Rebound of nuclear plants raising worries over waste

Rebound of nuclear plants raising worries over waste International Herald Tribune (New York times with Reuters) by James Kanter and Matthew Wald

January 30, 2009 As France presses ahead with building more next-generation nuclear reactors, new evidence emerged Friday to suggest that industry and governments may be unprepared to handle the increasingly toxic waste that will result.Highlighting the importance of the technology in France, both as its main source of electricity and as a major export industry, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced late Thursday that Électricité de France, Europe’s biggest power producer, was awarded the contract to develop a second atomic reactor using next-generation technology……………………………an anti-nuclear group said that information it gleaned from industry reports – publicly available but which have received little attention so far – show that waste from the EPR will be more radioactive by a factor of seven because more uranium is burned up. That will make it more expensive to handle and store safely, according to Greenpeace, which provided the details on Friday to the International Herald Tribune.

“Despite the French government’s global marketing of the EPR as cheap and safe, the evidence proves otherwise,” said Rianne Teule, an international nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace who is based in Amsterdam.

The next wave of reactors “poses an ever-increasing burden on people’s budgets and danger to their health, now and far into the future,” Teule said……………………..here are no EPRs in operation anywhere in the world, but the first is under construction at Olkiluoto, an island in the West of Finland, and the second in Flamanville, in northern France.

Teule said the evidence about the radioactivity of the waste was drawn from a report by Posiva, a waste disposal company owned by Finnish nuclear operators, and from the Swiss organization Nagra, which oversees management of nuclear waste.

Teule said the waste would pose greater dangers to workers from higher radiation doses during transfer and storage than current waste. She also said the waste would need to be stored for longer in areas above ground, where it is potentially exposed to terrorists.

Those factors, among others, would increase the overall cost of nuclear energy – costs that Teule said were not properly accounted for by industry and governments.

There are no long-term facilities for disposing or burying high-level nuclear waste anywhere in the world,…………………………….Hans Riotte, the head of the Radiological Protection and Radioactive Waste Management Division at the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris, said waste from the EPR, although smaller in volume, would be more radioactive than existing forms of high-level waste because it would be denser……………………….ny reports about the cost, or safety, of its EPR model still are a sensitive matter for the company, which is competing to become the designer of reactors for the next generation of nuclear plants in the United States and elsewhere………………………………

Problems at the EPR site in Finland mean the reactor already is badly overdue and vastly over budget, even though it was designed to have a shorter construction period than previous models.

The site has been plagued by water-logged concrete, faulty welds and flawed pipes, delaying the reactor start date by at least three years and raising costs by roughly 50 percent…………………………………Areva also is vying sell the technology to the United Arab Emirates as part of a project led by Total and GDF Suez.