The first fuel assemblies for unit 1 of China’s Taishan plant have been produced by Areva. The EPR unit – the first of two currently under construction at the site – is expected to begin operating next year.
An EPR reactor core consists of 241 fuel assemblies, comprising over 63,850 fuel rods. Areva said that it has now completed the first of three production campaigns for Taishan 1’s fuel assemblies at its plant in Romans, France. The fuel will be delivered to the plant in 2014. Areva said that as it is a new type of fuel, the company had faced additional engineering and production challenges.
Areva CEO Luc Oursel commented, “We can all be proud to have achieved this milestone. I would like to congratulate all the Areva employees who have worked on this project, from assembly design to component supply, and production of the final assemblies.”
Taishan 1 and 2 are the first two reactors based on Areva’s EPR design to be built in China and form part of an €8.0 billion ($10.4 billion) contract signed by Areva and the Guangdong Nuclear Power Group (CGNPC) in November 2007. The Taishan project – 140 kilometres west of Hong Kong – is owned by the Guangdong Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture Company Limited, a joint venture between EDF (30%) and CGNPC.
First concrete for unit 1 was poured in October 2009, with the dome of the reactor building being lowered into place on top of the containment building in October 2011. In January 2013, Areva announced that installation of the heavy components – the reactor pressure vessel, the four steam generators and the pressurizer – had been completed within the reactor building. At that time, the company said that the construction of the unit had “entered a significant new stage.”
Unit 1 should begin operating in 2014, with unit 2 following in 2015. Two further EPRs are planned for the site.
Analysts say that predicting the direction of Japan’s atomic future is difficult and that J-Power’s decision is a risky one — even with a pro-nuclear party back in power — because a majority here opposes long-term nuclear dependence.
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Their timing “was terrible,” said Hiroshi Takahashi, an energy industry expert at the Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo. “If I can make some advice to J-Power, it is to get out of nuclear power right now before they encounter even more problems.”
Video: Atsuko Ogasawara has watched a nuclear power plant be built from her yard for the past five years. Her choice to remain in her home is driven by her determination to carry on her late mother’s fight against nuclear power.
In Japan, two years after Fukushima nuclear accident, work resumes on new plant
OMA, Japan — At the remote northwestern tip of a snowy peninsula, beyond a small road of fishing shacks and empty one-story homes, 600 construction workers and engineers are building a brand-new nuclear plant for a country still recovering from the most severe atomic accident since Chernobyl.
The main reactor building is already at its full height, though draped in heavy fabric to protect it from the wind and freezing temperatures. A 500-foot crane swivels overhead. A completed power line stretches along a nearby ridge, where it might one day carry electricity down the peninsula and back toward the Japanese mainland — a place still fiercely divided over the long-term role of nuclear power.
In the aftermath of March 2011 meltdowns in Fukushima that contaminated 700 square miles with radiation and forced 150,000 to flee their homes, most never to return, Japan’s utility companies paused nearly all nuclear-related projects. The accident sparked a global debate about nuclear power, but it was especially fierce in Japan, where all 50 operable reactors were taken offline and work was halted on three new plants where building had been underway.
But two of the existing reactors are back in action, and the resumption of construction at the Oma Nuclear Power Plant here — a project that broke ground in 2008 and was halted by the operator, J-Power, after the accident — marks the clearest sign yet that the stalemate is breaking.
The green light for the new plan was, at its root, a bet by the energy company that Japan will come to again support and rely on nuclear power, which provided some one-third of Japan’s electricity before the Fukushima crisis.
Analysts say that predicting the direction of Japan’s atomic future is difficult and that J-Power’s decision is a risky one — even with a pro-nuclear party back in power — because a majority here opposes long-term nuclear dependence.
Still, experts see modest evidence of nuclear power’s resiliency. Japan has traditionally built its nuclear plants in far-flung towns that depend on the facilities for the subsidies and tax dollars — as well as the jobs — they bring. Consumers and big businesses fear the long-term economic pain of a nuclear phaseout — increased dependence on imported fossil fuels, annual trade deficits, higher energy bills.
At the national level, Japan has cycled through three prime ministers since Fukushima — the first fiercely anti-nuclear, the next moderately anti-nuclear, the current one cautiously pro-nuclear. The previous ruling party tried last fall to plot a nuclear phaseout by the 2030s, but anti-nuclear advocates say the pledge was watered down to the point of being meaningless. The new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, plans this month to convene the latest in a series of expert panels to help overwrite the phaseout plan, and its makeup suggests that he prefers a role for nuclear power.
Paladin Energy Ltd., PDN.AU -3.74% whose shares are listed in Toronto and Sydney, operates another Namibian uranium mine, known as Langer Heinrich. In the last quarter of 2012, Paladin lost $147.6 million, compared with a profit of $3.2 million a year earlier. The loss included a write-down of $96 million on a mine in Malawi “due to the continued low uranium price,” the company said. Paladin’s stock-market value has shrunk to under $1 billion from $9 billion in early 2007.
“We’re still recuperating post-Fukushima,” said Mark Chalmers, the company’s production general manager. Paladin is cutting costs by deferring some construction projects, managing inventories, reducing the number of contractors and increasing volume to cut unit costs.
NAMIB DESERT, Namibia—Martin Hirsch kicks a loose rock. “Uranium,” says the 56-year-old German geologist with a smile, wiping his sweaty forehead under the baking sun. “And watch out for the snakes.”
John W. Miller/The Wall Street JournalDavid Oliver,a metallurgist at a Paladin Energy mine in Namibia that has been wracked by lower uranium prices.
By an accident of geology, this tiny African desert republic of 2.1 million people is one of the world’s top five uranium producers. It accounts for about 10% of the global supply of nuclear fuel, trailing Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia and running neck-and-neck with Niger.
Namibia’s costs are also the highest of any major producing country. “Namibia has desert locations that are expensive and hard to get to, so if the uranium price is much under $70 a pound, it’s going to be a tough place to turn a profit,” says Rob Chang, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald.
The current index price: $42.25 a pound, pressured by, among other things, a pullback in nuclear power by several big countries.
The country’s two major operating uranium mines are losing money. One is controlled by giant Rio Tinto. The company said this month it would lay off about 276 people, or 17% of its workforce, at the Rössing mine in Namibia because of falling prices. The start of a third mine in the country, owned by French nuclear giant Areva SA, AREVA.FR +0.35% is delayed pending a pickup in prices.
Mr. Hirsch and his employer, so-called junior mining company Forsys Metals Corp. FSY.T -2.90% of Toronto, have yet to find an investor willing to invest $460 million needed to build the two mines and a processing plant it hopes to operate in the country. So-called junior miners like Forsys explore and map out a geological deposit before securing a partnership or sale with a major mining company with the capital needed to develop the mine.
A crisis of confidence in the nuclear-power industry, set off by Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi disaster in March 2011, has trickled down to Namibia, where uranium accounts for 12% of the country’s exports.
Uranium prices are down 70% over the past six years, while most other minerals have gotten stronger. Iron-ore prices, for example, have quadrupled. Prices first took a hit with the global financial crisis. Then the Fukushima disaster nixed a recovery, putting all but two of Japan’s 50 reactors out of service and triggering safety shutdowns at many reactors elsewhere.
That reduced uranium demand even as supply grew as a result of the past decade’s mining boom. Though reactors are still being built in China and Saudi Arabia, among other places, Germany is phasing out its nuclear program by early next decade due to environmental concerns.
In addition, Russia is still unloading uranium from discarded nuclear weapons for use as reactor fuel, as part of a 1993 disarmament treaty. Russia exports up to 24 million pounds of uranium a year—or one-fifth of global supply—according to the terms of the treaty. That program expires at the end of 2013, which could be a boon to uranium miners.
EPISODE BREAKDOWN: On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to Jim Riccio, Nuclear Policy Analyst at Greenpeace USA, about the ongoing nuclear crisis in Fukushima, Japan and why the world continues to pursue nuclear energy given the dangers associated with the technology.
Abby then talks to Christopher Noland, Director of the film ‘3.11: Surviving Japan’, about the 2nd anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and how dangerous radiation levels continue to affect local residents today.
BTS wraps up the show with a look at milk, it’s association with radiation and the facts pointing at how milk consumption is unnatural and certainly doesn’t do your body good.
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