California governor heads to Europe for climate talks http://m.startribune.com/california-governor-heads-to-europe-for-climate-talks/454332843/?section=nationBy KATHLEEN RONAYNE , ASSOCIATED PRESS October 31, 2017 SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Jerry Brown is continuing his international fight against climate change with an 11-day trip to Europe starting Saturday including stops at the Vatican and a United Nations conference in Germany.
Brown is a chief adversary to Republican President Donald Trump in the battle over U.S. climate policy, promising to help the country reach its emissions reductions targets even as Trump withdraws from an international climate accord. He’s been named the special adviser for states and regions at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany.
“While the White House declares war on climate science and retreats from the Paris Agreement, California is doing the opposite and taking action,” Brown said in a statement announcing the trip. “We are joining with our partners from every part of the world to do what needs to be done to prevent irreversible climate change.”
The non-profit California State Protocol Foundation, which accepts donations from private businesses, pays for Brown’s international travel. Travel for Brown’s staff members will be partially covered by money from the non-profit Climate Registry and the Climate Action Reserve, a program that deals with carbon offset projects, spokesman Evan Westrup said.
Brown’s November trip follows visits to China and Russia earlier this year to promote international collaboration on climate change. Next year, he plans to host a summit in San Francisco.
He will give a speech Saturday to the Vatican Pontifical Academy of Sciences symposium. During the week, Brown will address European Parliament leaders, the state parliament in Baden-Wurttemberg Germany, meet with representatives from national scientific academies and serve on several panels at the U.N. conference.
Govs. Kate Brown of Oregon, Jay Inslee of Washington and Terry McAuliffe of Virginia — all Democrats — will join him on a panel about states’ roles in fighting climate change. California Senate leader Kevin de Leon, also a Democrat, is scheduled to speak Friday at a Vatican workshop on climate.
Swamp Tales: Puerto Rico Cancels $300 Million Trump Crony Electrical Grid Rebuild Contract, The Progressive, by Harvey Wasserman October 30, 2017, The swampish saga would be hard to invent. In early October, Puerto Rico’s Energy Power Authority awarded a $300 million tax-funded contract to reconstruct the island’s hurricane devastated power grid to a two-person, two-year-old firm based in the small Montana hometown of Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The company is financially backed by a major donor to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
About eighty percent of Puerto Rico is still without power. Many hospitals are still dark. Local citizens needing medical treatments such as surgeries or dialysis have been forced to flee to places where electric power is available.
Puerto Rico’s power grid centers on antiquated oil, gas, and coal generators, the median age of which is forty-four years. Just two percent Puerto Rico’s juice came from wind and solar. One wind farm, on the south side of the island, survived Hurricane Maria largely intact, as did at least one small commercial solar array.
For Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million residents, restoring power is a matter of life and death. But the $300 million dollar contract was handed, with no public hearings, legislative discussion or long-term planning, to Whitefish, an obscure company from rural Montana.
At least one Zinke relative—his son—has worked on part-time contract for Whitefish. Zinke claims he had nothing to do with the deal.
Anti-Trump sentiment is rampant throughout the island, fed by a lack of concern expressed by the President for Puerto Ricans’ dire situation, and capped by a recent visit in which he pitched paper towels to a crowd of bewildered local residents. When San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz questioned the contract with Whitefish, the company threatened to stop work, then apologized.
The Puerto Rican power company’s contract astoundingly exempted Whitefish from official audits, stating, “In no event shall [governmental bodies] have the right to audit or review the cost and profit elements.” It also waived “any claim against Contractor related to delayed completion of the work,” meaning Whitefish was empowered to pretty much take as long as it wanted to complete the job……..
the uproar should also focus on the growing demand that the electric power systems in Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean be reconstructed around renewables and microgrids, rather than fossil-fired central distribution networks.
Most likely those systems will not be built by Trump cronies flown in at huge expense, who then must dodge rocks and bottles being thrown by angry locals.
