Late last month, the Ontario provincial government announced it was postponing its plans to build new nuclear reactors after it was found that the cost would be "billions" too high compared to what the province is able to pay.

Now it turns out that the price tag is in fact three times higher than what was expected: for two Candu reactors is 26 billion Canadian dollars – 16 billion Euros or eight billion each. Two EPR reactors would cost Ontario 23.6 billion Canadian dollars – 14.7 billion Euros or 7.35 billion each.

When Areva persuaded the Finnish government back in 2002 to build the disaster-prone EPR reactor at Olkiluoto, the price they quoted was 2.5 billion Euros (it’s currently costing five billion and counting). Seven years later and an EPR costs nearly three times as much. Talk about inflation!

The two Candu reactors would cost 10,800 Canadian dollars per kilowatt of power capacity. In 2007 the Ontario Power Authority assumed for a price of $2,900 per kilowatt – a third of the actual cost. The EPR price tag now says €4,587 per kilowatt of power capacity, while the International Energy Agency still tends to use a price of €1,600 per kilowatt in policy recommendations. Can you think of any other walk of life where getting figures so wrong would be tolerated? Thank goodness these guys aren’t in the census business – imagine the chaos they’d cause.

So what has the Ontario provincial government done? That’s right, it’s gone to the national government to ask for a bail-out, like a kid begging daddy for a larger allowance.

‘By simplifying any one submission down to a single number at this point would be very difficult to do and highly speculative,’ said Amy Tang, a spokeswoman for the Ontario energy ministry. She’s absolutely right. No-one can ever be sure how much a nuclear reactor will cost, least of all the nuclear industry whose promises and projections should never be believed, until the thing is completed. Going on previous experience, you should expect those figures to rise sharply.

St Petersburg Times: Captain Lus, a Russian vessel with radioactive cargo holed in collision
’The Captain Lus, a Russian vessel that regularly delivers radioactive cargo to St. Petersburg from abroad for subsequent reprocessing in Siberia, has collided with The Sundstraum, a Norwegian tanker, that was carrying chemicals. The Russian ship was en route from St. Petersburg to the French port of Le Havre. According to the preliminary investigation into the incident, the vessels share responsibility for causing the collision. Rashid Alimov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of the international environmental organization Bellona, told The St. Petersburg Times that The Captain Lus, which was holed in the collision, was carrying 9 containers of urainum ore concentrate on board. The cargo totalled 182 tons in weight, but no radioactive leaks were registered.’

Take the incident (rated level 2 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale) at the UK’s Dungeness B reactor that occurred on June 29 this year. Here’s the statement from the reactor’s owner, British Energy, describing what happened…

Whilst lowering a fuel plug unit in order to latch it to a new fuel stringer, it became apparent that the coupling had not latched correctly and that foreign material was trapped between the spring collet assembly and the neutron scatter plug. The debris appears to be a rubber sheet, the source of which is likely to be one of the three covers used to cover the maintenance tubes during earlier cell maintenance activities. The failure to correctly latch was identified during a procedural check as the assembly was being raised. Fuel handling activities were suspended, but the assembly remains suspended by approximately 3 metres.

"As part of the recovery process, polyurethane foam was injected below the suspended stringer to minimise the potential drop height in the event of it de-latching. The foam did not come in contact with the stringer. The subsequent analysis of the foam indicated that it was a material that could act as a moderator, and thus challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates.

Are you any the wiser as to what went on at Dungeness B? Stringers, collets, scatter plugs? This story has hardly had any exposure in the UK media and it’s not difficult to see why – a journalist would have to first be able to understand it and then explain it in a way so that his reader could also. The use of language works in the favour of Dungeness B’s operators – it’s a form of cover-up that takes advantage of people’s understandable ignorance of the complexities of nuclear power.

Take this passage:

The subsequent analysis of the foam indicated that it was a material that could act as a moderator, and thus challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates.

