Nuclear power uneconomical:
THE HINDU Business Line 28 oct 08 Lester Brown WASHINGTON: At a time when India is focusing on developing sources of nuclear energy, a leading scholar has said nuclear power is uneconomical and little private capital is going into this sector while investors are pouring tens of billions of dollars in to wind farms each year.“Despite all the industry hype about a nuclear future, private investors are openly sceptical and while the world’s nuclear generating capacity is estimated to expand by only 1,000 MW this year, wind generating capacity will likely grow by 30,000 MW,” no ted environmentalist and scholar Mr Lester Brown said in a media article ‘The Flawed Economics of Nuclear Power’.Drawing attention to the book ‘The Nuclear Illusion’ by Amory B Lovins and Imran Sheikh, Mr Brown said the cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant is around 14 cents per kilowatt hour while it costs only 7 cents per kilowatt hour at a wind farm
The founder of Earth Policy Institute, Brown, argued that given this huge gap, the so-called nuclear revival can only be done by unloading costs onto taxpayers, including the costs of disposing of nuclear waste, insuring plants against an accident and de commissioning the plant when it wears out.

The Clean, Green Nuclear Machine?

counter punch 27 oct 08 By BARBARA ROSE JOHNSTON

“…………………………Because nuclear energy was been redefined by the Bush administration as a national security concern, social and environmental safeguards can be legally ignored. Thus, as one example of many recent rulings, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under its enhanced authority to dismiss environmental and social safeguard legislation recently ruled that onsite above ground dry cask storage of PG&E’s radioactive waste at Diablo Canyon in California can go forward without further study of whether such storage is safe from terror attacks or adequately protects the health of nearby residents. The NRC’s ruling overturns a federal court order to consider these concerns………………………………………………s nuclear energy truly the clean, green machine that the Nuclear Energy Institute and its proponents make it out to be? Is it truly cost-effective? Will nuclear power finally prove to be a “safely-harnessed” source of sustaining energy? Or, will we once again, be lured into what many folks see to be a dance with the devil?…………………………………..

The average cost to build a nuclear power plant is reportedly some 2 billion dollars, though a 2007 estimate including costs to generate power by Lew Hay, chairman and CEO of Florida Power and Light, suggests that “the cost of a two-unit plant will be on the order of magnitude of $13 to $14 billion.” Actual flow of energy will not occur for years. Technological innovation has reduced the time it takes to build a nuclear reactor, it will still take some 7 – 12 years after plans are approved for energy to flow.

For those communities and workers that host the nuclear fuel chain — uranium mining, milling, enrichment, energy and military use, and storage of wastes — the label of “clean” and the notion of a “cost-effective” energy system is, simply and sadly, ludicrous. The no-emissions carbon footprint label assigned by the Nuclear Energy Institute ignores the significant environmental impact resulting from mining, transportation, processing fuel, using water as energy and coolant, and building nuclear power facilities. Cost-effective energy becomes an even more problematic label when you factor in the short-term and long-term health consequences of absorbing toxic heavy metals and the radioactive nature of these exposures, and the health care costs of treating such illness and disease.

And then there are the stewardship costs of protecting, storing, and (maybe some day) remediating nuclear waste. The cleanup for the 680-acre site of the Uravan uranium and vanadium mine and processing facility in Colorado completed in September 2008 reportedly cost $120 million. Cleanup costs from mining, milling, and the inevitable spills and releases associated with Manhattan Project research and Cold War militarism at 17 nuclear weapons plants have been projected in reports to Congress to reach between $100 billion to $200 billion dollars — and this estimate does not include the clean-up costs associated with nuclear weapons detonation, nor the cleanup of dumped waste from nuclear submarines. The eventual decommissioning of an aged nuclear power plant is currently priced at $300 million or more per plant. The costs to create, build, monitor and secure a safe storage facility for substances that pose a threat for tens of thousands of years to come are harder to estimate, given the many unknowns in the future.

Uranium One shuts the Dominion mine
Brendan Ryan 22 Oct 2008[miningmx.com] — URANIUM ONE has finally thrown in the towel on its troubled Dominion Mine near Klerksdorp and placed it on care and maintenance.The move follows a year of growing market speculation that the project was fatally flawed which was consistently denied by current CEO Jean Nortier and his predecessor Neal Froneman who resigned abruptly in February this year.Both Froneman and Nortier have at all times presented an overwhelmingly optimistic outlook on the future of Dominion despite repeated cuts in the mine’s forecast production profile over the past year.As of end-June the Dominion mine was valued in the company’s books at US$1.9bn compared with a total value for mineral interests, plant and equipment of $4.6bn………………………….. The failure of Dominion is one of South Africa’s biggest mining venture collapses………………………According to today’s statement Dominion has been closed following completion of a detailed life of mine planning process and budget “which has shown that the project would require a sustained recovery in uranium prices as well as significant additional capital investment in order to become economically viable.