#NukeGate: SCANA’s Failed Gambit https://www.fitsnews.com/2017/10/31/nukegate-scanas-failed-gambit/ Crony capitalist utility screws up the one card it had to play October 31, 2017. By FITSNewsSouth Carolina’s crony capitalist government-run utility, used to dictating terms to its bought-and-paid for politicians, got dealt a measure of its own medicine this week when state lawmakers – themselves badly exposed by the Palmetto State’s ongoing #NukeGate debacle – refused to play ball with the company.
What happened? SCANA attempted to use the planned ouster of two top corporate officials – CEO Kevin Marsh and top nuclear office Stephen Byrne – as a means of “cutting a deal” with state legislators.
As we exclusively reported on Saturday morning, “early reports indicated the besieged Cayce, S.C.-based company may have been attempting to use Marsh’s ouster as a ‘bargaining chip’ – a way for SCANA to gain leverage in its multi-front war with lawmakers, state and federal investigators and aggressive attorneys currently pressing a multitude of claims against the company.”
No such leverage was available, however … meaning SCANA essentially screwed up the one card it had to play (a card which, frankly, should have been played a long time ago).
This week reporters John McDermott and Andy Shain of The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courierconfirmed that leaders in the S.C. House of Representatives “refused to cut a deal with SCANA for Marsh and Byrne’s departure.” Oy …
Compounding the damage of this botched overture, SCANA has decided to replace Marsh from within – elevating its current finance chief Jimmy Addison to the role of CEO.
:Marsh, Addison and Byrne are among the top SCANA executives who made bank while presiding over #NukeGate – a multi-billion command economic intervention in the energy marketplace that has failed spectacularly, leaving Palmetto State taxpayers and ratepayers on the hook for a pair of new nuclear reactors that now may never be built.
In fact, ratepayers are continuing to pay $37 million per month on these reactors, even though work on the project has been abandoned.
To recap: SCANA and its state-owned partner, Santee Cooper, spent the past decade building a pair of next-generation AP1000 pressurized water reactors in Jenkinsville, S.C. at a cost of $9.8 billion. The money was spent, but the reactors were never finished. In fact they’re not even half-finished – with the cost to complete them ranging anywhere from $9-16 billion.
Unable to pony up that kind of cash, Santee Cooper pulled the plug on the project on July 31 … killing an estimated 5,600 jobs, squandering billions of dollars in investment (including more than $2 billion raised through rate increases on consumers) and throwing the state’s energy future into chaos.
Recently released documents revealed executives at the two utilities knew over a year-and-a-half ago that the project was doomed – yet continued to raise rates on consumers anyway. Not surprisingly, the project’s failure has spawned numerous lawsuits and a pair of criminal investigations – one state, one federal.
It’s also cratered SCANA’s stock price and prompted a desperate effort on the part of current governor Henry McMaster to unload Santee Cooper … for a song.
While members of the S.C. House leadership were correct to rebuke any overture from SCANA, they remain squarely on the hook for this multi-billion dollar disaster. Same with their colleagues in the State Senate and former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who failed to veto the now notorious legislation that enabled SCANA and Santee Cooper to effectively socialize their investment risk on this failed project.
Energy Minister David Mahlobo repeated the mantra on the trillion-rand nuclear programme; that it will be done at a scale and pace the country can afford. Gaye Davis | about 4 hours ago
However, in his comments after Gigaba’s medium-term budget policy speech, Mahlobo appeared to favour a more bullish approach.
Democratic Alliance National Council of Provinces (NCOP) member Farhat Essack put the question: “You said that no one has the figures for a nuclear programme and that the government owns the numbers. Please explain to this House what exactly did you mean by that?”
Mahlobo repeated the mantra on the trillion-rand nuclear programme; that it will be done at a scale and pace the country can afford. Mahlobo says the opposition’s focus on nuclear has nothing to do with policy.
“It has everything to do with who gets the tender. I’m not in the business of tenders. I’m in the business of ensuring that you have energy here to pump our economy and we’re not going to be deterred in doing that.”
LISTEN: Will new Energy Minister push nuclear deal through?
