EDF says individuals detained after breaking into Cruas nuclear plant

“All you need to do is make a hole (in the building) to start a fire,” Yannick Rousselet, Greenpeace France’s chief anti-nuclear campaigner told AFP.

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November 28, 2017

A group of Greenpeace activists broke into a French nuclear plant on Tuesday and scaled the walls of a building containing spent nuclear fuel to highlight security shortcomings at the facility.

Around 20 activists took part in the latest stunt by the environmental campaign group aimed at showing that France’s 58 nuclear reactors are vulnerable to attack.

The group said the protest at Cruas-Meysse plant in the southeastern Ardeche region, which has four reactors, proved that security around spent nuclear fuel pools was particularly lacking.

Four activists scaled one of the buildings containing pools used to cool highly radioactive spent fuel rods and set off flares.

“All you need to do is make a hole (in the building) to start a fire,” Yannick Rousselet, Greenpeace France’s chief anti-nuclear campaigner told AFP.

France’s state-owned energy giant EDF which operates the plant confirmed the intrusion but said that the plant’s safety was never in danger.

Regional security officials said 22 people were arrested, adding they had posed no threat.

The incident is the second of its kind in as many months.

In October, Greenpeace activists got inside a nuclear plant in Cattenom, near the border with Luxembourg, and set off fireworks at the foot of a spent fuel pool.

Four Greenpeace activists scaled one of the buildings at the nuclear plant and set off flares

France is the world’s most nuclear-dependent country, with atomic plants providing 75 percent of the country’s electricity.

Around a third of all reactors in the country are set to be closed by 2025 under a government plan to boost renewables.

In a report in October Greenpeace noted that most of France’s nuclear plants were built before the rise of threats from non-state terror groups such as the Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda and claimed that their defences were weak.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-greenpeace-alarm-nuclear-safety-break-in.html#jCp

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Energy efficiency – theme for July 2019

Energy efficiency represents the single largest potential contributor to global emissions reduction, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA 2017). It should be a key part of the global energy strategy, for several reasons:

It could reduce global electric demand by more than 20 per cent, based on current rates in the U.S. power sector, while maintaining high levels of services such as heating and lighting.
It avoids the need for increased energy, capacity and grid services, making it the least expensive way to decarbonise at scale.
It can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by billions of tonnes.

A dramatic example of the power of energy efficiency is lighting. In 2017 the United States passed the milestone of 1 billion LED and CFL lights installed, avoiding 142 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide emissions, at a cost of about $7 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide. In contrast, the cumulative installed capacity of rooftop solar reached 8,000 MW in 2017, saving 8 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide, at a cost of $360 per ton. Lighting efficiency thus yielded almost 18 times the avoided carbon dioxide, at about 2 per cent the cost per ton of rooftop solar.

Google provides another example of the power of energy efficiency. Its data centers now use 50 per cent less energy than the average data center, according to the company. Google also developed an improved chip, the TPU, which performs 83 times better than standard CPUs. The new chip allowed Google to reduce power consumption at its data centers by a factor of 30—far exceeding the effect on Google’s carbon footprint of all of the company’s renewable energy purchases. ” – John Woolard, Eco Business, 10 June 2019

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