't in a place to pursue the nuclear project," John Rowe, Exelon's chairman and CEO, told The Associated Press in an interview regarding the company's plans to add two nuclear reactors in Victoria, Texas. But the projects are so expensive, running an estimated $6 billion to $8 billion per unit, that they are proving difficult to finance.’

Continue reading Nuclear News: Exelon delays plan for Texas nuclear plant...

The Arctic Sunrise is on top of the world right now, at 82 degrees North, and the difficulties encountered are not just weather related. Because so few people live that far North, satellite cover is almost nonexistent, and staying in touch with the ship is a complicated operation.
We had to install iridium phones on top of the crow's nest to create a very low bandwidth dial-up connection.

Continue reading Just how do you get Internet at 82 degrees North?...

The interview is worth watching because of the evasions and contradictions in what Mr De Rivaz said that are common in nuclear power propaganda. Unfortunately they weren’t challenged by the interviewer so, in a short series, we're going to challenge them instead ( - part one is here, part two is here, part three is here).

In the interview, Mr De Rivaz said ‘nuclear is a CO2-free energy’. Yet more spin. Mr De Rivaz seems to be conveniently forgetting the C02 emissions from uranium mining, enrichment and nuclear fuel production along with the emissions from manufacturing the concrete and steel needed to build nuclear reactors.

When asked about support from the major UK parties for nuclear power and ‘are you confident you’ve got it in the current government and from any possible future government’, Mr De Rivaz said emphatically: ‘Yes, I am… I am confident that the main opposition party is exactly on the same policy.’ Strange then that the energy policy document from the opposition Conservative Party makes no reference to future plans for nuclear power at all. Not a single one.

Mr De Rivaz also said that EDF’s nuclear power plants will take ‘less than 60 months’ to build which is a pretty wild boast in the current climate. Can we really expect EDF to buck a very large trend and actually get their reactors built on time and on budget? Stranger things have happened but the precedents are poor to say the least.

Financial Times: French government forces Areva's 'iron lady' to bend
’Areva's board meets today to rubber stamp what was always inevitable - the sale of the nuclear group's transmission and distribution business and its stakes in a number of blue-chip companies. This is what Areva's main shareholder, the French government, has long wanted to fund the rising investment needs of its nuclear champion. This is what Jean-Cyril Spinetta, its new chairman - also the chairman of Air France-KLM - is going to recommend. He is also expected to confirm that the government, which, through different state or state-controlled institutions, owns more than 90 per cent of Areva, has agreed to open up the company's capital to new investors, although perhaps not the investors Anne Lauvergeon, Areva chief executive, would have wanted. Ms Lauvergeon, sometimes called France's "iron lady", has long campaigned for a market flotation to open up the group's capital, which is only traded through investment certificates. However, the government has always regarded Areva as a strategic national asset. It now wants to raise funds which are urgently needed not just for investments, but also to finance the â‚2bn ($2.8bn) Areva needs to buy out Siemens, its German engineering joint venture partner.’

Continue reading Nuclear News: French government forces Areva's 'iron lady' to bend...

How this works:

The accumulating costs above are based on the EUR 1.7 billion overrun announced by Areva/TVO plus an extra EUR 1.2 billion which will be needed to purchase electricity that has not been produced by Olkiluoto-3 since its projected start.

These costs will eventually be paid for by Nordic electricity consumers and French taxpayers, either through higher bills for customers or through taxes.

The financing of Areva’s EPR programme isn’t going well at all. It needs ‘between eight and 10 billion euros by 2012 to fund its investment programme’ and a desperate French government are putting parts of the company up for sale.

Related posts: EPR: Enfant Terrible of the French Nuclear Industry