Malloy signs Millstone nuclear bill, By Ken Dixon, Ct Post, Tuesday, October 31, 2017 HARTFORD — A bill that environmentalists and consumer advocates charged would allow the Millstone nuclear power plant the ability to compete with renewable sources of power, was signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, following its passage last week in the Legislature…..
Opponents of the bill charged that allowing Millstone to compete with renewables, could costs consumers an extra $300 million a year in a state with some of the nation’s highest charges for electricity……
The announcement this month that 31 Hanford workers were contaminated from a June 8 incident is raising more questions about how government agencies alert the public about the test results of leaks from one of the world’s most polluted sites.
The Department of Energy, which oversees the multibillion-dollar contracts paid to private companies tasked with cleaning up Hanford, alerted the public on June 8 of a plutonium release. Then on Oct. 18, it announced that some 31 workers were contaminated with low levels of radiation following the incident that triggered the “take cover” alarm on June 8 at the 580-square-mile site just outside of Richland.
Initial testing of contractors, who were working with heavy equipment to dismantle part of the line that produced much of this nation’s plutonium, found no contamination in their protective clothing or skin. However, 305 of the employees were later tested. Of those, 31 were found to have low levels of radiation in their systems.
Tom Carpenter, the executive director of watchdog group Hanford Challenge, said the four-month delay in government officials explaining the results of the exposure and testing has become the new norm.
“It’s been a trend at the Hanford site for many years,” Carpenter said. “If news does get released about something that’s not good, it’s often half the story. In many cases, the news is actually released by active workers.”
Carpenter questioned whether DOE officials required the testing of employees or made it voluntary. He also wanted to know why officials only tested workers’ fecal matter rather than doing a full-body count to test for contaminated particles that could have lodged in their lungs.
DOE spokesman Geoff Tyree confirmed the tests were only for those employees who asked for them. Officials did follow up and used the full-body scans, or lung counts, for four employees who requested them.
As part of a follow-up to the fecal scans, known as bioassay tests, officials conducted chest counts on 114 employees and took urine samples from 97 workers. All of those scans, including those of the four who requested lung counts, came back as negative, Tyree said.
“Employee safety remains our No. 1 goal as we encounter and overcome challenges inherent with demolishing what was once one of the most hazardous buildings in the DOE complex,” Tyree said, reading from a prepared statement. “We believe we have taken positive steps to further reduce the possibility of contamination during the remaining demolition work.”
He noted that of the 31 exposed employees, 18 had levels of 0.5 millirems over 50 years. The other 13 had higher doses, some 10 millirems over 50 years. For comparison, the average resident receives about 300 millirems a year from natural background radiation.
The workers’ scans came in “well below the administrative limit of 2,000 millirems per year for contract employees,” Tyree said.
“There was no kind of concern expressed. Initially, they said no worker was exposed,” he said. “That turned out to be not right, but they didn’t change their tune. Their characterization was, ‘This was such a small amount.’ That’s the wrong response. Nobody should have been exposed to plutonium.”
Carpenter said he believes the safety protocols at Hanford have slipped.
“Twenty years ago if this happened at Hanford, the site would have been shut down. Outside inquiries would have opened up. People would have asked, ‘What went wrong? Why and how can we avoid it in the future?’ Now they shut down a couple of days and they go back to work.”
Tyree said employees of CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. began taking down the outer portion of the Plutonium Reclamation facility in November 2016. The building was used to extract plutonium out of waste from previous processes.
Following the June 8 contamination release, CH2M Hill shut down work on the reclamation facility and has not yet restarted. The company plans to take down a portion of the main plutonium processing facility next to the reclamation plant to prevent a wind-tunnel effect between the two buildings that could have contributed to the spread of the radiation.
Tyree said crews previously set up air monitors around the construction site that are designed to pick up contamination levels far below those that would put workers at risk. If they are set off, work stops to determine what’s going on, he said.
But Carpenter noted that the Washington Department of Health tests showed plutonium and americium particles in low levels at the Rattlesnake security barricade, which is 3 miles from the plant where the workers apparently caused the contamination release.
