New £20bn Hitachi nuclear plant looks set to be built in Wales – with taxpayer funding, Compelo.comBy Felix Todd, 31 May 18,
Japanese multinational conglomerate Hitachi has been in talks with UK Government concerning the construction of its nuclear plant in Anglesey, Wales – which, despite local protesters, appears to have been given the go ahead at the cost of the taxpayer
UK Government ministers are reportedly planning to pay £15bn worth of taxes to aid the construction cost of Japanese multinational Hitachi’s proposed nuclear power plant in north Wales.
The news comes as a hammer blow to those opposed to the plant’s construction in Wylfa Newydd, including Welsh protesters from the group Pawb (People against Wylfa B), who went to Japan earlier this week to voice their opposition.
Their concerns were merited by local councillors, who suggested in March that the project – which has a total cost of about £20bn – could lead to an increase in homelessness.
……. Plans for a similar plant in Hinkley Point, Somerset, were delayed last July for 15 months and the total cost was increased by £2.2bn – bringing it to a total of more £20.3bn, more or less in line with the Hitachi project. https://www.compelo.com/20bn-hitachi-wales-nuclear-plant/
Toshiba exits US nuclear project https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20180531_37/31 May 18 Japanese electronics maker Toshiba is walking away from a nuclear energy project in the US. The firm says it won’t take part in building or operating the nuclear plant.
There are 2 reactors on the drawing board. Toshiba executives say the project is no longer financially viable.
They say an increase in shale production has caused a fall in electricity sales.
They also point to stricter regulations introduced after the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima. Toshiba joined the South Texas Project in 2008. Executives were hoping to start operating the reactors around 2016 or 2017.
But the power company that’s heading up the project hasn’t started building them.
Toshiba is cutting its ties to the nuclear power business overseas.
The firm incurred massive losses through its former American nuclear subsidiary, Westinghouse.
Nature 29th May 2018 , Prime Minister Theresa May conceded on 21 May that a post-Brexit Britain
was willing to pay to “fully associate” with Euratom, Europe’s nuclear agency. The details of the arrangement, similar to many that surround the controversial exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union, still have to be ironed out.
And among those watching the negotiations with mounting concern are scientists at the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, UK, who currently benefit greatly from Britain’s membership of the agency. The hundreds of researchers at JET receive annual funding of around €60 million (US$70 million), because Britain is part of Euratom. As it stands, that funding will cease at the end of this year. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05283-x
Booker prize-winning author predicts climate reality will not be far from scenarios imagined in her post-apocalyptic fiction, Guardian, Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent, 31 May 2018
Climate change will bring a dystopian future reminiscent of one of her “speculative fictions”, with women bearing the brunt of brutal repression, hunger and war, the Booker prize-winning author Margaret Atwood is to warn.
“This isn’t climate change – it’s everything change,” she will tell an audience at the British Library this week. “Women will be directly and adversely affected by climate change.”
The author, whose landmark novel The Handmaid’s Tale has been turned into an acclaimed TV series depicting a dystopian future in which women are deprived of all rights and turned into breeding machines for men, predicts conflict, hardship and an increasing struggle for survival for women as climate change takes hold.
“More extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, rising sea levels that will destroy arable land, and disruption of marine life will all result in less food,” she explained before the event. “Less food will mean that women and children get less, as the remaining food supplies will be unevenly distributed, even more than they are.”
FERC, DOJ support Illinois nuclear subsidies in court filing UTILITY DIVE,31 May 18
Dive Brief:
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Department of Justice filed a joint legal brief in support of Illinois nuclear subsidies on Tuesday.
Lawyers for the two agencies wrote the zero emission credits (ZECs) for Illinois nuclear plants do not interfere with FERC’s authority to regulate wholesale power markets, as generators claimed. If the subsidies disrupt market operations, “the solution lies with the Commission, not the courts,” the agencies wrote.
The legal opinion will likely also apply to a pending court challenge against New York nuclear subsidies, as well as a New Jersey subsidy program enacted last week. The FERC opinion could also make a Supreme Court case over the subsidies less likely, analysts say.
Dive Insight:
The Tuesday amicus brief from FERC and DOJ is a blow for opponents of nuclear subsidies, who hoped the courts would throw out the recent state programs designed to keep uneconomic plants from retiring.
In their brief, filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, FERC and DOJ write the Illinois program does not suffer from the “fatal defect” that doomed other state subsidy programs in the courts.
………Evaluating methods to integrate state energy policies into wholesale markets has been a focus at FERC in recent years — and also a point of contention. In March, the commission approved an ISO-New England plan to change its capacity market auctions to handle subsidized resources, but the 3-2 vote exposed divides between regulators on how to handle future cases.