This means that the foam, had it been in the reactor during operation, would have become part of the nuclear reaction. You really don’t want foreign material inside a reactor acting as a moderator – moderation is the vital process whereby the nuclear reaction is controlled – it can make a dangerous nuclear accident more likely. So, ‘challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates’ means ‘break vital safety rules and put people in danger’.

The nuclear industry: they think they’ve made the atom their servant and now they’re trying to do the same with language.

LA Times: Marking the 50th anniversary of U.S.'s first nuclear meltdown
’On the morning of July 14, 1959, Sodium Reactor Experiment trainee John Pace received the bad news from a group of supervisors who had, he recalled, "terribly worried expressions on their faces." A reactor at the Atomics International field laboratory in the Santa Susana Mountains had experienced a power surge the night before and spewed radioactive gases into the atmosphere. "They were terrified that some of the gas had blown over their own San Fernando Valley homes," recalled Pace, who was 20 at the time. "My job was to keep radiation out of the control room." Pace set to work sealing doors and windows with clear packing tape and scrubbing the walls with sanitary napkins soaked with special chemicals because, he said, "soap and water wouldn't do the trick." Today, on the 50th anniversary of America's first nuclear meltdown accident, Pace will join federal regulators and former lab workers in a commemorative gathering at the Aerospace Cancer Museum of Education in Chatsworth.’

(Steve Thomas, Professor of Energy Policy at Greenwich University, speaking about the disastrous construction of the OL3 EPR reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland.)

This week has seen big trouble for the company. Two serious incidents at its Ringhals nuclear reactor in southern Sweden have seen the company threatened with ‘special supervision’ measures with would put safety procedures under increased scrutiny.

One of the incidents involved the failure of an automatic safety system designed to prevent the release of radioactive material. To make matters worse almost sixty other incidents have been reported at the reactor this year alone. Ringhals employees have also tested positive for drugs or alcohol.

(Vattenfall are also the operators of Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear reactors, one of which came perilously close to a meltdown in 2006, narrowly avoiding causing the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.)

To add to Vattenfall’s woes, the company has had to fire the plant manager of its Krummel reactor in Germany. The reactor had only been running for two weeks - after a fire in a transformer in 2007 closed the plant for two year - when a short circuit in another transformer caused the reactor to shut down once again. It is expected to be out of action for several months. In fact, the clock is ticking for the disaster-prone company in more ways than one…

Peter Harry Carstensen, State Premier of Schleswig Holstein - where the Krummel plant is located - said he would grant Vattenfall "one last chance" to get on top of the problems at the reactor.

"If there is one more incident like this, I will see to it that this power station is shut down," the Christian Democratic politician told Vattenfall head Tuomo Hatakka in Kiel on Tuesday.

He should have listened to Greenpeace Germany. This week the group staged another action at the Krummel reactor, welding shut five of the site’s entry gates and posting signs saying ‘Nuclear power plant Krümmel is closed because of the unreliability of Vattenfall’.

Finally the Swedish government are now asking questions. It is demanding ‘that state-owned power utility Vattenfall provide an account of its work on nuclear safety after problems at one of its plants in Germany and security concerns at another in Sweden’. The answer better be good.

The Peninsula Online: EDF presses govt to hike power price
PARIS: Tension is shaping up over pressure from EDF, the world’s biggest nuclear power producer, for a price leap for French households amid big developments in France’s vital nuclear power industry. The group’s chief executive Pierre Gadonneix revealed in a magazine interview on Wednesday that EDF was seeking permission from the government to raise the price of household electricity by 20 percent over three years, or slightly longer, so that the group could stop going deeper into debt. He backed this up with comments yesterday, but Economy Minister Christine Lagarde shot back that the government was ‘absolutely not tied by the points put forward’ by EDF. She said ministers would examine the request in due course and take decisions. But she observed: ‘When one wants the stars one reaches even higher for the moon.’

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.

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.

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.

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."’