A £1bn nuclear white elephant

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A £1bn nuclear white elephant

THE INDEPENDENT 7 April 09 Call for public inquiry as Sellafield recycling plant is costing taxpayer millions every year A controversial nuclear recycling plant, approved by the Government despite warnings over its economic viability and reliance on unproven technology, has racked up costs of more than £1bn and is still not working properly.

Backers of the plant at Sellafield, which promised to turn toxic waste into a useable fuel that could be sold worldwide, had claimed the plant would make a profit of more than £200m in its lifetime, producing 120 tonnes of recycled fuel a year. But after an investigation by The Independent, the Government admitted technical problems and a dearth in orders has meant it has produced just 6.3 tonnes of fuel since opening in 2001.

With construction and commissioning costs of more than £600m, the facility, known as the Mox plant because of the mixed oxides (Mox) fuel it is designed to produce, has cost more than £1.2bn, confirming its status as the nuclear industry’s most embarrassing white elephant and one of the greatest failures in British industrial history, losing the taxpayer £90m a year. Green campaigners and opposition MPs are now calling for the plant to be closed immediately, and a minister who fought its construction at the time has called for a public inquiry into how the plant was ever given the go-ahead.

April 7, 2009 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, UK | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs | Leave a comment

‘No’ to nuclear power

Author: David Kennell
People’s Weekly World Newspaper 7 April 09 – “…………………………….The inherent danger of a nuclear accident is recognized by the Price-Anderson Act, which forces taxpayers (not the company) to be responsible for any major accident. Even if no accidents occur, or if plutonium-239 (half-life of 24,110 years), created in fast neutron reactors, is not lost or stolen to make nuclear weapons, there is still no known procedure to eliminate the high-level radioactive waste.

More than 95 percent of the waste products are cesium-137 and strontium-90, which have half-lives (lose 50 percent) of about 30 years. They are not the problem. The “transuranics” (isotopes of uranium, curium-245 and plutonium) have half-lives of thousands of years. So far, the much touted “recycling” requires purification of the transuranics and is very inefficient and difficult and has only been accomplished on a small laboratory scale. The planet is accumulating these highly lethal products with no place to put them.

About half the U.S. nuclear waste is at Hanford, Wash., in nuclear “sludge” acquired from our nuclear weapons program. The other half is from our 103 nuclear power plants. The Hanford waste is beginning to leak into the Columbia River.

As an aside, the unknown cost of waste disposal by currently unknown means is never considered when calculating dollar costs.

But the real costs cannot be measured in dollars. We are saddling future generations, hoping that future technology can solve the problem that has not been solved during the last 60 or so years…………….

Using nuclear fission to boil water is not only absurd — it could be the greatest folly of all time.

April 7, 2009 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs | Leave a comment

Utah nuclear power proposal has a powerful thirst

Water application » Billions of gallons would be diverted The Salt Lake Tribune, by Patty Henetz 6 April 09

A state representative pushing to bring nuclear energy to Utah has applied to the state to take billions of gallons of water from the Green River to supply reactors that could produce electricity for 3 million households.

Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, executive director of the Kane County Water Conservancy District, has filed an application with the Utah Division of Water Rights to transfer 29,600 acre-feet of water to Emery County.

The water would be used for two proposed nuclear reactors for the Transition Power LLC Blue Castle Project on private land west of the city of Green River, said company CEO Aaron Tilton, a former lawmaker from Springville…………………….. Critics say even though the water right originally was for a coal-fired plant, it may not be easy to transfer it to a nuclear plant whose customers would include more Californians than Utah residents.

April 7, 2009 Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, USA | Leave a comment