“How did it drift all the way to the highway?” he said.
Carpenter also questioned why the contractors didn’t deploy large tents to contain the dust from the demolition.
“That would have kept any radioactive clouds from coming out,” Carpenter said. “I understand they want to save money. But there are some risks that you don’t trade off.”
Tyree said contractors have responded to the incident by moving employees farther away from the demolition; adding exhausters, which draw contaminated air into the site, where it is filtered; and using dust suppression from ground-based foggers during the work.
Tyree said employee safety remains DOE’s top priority.
Workers produced plutonium for the nation’s top-secret Manhattan Project during World War II. Following the war, Hanford workers produced plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal during the decadeslong Cold War.
The Hanford Site was decommissioned in 1988 for federal cleanup.
Editors Note: The first two paragraphs were clarified on Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2017 to reflect that the Department of Energy did alert the public on June 8 about a plutonium release.
GENEVA (Reuters) – Greenhouse gas emissions are on course to be about 30 percent above the 2030 global target, but there are signs of a move away from fossil fuels that not even U.S. President Donald Trump can stop, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Trump has announced he will pull out of the Paris climate agreement under which 195 countries pledged to try to keep global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
An annual U.N. audit of progress toward that goal showed emissions are likely to be 53.0-55.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year by 2030, far above the 42 billion ton threshold for averting the 2 degree rise.
But U.N. Environment chief Erik Solheim hailed signs of progress, with an apparent three-year plateau in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, cement production and other industrial processes, largely due to slower growth in coal use in China and the United States.
“We all know the bad news. In my view however we are at a turning point where the good news is taking precedence from the bad news,” he told an event to launch the report in Geneva.
“We are at a watershed moment where we have stopped the rise in CO2 emissions, there is every reason to believe we can bring them down, and we see great news coming from all over the world every day,” Solheim said by video link from Nairobi.
He said the question he was asked wherever he went was: “What about Donald Trump?”, to which he answered that the momentum was now with private sector efforts to combat climate change which Trump would not be able to stop.
”In all likelihood the United States of America will live up to its commitments not because of the White House but because of the private sector,” he said. “The train is on the right track, but our duty is to speed it up.”
The U.N. says greater efforts will be needed because temperatures are set to rise by 3.0-3.2 degrees Celsius this century. Ministers will work on guidelines for the Paris agreement in Bonn next month.
Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said climate-fueled hurricanes, floods and drought would rapidly worsen unless ministers committed to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
“Paris was just the starting point,” she said.
”Faster, bolder action is needed. Leaders must emerge in Bonn and use the platform to take stronger action and hold others to account if they fail to live up to their obligations. We can still achieve 1.5 degrees Celsius if we all work together.”
The WHOI research team also compared the radioactive contamination at the Marshall Islands to the contamination found today near Fukushima in Japan in the aftermath of the Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. “In contrast to Fukushima, where cesium is the most abundant radionuclide of concern, in these atolls, the focus should be on plutonium, given its significantly high levels,”
Scientists have found lingering radioactivity in the lagoons of remote Marshall Island atolls in the Pacific Ocean where the United States conducted 66 nuclear weapons tests in the 1940s and 1950s.
Radioactivity levels at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls were extensively studied in the decades after the testing ended, but there has been relatively little work conducted there recently. A team of scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) reported that levels of radioactive cesium and plutonium have decreased since the 1970s, but these elements continue to be released into the Pacific Ocean from seafloor sediments and lagoon waters.
The levels of plutonium are 100 or more times higher in lagoon waters compared to the surrounding Pacific Ocean and about two times higher for a radioactive form of cesium. Despite these enrichments, they do not exceed U.S. and international water quality standards set to protect human health, the scientists reported Oct. 30, 2017, in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
To determine the source of these radionuclides in lagoon waters, the WHOI scientists measured the amounts and flow of radioactive material entering the ocean from groundwater seeping from the islands. They found that groundwater was a relatively low source of radioactivity.
