nuclear-news

Sizewell/Hinkley: Nuclear deal ‘a £50bn gamble’, says Royal advisor

By Tom Potter Saturday, March 16, 2013
8:00 AM

http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/sizewell_hinkley_nuclear_deal_a_50bn_gamble_says_royal_advisor_1_1981039

A ROYAL advisor has slammed Government proposals to guarantee a minimum price for the electricity generated by EDF Energy for the next 30-40 years.

Former Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) chairman Jonathon Porritt compared guaranteeing a “strike price” for the electricity produced by Hinkley Point C to making a “£50billion bet on the wholesale price of energy in 2050”.

Under proposals by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), a minimum price for the nuclear electricity of almost £100 per megawatt hour would give EDF a guarantee on future returns and may herald similar deals for the rest of Britain’s planned nuclear suite, including Sizewell C.

But Mr Porritt, one-time director of Friends of the Earth and founder of the non-profit Forum for the Future, said energy minister Ed Davey was planning to sign a long-term investment contract to buy electricity at twice today’s price from power stations that will not produce any electricity in this decade.

Mr Porritt, who acts as advisor on environmental matters to Prince Charles, added: “That would be like having asked Tony Benn, Harold Wilson’s energy minister in 1976, if he knew what the wholesale price of electricity would be in 2013.”

March 16, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nuclear talk is cheap, nuclear power is not – Greenpeace

And all this after 60 years of the nuclear age and levels of government support and multi-billions in subsidies and bail-outs that the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries can only dream of. It borders on the pathetic.

After such waste and incompetence, and instead of lauding nuclear power, these 12 EU nations should be laughing the nuclear industry out of town. If would be hilarious if it wasn’t for the damage these nuclear fantasies have caused and are causing…..

Blogpost by Justin McKeating – March 15, 2013 at 14:59

When it comes to keeping promises, the nuclear industry and its supporters are very good at talking the talk but very bad at walking the walk.

The industry’s excited talk about a nuclear “renaissance” where a thousand new nuclear reactors would bloom and save the planet from catastrophic climate change turned out to be a dangerous fantasy. The time, money and resources wasted fantasising over new nuclear reactors have left a lost decade where energy efficiency and renewables could have made real and planet-saving progress on reducing emissions but have been shamefully neglected.

This is why the communiqué released by 12 EU nations affirming their support for nuclear power is dangerously deluded.

Showing a tasteful grasp for the timing of their propaganda– the day after the 2nd anniversary of the Fukushima disaster – Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and the UK –“affirmed their commitment to collaborate in the context of the role that they believe that nuclear energy can play a part in the EU’s future low carbon energy mix”

Or, in straight-talk, these nations wish to continue to prop up the nuclear boondoggle – expensive, unsafe, dirty and unable to make any significant contribution to fighting climate change – even while the chances of humanity limiting the global temperature increase to an average of two degrees Celsius are looking increasingly and terrifyingly unlikely.

The thing is, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time as an observer of the nuclear industry and its boosters, it’s this: nuclear talk is cheap while nuclear power is expensive and getting more so by the day.

The nuclear “renaissance” in Europe – which has been heralded for at least five years – has yielded just two partially built nuclear reactors at Olkiluoto in Finland and Flamanville in France. Both reactors, of the same European Pressurised Reactor design, are years behind schedule and billions of Euros over budget.

Which is certainly why the signatories to this week’s communiqué have said:

The Member States wishing to construct new nuclear power stations signalled that an investment environment must be created taking account of the long term nature of nuclear infrastructure projects in the EU.

“An investment environment” is spin for fixing the game in the nuclear industry’s favour. It’s a fancy way of saying that governments must guarantee the profits of the nuclear companies for decades as well as shielding them from any liability should their reactors cause an accident. It’s propaganda that says the public must pay while the nuclear companies profit.

The evidence for this is everywhere.

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March 16, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

USA Nuclear weapons complex in disarray

3/07/2013
By Jay Coghlan
Nuclear Watch New Mexico

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has recently released Fiscal Year 2012 Performance Evaluation Reports on its contractors at its eight nuclear weapons sites, following Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s successful lawsuit for FY 2011 Reports. These assessments are the scorecards for Performance Evaluation Plans negotiated between the government and its nuclear weapons contractors, which awards the contractors hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars. Public access to these reports is of increasing importance as federal oversight is being continuously diminished. The trend of soaring contractor profits paired with decreasing accountability should be reversed, especially given sequester budget cuts that will further handicap federal oversight.

Nuclear Watch New Mexico has released an analysis and selected excerpts of the FY 2012 NNSA Performance Evaluation Reports. In summary:

In June 2012 the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a press release entitled “Committee to Examine Eroding Oversight at Nation’s Most Critical Nuclear Sites – “Hands Off, Eyes On” Approach Raises Bipartisan Concerns“ and asked the Government Accountability Office to report on the effectiveness of NNSA’s contractor assurance system.

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March 16, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

VIDEO: TSA chase down nuclear patient with handheld gieger counters

March 15, 2013 10:02 PM

(CBS) — It was stunning for those who watched Thursday night as federal agents investigated a possible nuclear threat at Chicago’s Ogilvie Transportation Center.

CBS 2′s photojournalist Lana Hinshaw-Klann happened to be at the scene and used a cell-phone camera to record agents in action. Reporter Dave Savini looks into what agents were looking for and what they found.

Sources say the agents were members of the elite TSA VIPR team on the 5:04pm Union Pacific West line. They were carrying hand-held nuclear-detection devices that picked up a reading.

VIPR teams were created after the 2004 bombing of a train in Madrid, Spain, to protect U.S. transportation.

At the Ogilvie station, officers held the train and searched for a person or bag that posed a potential nuclear threat.

Jerry Jones, a Chicago lawyer, was heading home on that train. He says the federal officers narrowed the trouble to the area where he was sitting.

“I had no idea I was the center of the activity,” he says.

The special security team must have picked up on him as he entered the station and walked up the stairs, Jones says. Little did he know a nuclear stress test he had at a hospital earlier in the day had set off silent alarms and sent security scurrying.

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March 16, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments