Bad Reactors – Mariah Blake
Bad ReactorsRethinking your opposition to nuclear power? Rethink again.Washington Monthly Feb 09 By Mariah Blake – “…………………..These complications have already erased the cost savings nuclear power was supposed to deliver compared to other energy sources, such as natural gas. What’s more, the reactor won’t be completed before 2012, when the Kyoto treaty expires. To meet its targets, between now and then Finland will have to buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of credits through the European Union’s emissions trading scheme. In the meantime, because the country expected the reactor to deliver a bounty of energy and didn’t pursue other options, it’s facing a severe electricity shortage and will have to import even more from abroad, which will drive up power bills. Elfi, a consortium of Finnish heavy industries, has calculated that the project delays will create $4 billion in indirect costs for electricity users………………………………….s Finland’s experience shows, the reality may be far messier than the industry lets on: a growing body of evidence suggests that new nuclear construction projects are prone to the same setbacks as those undertaken a generation ago, when lengthy delays and multibillion-dollar cost overruns were commonplace. This raises serious questions about the potential of nuclear power as a front-line solution in the battle against climate change.
Austin won’t sign off on nuclear plant expansion – Austin Business Journal:
Austin won’t sign off on nuclear plant expansion
Austin Business Journal February 12, 2009 “The Austin City Council voted on Feb. 12 against participation in the proposed expansion of a South Texas nuclear plant………………………Worley Parsons, a consultant the city hired to evaluate NRG’s proposal, concluded that an Austin investment in the proposed project could have the city paying $2 billion or more over at least the next seven years.
That sum would require a significant sum of debt relative to Austin Energy’s size, the analysis said, that could in turn result in a downgrade of its credit rating and lead to higher future borrowing costs.”
Austin won’t sign off on nuclear plant expansion – Austin Business Journal:
EDF profits plunge in 2008 as nuclear expansion continues
EDF profits plunge in 2008 as nuclear expansion continues
Business News
Feb 12, 2009, Paris – State-owned French energy supplier EDF saw its profits fall by nearly 40 per cent in 2008 as it continued to expand its nuclear energy division abroad, the company said on Thursday……………………. Investors were no doubt put off by the plunge in profits and bid EDF shares down by 9.11 per cent, to 32.31 euros, in late morning trading on the Paris Bourse.
Centrica faces investor revolt on British Energy
rom The Times February 11, 2009Centrica faces investor revolt on British EnergyShareholders voice anger at the utility’s proposed £3.1bn nuclear deal and call on it to buy gas assets instead
Centrica is facing a shareholder rebellion over its plan to spend £3.1billion buying a stake in Britain’s nuclear industry.
A leading institutional shareholder in Centrica, the owner of British Gas, is urging the company to scrap its plan to acquire 25 per cent of British Energy from EDF of France and use the money to buy more gas assets instead.
The investor, which asked not to be named, is the latest in a growing chorus of City objectors to the deal.
Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, uranium, radioactive
Salmond: “nuclear will take billions from renewables”
Salmond: “nuclear will take billions from renewables New Energy Focus 09-02-09
Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond has claimed that the UK government’s commitment to nuclear power will rob the renewables industry of billions of pounds’ worth of investment.
Mr Salmond, whose SNP minority government is opposed to nuclear, was speaking to the Scottish Parliament during First Minister’s question time on Thursday, where he warned that nuclear power and renewable technologies could not share resources.
“Anything you invest -and it will be billions – in nuclear power is billions taken away from clean technology and in renewable technology,” he said.
He went on to emphasise Scotland’s “great prospects” in the renewables sector, which he described as the government’s “top priority”.
“I do not believe that the case for nuclear power is made,” he added. “Nuclear power is not the answer to tackling climate change or security of supply”.
New Energy Focus – Salmond: “nuclear will take billions from renewables”
Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, uranium, radioactive
The state of Uranium
The state of Uranium The Financial Times Alphaville Feb 06 Gregor Macdonald “…………………Now spot uranium prices have fallen to the $50 level. Alas, the uranium supercycle proved all too cyclical………………………………..
The global recession meanwhile is presenting a rather obvious problem to any new price advance. Power generation in both the OECD and in Asia is currently being served with much cheaper coal and natural gas. With industrial demand for power down notably in China and the US it’s become opportune for a number of nuclear generators to go offline for maintenance.