In particular, they found that radioactive groundwater was not leaking much from beneath one suspected potential source: the Runit Dome on the island of Runit—a massive 350-foot-wide concrete lid that covers 111,000 cubic yards of radioactive soil and debris that were bulldozed into a bomb crater and sealed over. It was constructed in the late 1970s by the U.S. government to contain contaminated waste from the nuclear tests. The bottom of the Runit Dome is not lined and below sea level, so scientists and others have been concerned that tidal action could move water through the buried radioactive material and bring it out to sea.
“The foundations of these island atolls are ancient coral reefs that have the porosity of Swiss cheese, so groundwater and any mobilized radioactive elements can percolate through them quite easily,” said WHOI geochemist Matt Charette. Though that does not seem to be happening now, the scientists advise that the Runit Dome area should be continuously monitored as sea level rises and the dome deteriorates.
Using isotopes of plutonium that act like a fingerprint to pinpoint sources, the WHOI scientists found that the seafloor sediments around Runit Island seem to be contributing about half of the plutonium to the lagoon. “Additional studies examining how radioactive plutonium moves through the environment would help elucidate why this small area is such a large source of radioactivity,” Buesseler said.
The WHOI scientists who conducted the study and wrote the report included Ken Buesseler, Matthew Charette, Steven Pike, Paul Henderson, and Lauren Kipp. They sailed to the islands aboard the research vessel Alucia on an expedition funded by the Dalio Explore Fund.
The team collected sediments from the lagoon with poster tube-sized collectors that were inserted by divers into the seafloor’s sediments, filled with mud, capped. Back in WHOI laboratories, the cores were sliced into layers and analyzed to reveal a buried record of local fallout from the nuclear tests. The scientists also collected and analyzed samples of lagoon waters .
On the islands, they collected groundwater samples from cisterns, wells, beaches, and other sites. They analyzed these samples for the levels of radioactive cesium and plutonium from weapons tests. For the first time on these islands, the scientists also measured isotopes of radium, a naturally occurring radioactive “tracer” that give scientists key information to determine how much and how fast groundwater flows from land into the ocean.
The WHOI research team also compared the radioactive contamination at the Marshall Islands to the contamination found today near Fukushima in Japan in the aftermath of the Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. “In contrast to Fukushima, where cesium is the most abundant radionuclide of concern, in these atolls, the focus should be on plutonium, given its significantly high levels,” said WHOI radiochemist Ken Buesseler.
The U.S. conducted 66 nuclear weapons tests between 1946 and 1958 at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, each a ring of low-lying reef islands that surrounds a larger lagoon. Bikini has 26 islands; Enewetak had 42 islands, but three were bombed out of existence. They became known as the western part of the “U.S. Pacific Proving Grounds.”
Bikini and Enewetak are among 29 atolls that make up the Republic of the Marshall Islands, located in the equatorial Pacific, about 2,500 miles west of Hawaii. The collective land area of the thousands of small islands is equivalent to the area of Washington, D.C. but they are spread across an ocean area that exceeds the size of Alaska.
The work holds particular significance to the atolls’ indigenous populations which were evacuated before the tests and thus far have only been allowed to return to one small island in the Enewtak Atoll.
This research was funded by the Dalio Foundation and the Dalio Explore Fund.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The chief executive at the second South Carolina utility involved in a failed $9 billion project to build two nuclear reactors is stepping down.
SCANA announced Tuesday that Kevin Marsh is retiring as chairman and CEO of the company and its subsidiary, South Carolina Electric & Gas, at the end of the year.
Senior Vice President Stephen Byrne also is retiring at the same time.
Lawmakers and others had been putting pressure on the company to make leadership changes since SCANA and state-owned utility Santee Cooper announced they were abandoning construction of the reactors July 31.
SCANA Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Addison will become the utility’s new CEO on Jan. 1.
Santee Cooper CEO Lonnie Carter also is retiring after the project was abandoned
SHANGHAI–China’s first offshore nuclear reactor is set to be completed soon, engineers involved in the project said, bolstering Beijing’s maritime ambitions and stoking concerns about the potential use of atomic power in disputed island territories.