TVA spokesman Scott Brooks said the federal utility is pursuing action to collect for the overcharges by the contractor. May 31st 2018, by Dave Flessner
The Tennessee Valley Authority was overcharged nearly $4.4 million by a contractor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant for construction of the Unit 2 reactor from 2013 to 2015, according to an audit released Wednesday.
TVA’s inspector general said Williams Plant Services (WPS) used labor classifications not provided in its contract for nearly $3.5 million of work at Watts Bar and another $430,322 for excessive markups, ineligible overtime and other unsupported labor costs. The contractor also improperly billed for $435,624 of temporary living allowances and travel costs, according to TVA auditors. Read more from our newspartners at the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
“Right now the greenery that we have, the earth, the soil — everything is a product of the things that people who have come before us have left behind,” Narita told NBC News. “We can’t just treat those things carelessly.”
In a drill, fake terrorists take over Arctic radioactive waste storage site
Russian officials have said they thwarted a terrorist attack at a facility storing old radioactive components from nuclear vessels located in the Arctic — but don’t worry. It was just a drill. Bellona, by Anna Kireeva
Russian officials have said they thwarted a terrorist attack at a facility storing old radioactive components from nuclear vessels located in the Arctic — but don’t worry. It was just a drill.
The simulated siege was part of a large-scale exercise called Atom-2018, and was meant to prepare workers at the Sayda Bay for the worst – an armed incursion into a sensitive facility within Russia’s vast but fragile nuclear waste storage industry, complete with bombs, hostages and political demands.
According to reports, staff at the facility were alerted to the fact that the exercise was a drill. The purpose of the fake crisis, rather than scaring workers at a radioactive materials storage site, was to prepare officials from Russia’s security services to map out countermeasures specifically designed for the Sayda Bay site.
Sayda Bay is a part of the Murmansk branch of RosRAO, the state operator responsible for the management and storage and handling of non-nuclear radioactive waste, as well as decommissioning nuclear vessels, especially submarines.
Located 60 kilometers from Murmansk, Sayda Bay is itself an old Soviet-era military base. Since 2004, it has been tasked with storing reactor compartments from the dismantled submarines of Russia’s once overwhelming Northern Fleet of nuclear submarines.
Later, facilities were built at Sayda Bay to handle and condition radioactive waste. Currently it houses about 80 single unit reactor blocks and has space for 40 more. Eventually, the site will hold the irradiated remains of the Lepse, a nuclear icebreaker refueling vessels that is carefully being pulled apart at the Nerpa Shipyard near Murmansk.
Barry GEM 29th May 2018 Graham Vodden: I read with interest your article in The GEM regarding Hinkley Mud, and I have to say that I have no confidence in the National Assembly making the correct decision on this matter. I fully endorse the petition calling for the licence to be suspended to allow for a full environmental assessment before any dredging and dumping is started.
We already have a problem with excess mud coming ashore on Penarth beach because somebody decided years ago to dump local dredged mud out of Cardiff Dock entrance at the North Cardiff buoy, instead of where it used to be dumped at the Middle Pool buoy, where it would disperse and not cause any environmental problem.
The question that needs to be addressed is why does EDF want to bring this mud all the way from Hinkley beach to the North Cardiff Buoy position for dumping? The answer to that is there is already a licence issued for dumping mud or sediment here, which makes the whole process easier.
The other question which needs to be asked is why can’t they dump this sediment outside Hinkley? There is plenty of depth in that part of the channel and it would not cause any problems, it would just disperse. The answer to that is that EDF would have to go through the whole process of licence application again. My message to EDF is, keep your suspect ‘mud’ in the area of Hinkley. The last thing Penarth needs is a massive mud pollution increase on our beach. http://www.barry-today.co.uk/article.cfm?id=119999&headline=Why%20does%20EDF%20want%20%20to%20dump%20mud%20from%20%20Hinkley%20on%20our%20coast?§ionIs=news&searchyear=2018
U.S. House Approves Measure to Compensate Arizona ‘Downwinders’ http://knau.org/post/us-house-approves-measure-compensate-arizona-downwinders, ByRYAN HEINSIUS 31 May 18• Many Southwesterners sickened by Cold War nuclear weapons testing were excluded from a 1990 federal compensation program. Now the U.S. House has approved a measure aimed at providing relief to the residents known as downwinders. KNAU’s Ryan Heinsius reports.
The original Radiation Exposure Compensation Act left out parts of Mohave County, the Hualapai Reservation, and southern Nevada, despite high rates of cancer and other diseases thought to be caused by nuclear fallout. The new House amendment orders the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to assess whether thousands are eligible for assistance.