In addition, construction costs for new plants have skyrocketed. Some recent studies have also suggested the energy return on investment for new nuclear, after construction time and materials, may actually take years. In this regard nuclear power has been somewhat hurt………………
Tags: Ambassadorto address U.S. foreign policy, nuclear disarmament
Rebound of nuclear plants raising worries over waste
Rebound of nuclear plants raising worries over waste International Herald Tribune (New York times with Reuters) by James Kanter and Matthew Wald
January 30, 2009 As France presses ahead with building more next-generation nuclear reactors, new evidence emerged Friday to suggest that industry and governments may be unprepared to handle the increasingly toxic waste that will result.Highlighting the importance of the technology in France, both as its main source of electricity and as a major export industry, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced late Thursday that Électricité de France, Europe’s biggest power producer, was awarded the contract to develop a second atomic reactor using next-generation technology……………………………an anti-nuclear group said that information it gleaned from industry reports – publicly available but which have received little attention so far – show that waste from the EPR will be more radioactive by a factor of seven because more uranium is burned up. That will make it more expensive to handle and store safely, according to Greenpeace, which provided the details on Friday to the International Herald Tribune.“Despite the French government’s global marketing of the EPR as cheap and safe, the evidence proves otherwise,” said Rianne Teule, an international nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace who is based in Amsterdam.
The next wave of reactors “poses an ever-increasing burden on people’s budgets and danger to their health, now and far into the future,” Teule said……………………..here are no EPRs in operation anywhere in the world, but the first is under construction at Olkiluoto, an island in the West of Finland, and the second in Flamanville, in northern France.
Teule said the evidence about the radioactivity of the waste was drawn from a report by Posiva, a waste disposal company owned by Finnish nuclear operators, and from the Swiss organization Nagra, which oversees management of nuclear waste.
Teule said the waste would pose greater dangers to workers from higher radiation doses during transfer and storage than current waste. She also said the waste would need to be stored for longer in areas above ground, where it is potentially exposed to terrorists.
Those factors, among others, would increase the overall cost of nuclear energy – costs that Teule said were not properly accounted for by industry and governments.
There are no long-term facilities for disposing or burying high-level nuclear waste anywhere in the world,…………………………….Hans Riotte, the head of the Radiological Protection and Radioactive Waste Management Division at the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris, said waste from the EPR, although smaller in volume, would be more radioactive than existing forms of high-level waste because it would be denser……………………….ny reports about the cost, or safety, of its EPR model still are a sensitive matter for the company, which is competing to become the designer of reactors for the next generation of nuclear plants in the United States and elsewhere………………………………
Problems at the EPR site in Finland mean the reactor already is badly overdue and vastly over budget, even though it was designed to have a shorter construction period than previous models.
The site has been plagued by water-logged concrete, faulty welds and flawed pipes, delaying the reactor start date by at least three years and raising costs by roughly 50 percent…………………………………Areva also is vying sell the technology to the United Arab Emirates as part of a project led by Total and GDF Suez.
Rebound of nuclear plants raising worries over waste – International Herald Tribune
Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, radioactive, uranium
Uranium Stocks Remain in Deep Sleep
Uranium Stocks Remain in Deep Sleep The Market Oracle 38 Jan 09 Boy, this is one frustrating market. The uranium stocks just seem to be trapped in a deep sleep and are hesitant to wake up. I guess that is still preferred seeing as how the spot price of uranium U308 dropped $3.00 this week. Going by that we are still lucky that the stocks have not plunged.
Japan nuclear capacity to fall as Chubu scraps units | Reuters
Japan nuclear capacity to fall as Chubu scraps units
TOKYO, Jan 27 (Reuters) – Japan’s nuclear power generation capacity will fall by 1,380 megawatts, or 2.8 percent, to 47,935 megawatts from Friday, a government official said, reflecting a utility’s move to scrap two nuclear reactors and replace them with a new one.
Chubu Electric Power Co (9502.T), Japan’s third-biggest utility, said in December it would decommission its 540-megawatt No.1 and 840-megawatt No.2 generators at its sole Hamaoka nuclear plant, and build a new No.6 reactor to replace them. [ID:nT303675]
The move reduced the number of nuclear power generators for commercial use in Japan, which has the world’s third-biggest nuclear generation capacity after the United States and France, to 53 from 55.