Beijing hopes offshore reactors will not only help win new markets, but also support state ambitions to become a “strong maritime power” by providing reliable electricity to oil and gas rigs as well as remote South China Sea islands.
Zhang Nailiang, engineer with the China Shipbuilding Industry Corp. (CSIC), said the technology was “mature” and the first demonstration project would be deployed soon at drilling platforms in northern China’s Bohai Sea.
“We are confident we should be able to get it finished very soon,” he said at an industry meeting this month. He declined to give an exact date, saying only that it would be ready well before 2020.
The demonstration project is being developed by a research team established by CSIC, China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) and two reactor builders, China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) and China General Nuclear Power (CGN).
The direct use of military technology has aided progress, Zhang said, noting that other projects–including one launched by CNOOC and CGN last year–are still at the testing stage.
China has urged nuclear firms to develop technologies that will help boost domestic capacity and win projects abroad.
Zhang said floating reactors also served a wider political goal to strengthen China’s maritime presence, an aim reiterated by President Xi Jinping during his Communist Party Congress address this month.
“We in the nuclear and shipbuilding industries have a call of duty to construct a ‘strong maritime power,'” Zhang said in a speech.
China National Nuclear Power (CNNP), CNNC’s listed unit, launched a floating nuclear power subsidiary in August and also said the technology would help China become “a strong maritime power.”
Though CNNP did not mention the South China Sea, CGN and CNOOC’s rival project will be deployed in the region, which includes islands and reefs claimed by the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam as well as China.
Experts warn offshore reactors could raise safety and security questions.
“The problem is the remoteness raises all kinds of questions about security, safety, economics and logistics,” said Mark Hibbs, senior fellow of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Offshore nuclear power could lead to the militarization of disputed waters, with China arguing “they have to beef up their presence” in order defend the reactors, Hibbs said.
“The big picture is that the Chinese see nuclear energy as a very strategic technology and as something that China will deploy to its strategic benefit,” he added.
The San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace present the first in a series of events designed to educate on the challenges and options for radioactive waste storage at nuclear power plants. Guest presenters are Molly Johnson of Mothers for Peace and Donna Gilmore of San Onofre Safety.
San Luis Obispo, October 20, 2017 http://www.mothersforpeace.org
A report has revealed the scale of Royal Navy vessels being ‘cannibalised’ as the need grows to swap parts between ships and navy helicopters.
Nuclear-powered Astute-class hunter-killer submarines, one of the most modern and advanced vessels in the navy, experienced the highest level of cannibalisation in the fleet with 59 instances per boat on average.
Equipment ‘cannibalisation’ increased 49 per cent from 2012 to 2017. Spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO) said budget cuts in the last two years could have increased the need to carry out the practice.
In the past two years, the Navy has removed an estimated £92m from its maritime support in-year budgets
In the Astute class, some parts were taken from submarines as they were still being constructed – adding to delays in the production process – and costing the taxpayer millions of pounds.
In the past five years, the three in-service Astute-class submarines had 506 defects, with 28 per cent of the 313 resolved defects in 2016-17 fixed through cannibalisation. The remaining fixes were resolved by sourcing parts from the supply chain.
A Royal Navy spokesman said: “Less than 0.5 per cent of parts we use come from swapping components, and we only do this when it’s absolutely necessary to get ships out of port and back on to operations more quickly.
“We continue to make improvements to how we manage this long-established practice.”
The Mail has approached Barrow MP John Woodock for comment and will also make inquiries with BAE Systems.
Cannibalisation: What are the guidelines?
Official guidance states that cannibalisation should only happen when no other solution is available. But, the NAO said delays in deliveries of spares and a lack of information about when parts will be available contributed to the increase in the practice.
The NAO report noted that in some circumstances, such as during high-intensity operations, cannibalisation can be the most effective way to keep vessels at sea.
“The risk of cannibalisation has increased further with reductions in fleet sizes meaning the armed forces have limited alternative equipment to deploy,” the report noted.
The NAO said the Ministry of Defence had taken decisions to cut support, which could have exacerbated the problem of cannibalisation.