“The American government made a promise with RECA, with the bill, and, by darn, we ought to follow through with it to make sure that anybody that was affected to be included in this process,” says Arizona Republican Paul Gosar who authored the measure.
Residents who’ve developed some diseases could be eligible for a $50,000 payment, and have until July 9, 2022 to file claims.
Nearly 200 atmospheric weapons were tested north of Las Vegas between 1945 and 1962. In the last three decades, more than 20,000 downwinder claims have been filed with the Justice Department, totaling more than $2 billion.
Edie 29th May 2018,A new report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found
that corporates have actively sourced renewable energy equivalent to the overall demand of France, but renewables demand could soar if companies turned voluntary agreements into active goals.
The new IRENA report, published at last week’s Clean Energy Ministerial meeting in Copenhagen,
found that more than 2,400 companies across 75 nations sourced 465TWh of renewable energy in 2017. The report found that more than half of the companies studied are voluntarily procuring and investing in onsite generation or purchasing agreements to power their operations with renewable electricity.
Of the companies listed in the study, more than 200 are sourcing 50% or more of their energy from renewables. According to IRENA, 100% of active corporate sourcing of renewable electricity is “already feasible”, but the report found that just 17% of the companies listed had a renewable electricity target in place and three-quarters of these targets are set to expire before 2020.
BRENT MARCHBANKS, 31 May 18 We must demand that congressional and state office seekers explain their position on this longstanding and crucial issue.
We should all contact Attorney General Wasden and urge him to protect the Batt deal. May 30, 2018
Since the 1940s, science has sought a way and a place to safely and permanently store nuclear waste. So far, no luck. Tons and tons of nuclear waste is “orphaned” in our own country and around the world, with no place to go.
Many Idahoans believe that the 1995 Batt agreement resolved this issue as to our state and the private companies, the U.S. and the other countries who are looking for places to send their poison.
It didn’t.
The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and some of Idaho’s elected officials now want to open our state to 7,000 cubic meters of Hanford’s radioactive waste. Ominously, INL is anxious to “renegotiate” the Batt agreement to allow even more toxic stuff into the state.We must demand that congressional and state office seekers explain their position on this longstanding and crucial issue.
We should all contact Attorney General Wasden and urge him to protect the Batt deal.
Logan has 10 months to consider modular nuclear reactor program, HJ News.com, By Sean Dolan staff writer, 31 May 18, “……..Right now, Logan is the largest city participating in a plan to build a small modular nuclear reactor just north of Idaho Falls.
The project is still in the development phases, and Logan has several opportunities to pull out of the project, including a coming deadline in March 2019. At that point, UAMPS Chief Legal Officer Mason Baker said, UAMPS will gauge how many cities are participating and decide whether it makes good business sense to keep going. Baker said UAMPS hopes Logan will sign power contracts before the March deadline.
……“There’s all kinds of risks,” said Logan Light and Power Director Mark Montgomery. “There’s first-of-its-kind risk, there’s construction risk, there’s design risk, there’s a regulatory risk and probably other risks that I’m forgetting.”
Logan is set to participate in the nuclear reactor at 30 megawatts, which exceeds any of the city’s existing power contracts. Logan Finance Director Rich Anderson said there is always risk involved in the power business, but he is concerned with the financial risk involved in this level of participation…..Since 2016, Logan has paid UAMPS $206,000 for administration and general costs and has another $250,000 budgeted for this year. City Attorney Kymber Housley said there’s a risk that Logan could pay UAMPS hundreds of thousands of dollars for a project that might never happen.
“One of the big risks is it gets caught up in litigation,” Housley said in a Wednesday interview. “I don’t even think it’s a question of if; it’s more of a question of how many lawsuits will be brought trying to stop a nuclear plant.”
Officials with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) plan to hold a public hearing May 31 on the safety record of the Arkansas Nuclear One power plant in Arkansas, whose two units are among three cited by the agency for poor performance and other problems in its annual assessment of the nation’s nuclear fleet.
The NRC ranks nuclear facilities in five categories, with Category 1 designating a safe-performing plant, down to Category 5, which requires a plant to close until NRC inspectors sign off on corrective actions. Victor Dricks, senior public affairs officer with the NRC, told POWER the agency has never placed a unit in Category 5……..
The Arkansas meeting is one of a number of upcoming public sessions scheduled by the NRC at plants across the country to discuss the group’s safety reports. The agency this week said it would continue with additional oversight of TVA’s Sequoyah Nuclear Power Plant in Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, after an undisclosed security violation at the plant last fall. …….
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