Japan nuclear capacity to fall as Chubu scraps units | Reuters
Cleanup agencies looking for more money as Hanford work continues
Cleanup agencies looking for more money as Hanford work continues Jan 26, 2009
Komo News By SHANNON DININNY, Associated Press
RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) – Each year, the federal government spends roughly $2 billion to rid the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site of toxic and radioactive waste………………………..The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Today, it is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, with cleanup costs expected to top $50 billion…………………Even more challenging in recent months: finding the money to complete the work and meet legal deadlines for cleanup.The Energy Department has said it will miss 23 deadlines this year because there is insufficient money in the 2009 budget. Now, some U.S. senators are pushing the Obama administration to spend stimulus money to clean up not just Hanford, but all Cold War-era sites……………….In 1989, the state and federal government signed the Tri-Party Agreement to establish legal deadlines for completing all phases of the cleanup. Twenty years later, the two sides are embroiled in a lawsuit over missed deadlines and inadequate funding.
Nuclear plant foes shift from environmentalists to consumer groups
Nuclear plant foes shift from environmentalists to consumer groups
By DON NORFLEET The Fulton Sun Jan 26, 2009 Other than balancing the state’s budget during a recession, AmerenUE’s plan to build a second reactor at the Callaway Nuclear Plant is considered by many as the biggest issue facing the current session of the Missouri General Assembly.The plant expansion, estimated to cost from $6 to $9 billion, would be the single most expensive construction project in Missouri’s history.
Unlike the first nuclear reactor to be constructed in Missouri, opposition to the second nuclear reactor at the Callaway Nuclear Plant has come more from consumer groups than anti-nuclear activists and environmentalists.
Thousands of jobs to go at BHP Billiton –
Thousands of jobs to go at BHP Billiton ABC Rural News 21/01/2009The world’s biggest mining company, BHP Billiton, will shed 6000 jobs – more than half of them here in Australia………………………….200 members of the expansion team project for the Olympic Dam copper, gold and uranium mine in South Australia will also be made redundant.
Spot price falls, as does exploration spending
Uranium: spot price falls, as does uranium exploration By Luke Brocki Uranium Investing News and U3O8.biz Jan 19, 2009 Spot uranium prices fell US$2 this week to US$51 a pound U3O8, according to price publisher Ux Consulting. And while rival publisher Tradetech’s uranium price estimate hasn’t budged this year, sitting stable at US$52 a pound, analysts suspect sellers are starting to soften, reducing prices to attract buyers. UxC says six-month delivery times on contracts are starting to gain in popularity, replacing shorter terms. This has historically been good news, but longer contracts won’t turn the tide in a soft market without help from a strong spot price…………………………According to the weekly uranium update from Toll Cross Securities Inc., junior explorers dropped 2% this week, advanced explorers fell 5%, production visibility companies fell 8%, and producers dropped 3%. The Toll Cross Junior Uranium Index, which monitors a basket of stocks deemed by Toll Cross as representative of the sector, fell nearly 5% to 163,85 from 171.74.
Areva bags licence to operate world’s second biggest uranium mine
Areva bags licence to operate world’s second biggest uranium mine
domain-b.com news 16 January 2009After months of negotiation, the French nuclear energy group Areva has been granted a license to build and operate the Imouraren uranium mine in Niger, the biggest in Africa and the second biggest in the world.
The Imouraren deposit is the largest known uranium deposit in Africa, and the world’s second largest, after Australia’s Olympic Dam deposit…………………….Under the agreement, Areva will have a 66.65-per cent share in the newly created mining company, with the remaining 33.35 per cent being owned by the State of Niger.
domain-b.com : Areva bags licence to operate world’s second biggest uranium mine
Areva clashes with Finnish utility over delays to new nuclear plant
Areva clashes with Finnish utility over delays to new nuclear plant S
centa.co.uk, UK – 15 Jan 09 Areva, the nuclear plant designer expected to be at the forefront of a British atomic power revival, has become embroiled in a bitter war of words with a …this online article is available only to the UK
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PLEASE OPPOSE HR 8255 AND S.3639 – bills would accelerate satellite deployment, with no environmental review or safeguards – https://ncstd5li.quorum.us/campaign/169331/
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