“In the past two years, the Navy has removed an estimated £92m from its maritime support in-year budgets,” the report said.
That amounted to 34 per cent of the total £271m of maritime support budget cuts.
An estimated £22m of parts from submarines in production have been supplied to in-service parts and the practice delayed the completion of HMS Artful by six weeks, leading to an extra £4.9m in indirect costs.
The NAO said the Ministry of Defence had identified that cannibalisation has affected submarines currently in production “leading to an estimated £40m cost increase”.
Cannibalisation: The figures
In the last five years, between 0.3 per cent and 1.4 per cent of parts provided to the main classes of ships and submarines have been cannibalised.
Between April 2012 and March 2017 there were 3,230 instances involving 6,378 parts, with 795 instances in 2016-17 alone – the equivalent of 66 a month, up from 30 a month in 2005.
Cannibalisation can be functional but can actually increase costs. In 50 per cent of cases on Type 23 frigates the expense of moving equipment was equal to or greater than the value of the part – and risks causing damage or disruption.
An average 1.4 per cent of parts issued to Astute-class submarines involved cannibalisation compared with 0.4 per cent across all ships and submarines.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s latest inspection of Indian Point says the power plant’s owners must do more to resolve a recurring problem with O-rings used to seal off nuclear reactors, the cause of eight water leaks since 2003.
Indian Point’s owner, Louisiana-based Entergy, has taken “prudent, conservative action to shut down the plant” to make repairs and identify what may have caused leaks of slightly radioactive water.
But, the NRC notes in its inspection report of Indian Point for the third quarter of 2017, those efforts have not been completely successful.
“Corrective actions to address the causal factors over the years have not been completely effective at preventing recurrence of the issue,” the NRC report states.
The large stainless steel O-rings work to secure the lid or head of the reactor onto the body of the reactor vessel, where nuclear fission occurs.
The leakage issue is likely tied to a 2003 design change that affected how O-rings are installed during the plant’s maintenance shutdowns, typically every two years, the NRC adds. The NRC says Entergy must evaluate its installation procedure to make sure it meets requirements and expectations.
Currently, Indian Point’s two reactors — Units 2 and 3 — are operating without leaks, the NRC said.
The most recent leak was discovered in Unit 3 in June during scheduled maintenance.
And the leaks of slightly radioactive water dating back to 2003 have not escaped into the environment. Any leakage would likely be captured by a leakoff line or by a drainage system inside the reactor building.
“We will continue to follow developments involving the O-rings at Indian Point,” NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said.
An Entergy spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.
In January, Entergy announced that it will shut down operations at Indian Point in 2021, following a protracted legal battle with the state of New York.
A report on Tuesday by a local newspaper, the Independent said that the feasibility studies for the plant and a research center construction will include site screening, capacity, financing, and time frames of the projects.
The newspaper report quoted a report by Bloomberg, a foreign news agency as saying that the state-owned Russian nuclear company Rosatom disclosed the nuclear deal in an emailed statement.
It noted that Nigeria and Russia in 2009 signed an intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in the field of the peaceful usage of nuclear technologies.
According to the report, the Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission reported in 2015, Nigeria had talks with Rosatom to build as many as four nuclear power plants costing about $20 billion.
The report added that the chief officer of the Egbin power plant in Lagos State, the nation’s biggest, said last month that Nigeria distributes an average of 4,500 megawatts of electricity, but that half the output is lost because of inadequate transmission infrastructure.
“Rosatom is seeking to build nuclear power plants in other countries on the continent, including South Africa,” the report added.
A government report predicting it will cost $1.2 trillion to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal is raising alarms that the Pentagon severely underestimated what it will take to replace its current weapons — and sparked calls Tuesday for the Trump administration to reevaluate a modernization plan first proposed by former President Barack Obama.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated it will cost at least $1.2 trillion between 2017 and 2046 to introduce the mix of nuclear-armed submarines, bombers and missiles that are now under construction. That’s a higher price tag than some previous estimates had offered.
The projections immediately set off a fierce debate over whether such a plan is even practical, and presented Congress with a new quandary as lawmakers try to find the money to support President Donald Trump’s other military priorities, like building a bigger Navy.
“Congress still doesn’t seem to have any answers as to how we will pay for this effort, or what the trade-offs with other national security efforts will be if we maintain an arsenal of over 4,000 nuclear weapons and expand our capacity to produce more,” Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that praised the report as a “thorough, credible analysis.”
But supporters insisted that spending what the Pentagon projects could amount to 6 percent of Pentagon’s budget to upgrade the nuclear arsenal over the next three decades is a fair price for what one called the “cornerstone of America’s national security.”
“The price is affordable and the mission is imperative,” Claude Chafin, the spokesman for Republican members of the Armed Services panel, said in a statement. “Those who might argue otherwise ignore the enormous cost of facing an increasingly insecure world with an eroding and uncertain deterrent.”
And the country’s top nuclear officials have defended the modernization effort’s cost. “We’re now at a point where we must recapitalize every leg of the nuclear triad,” Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee in March. “We have squeezed about all of the life we can out of the systems we possess.”
The new report comes as Trump pledges to make the nation’s nuclear deterrent “far stronger and more powerful than ever before,” and as his administration reassesses the nation’s nuclear weapons structure. That so-called Nuclear Posture Review is expected to be completed by January, and could propose new programs.
A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, asked to comment on the report, noted the Trump administration’s nuclear review is ongoing and that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is due to present his recommendations to the president by the end of the year.
But the new CBO estimate shows that even the current plan poses significant challenges for a strained federal budget outlook. It updates a previous analysis that concluded the nuclear modernization plan would cost more than $400 billion between 2017 and 2026.
“If this goes through this will be the biggest increase in U.S. spending for nuclear weapons since the Reagan administration in the early 1980s,” said Stephen Schwartz, a nuclear policy consultant. “It is not penny-wise. It is likely that Congress, the Air Force and the Navy are really going to get spooked by the looming bill. It is not affordable.”
The new budget estimates reinforce the concerns of those who have long insisted the plan is not viable.
Indeed, the new government cost estimate is in line with a one previously published by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Calif., which estimated that updating the nuclear triad could cost more than $1 trillion over 30 years. That assessment has been widely criticized by advocates of nuclear weapon spending as an exaggeration.
But in actuality the costs could even be higher than even the CBO is now estimating, according to a number of nuclear policy experts.
Tom Collina, director of policy at the nonprofit Ploughshares Fund, which advocates for having fewer nuclear weapons, pointed out that the new report does not take inflation into account. He said the real cost could be more like $1.5 trillion.
“The price of the nuclear arsenal rebuild is skyrocketing and it’s unsustainable,” he said in an interview. “This is now a spending spree.”
In addition, the costs of the nuclear arsenal are almost sure to fluctuate as weapons programs and spending on new facilities and communications systems mature. And they could grow substantially if the Trump administration’s nuclear review results in an even more robust upgrade plan.
“If the forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review by the administration does not scale-back current nuclear weapons spending plans — or worse, accelerates or expands upon them — expenditures on nuclear weapons will endanger other high priority national security programs,” Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said in a statement.
“This also only looks at the current plan,” Schwartz added. “If the NPR comes back and it turns out they want a new sea-launched cruise missile or a new warhead or a more bombers, all this stuff goes out the window.”
The CBO report is already being used to try to force a new debate on nuclear needs.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the upgrade plan “nothing more than a budgetary boondoggle” and in a statement urged “cutting unnecessary and destabilizing nuclear weapons systems.”
“There has never been a serious debate in Congress over the comprehensive cost of the nuclear weapons program,” added Schwartz. “We have a golden opportunity. I do not have a great deal of optimism that there are enough people in the Trump administration that are interested in this and looking at this closely.”
But Reif said reality is bound to set in eventually.
“Unless the U.S. government finds a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” he said, “the nuclear weapons spending plan inherited by the Trump administration will pose a crushing affordability problem.”
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