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Early start for secret shipments of radioactive weapons fuel to Nevada

DOE: Uranium shipments to Nevada could start soon, knoxnews.com,  Associated Press  December 31, 2012 OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) — A U.S. Department of Energy official says stocks of radioactive uranium could start shipping from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to Nevada in 2013.

However, The Knoxville News Sentinel reports (http://bit.ly/WVktTK ) that agency officials will not discuss exact dates of the shipments because of safety and security reasons because of the fissionable material’s potential use in nuclear weapons. DOE’s Environmental Manager Mark Whitney said in an interview with the newspaper this fall that the DOE wanted to start the shipments to the Nevada National Security site in early 2013 pending approvals to ship. Continue reading →

January 3, 2013 Posted by | Uranium, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

UK nuclear lobby desperate to keep the industry alive, therefore needs waste dump quickly

cartoon-waste-discussion without a positive decision, new nuclear development could be put
at risk.

Ministers are thought to be working on plans to try to ensure the
new-build programme is not derailed. Final investment decisions and
approvals for EDF’s proposed nuclear plant in Somerset are expected
next year.
a “no” vote in Cumbria in January would be likely to
deter a consortium that is at the early stage of planning a new plant
in the county, as it would have to invest hundreds of millions of
pounds before seeking planning permission….

Nuclear sector pushes for green light on waste dump. Telegraph By
Emily Gosden  30 Dec 2012
Britain’s nuclear industry has warned that a “no” vote by local
councils on crucial plans to assess sites for a major radioactive
waste dump would be “an injustice to future generations”. Continue reading →

December 31, 2012 Posted by | politics, UK, wastes | 1 Comment

$2 billion to shut down Quebec’s nuclear plant, but $4 billion to keep it open

The Parti Quebecois  also announced it will set aside another $200 million in a
“diversification fund” to help the surrounding communities retrain
their workforces and spur alternative development opportunities.

Shutdown of Que. nuclear plant to cost $2B, Ifp
QMI Agency
December 28, 2012 MONTREAL – The licence for Quebec’s only
operational nuclear power plant expired Friday, and the provincial
government said it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the
next 50 years to dismantle the reactor.

The Parti Quebecois campaigned against refurbishing the plant,
claiming that the $4-billion price tag was financially unjustifiable, Continue reading →

December 29, 2012 Posted by | Canada, decommission reactor, Reference | Leave a comment

USA’s nuclear waste problem more acute, with probable reactor close-downs

Decommissioningwith the current glut of natural gas, more [nuclear reactor] closings seem possible, which means leaving the wastes behind — “stranded,” as Mr. Wyden put it — at the sites of defunct reactors………...

Come January, Another Try on Nuclear Waste By MATTHEW L. WALD , NYT, 18 Dec 12, The incoming chairman of the Senate Energy Committee suggests that the Energy Department should stop billing utilities more in waste disposal fees than the department is actually spending on addressing nuclear wastes. And he wants the department to pay for moving some of the wastes out of spent fuel pools at the
nation’s highest-risk reactors and into dry casks.  Continue reading →

December 19, 2012 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Contradictory information about Lynas rare earths project in Malaysia

Lynas will be in court in Malaysia on 19 December. The Save Malaysia Stop Lynas (SMSL) campaignerswill be appealing against the Kuantan High Court decision to lift its stay on the company being able to exercise its rights to proceed under the temporary licence.

The toxic waste that’s not in Australia’s backyard http://aliran.com/11005.html  18 Dec 12, Australian-owned company Lynas is quietly shipping rare earth to a processing plant in Malaysia – without a firm plan in place to dispose of dangerous radioactive waste. Wendy Bacon reports.

If a manufacturing plant involving radioactive materials moved into your community, one of the first things you would ask is, “what’s going to happen to the waste?”

This is exactly how residents of Kuantan on Malaysia’s east coast reacted when the Australian company Lynas announced plans to build Lamp, the world’s biggest rare earth processing plant in their area.

Several years later, they have no clear answer. Indeed last week, while the plant that will use concentrate imported from Lynas’s rare earth mine at Mount Weld in Western Australia was finally ramping up for production, the Malaysian government and the company were in direct conflict about what would happen to the waste. Continue reading →

December 18, 2012 Posted by | Malaysia, RARE EARTHS, Reference, wastes | Leave a comment

Plutonium now called “material” as it travels from Scotland to Wales

PuBreeder is classed as material and not as fuel or waste, by NDA.

Nuclear material moved by train from Scotland to England , BBC News,  17 December 2012  The first of 90 rail shipments of nuclear material from Dounreay in Caithness to Sellafield in Cumbria was made overnight.

The journey was understood to have been made under armed escort. Forty-four tonnes of breeder material in total will be transported by train to Sellafield for reprocessing. Continue reading →

December 18, 2012 Posted by | - plutonium, UK | Leave a comment

Lithuanian nuclear plant: decommissioning stalled due to company disputes

EU freezes Lithuanian nuclear plant decommissioning funds, EurActive 14 Dec 12 The European Commission announced yesterday (13 December) that international donors, among which the largest is the EU, have decided to suspend the funding of one specific decommissioning project in the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania. The project covers the construction of the storage area for the leftover spent fuel and the supply of storage casks for defueling the central’s two reactors.

The decision was taken on the grounds that the operator of the power plant (INPP) and the consortium delivering the project (GNS/NUKEM) have not managed to settle their dispute, now on-going for more than two years, on how to implement the project concretely. Nukem is a “dual national” company based in Germany (NUKEM GmbH) and the United States (NUKEM, Inc.) focused on the civil nuclear fuel market. Continue reading →

December 15, 2012 Posted by | decommission reactor, EUROPE | Leave a comment

Britain’s taxpayers up for more than 100 billion pounds in nuclear cleanup

coffin-reactorNuclear clean-up to cost £100bn and take 120 years. Decommissioning, no2nuclearpower, 9 December 2012 BRITAIN’S taxpayers will be landed with a bill of more than £100bn for cleaning up radioactive waste from sites such as Sellafield and Dounreay, according to the chief executive of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

The amount represents a near-doubling of the £56bn cleanup cost announced when the NDA began operating in 2005, and could rise still more. The warning comes as NDA highly-recommendedengineers start work on some of the biggest and most expensive engineering projects seen in Britain — building giant robotic grabs to lift deadly nuclear waste from Sellafield’s decaying 1950s repositories.

The buildings being targeted include Sellafield’s B29 and B30 cooling ponds, where decaying 1950s fuel rods are stored. This weekend John Clarke, chief executive of the NDA, said he was spending £3bn a year on the cleanup, with about £1.6bn of that going on Sellafield alone. Such sums are similar to those spent on the London Olympic site at the peak of construction.

Figures released by the Department of Energy and Climate Change show that, since Britain’s first nuclear power station opened in 1956, they have generated 2.5 billion megawatt hours of electricity — worth £125 billion at today’s prices. If the cost of building Britain’s 20-odd nuclear power stations (around £10bn-£12bn each in today’s money), is included, it would far exceed the value of the power produced, say experts.

Such figures show why power companies, which would be responsible for the waste, are refusing to build new nuclear power stations without government guarantees of a consumer subsidy that will almost double the market price for their power.
Sunday Times 9th Dec 2012 more >>   http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/news/daily12/daily.php?dailynewsid=343

December 13, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, decommission reactor, politics, Reference, UK | 1 Comment

America’s latest nuclear bomb test – an act of hypocrisy

hypocrisyAmerican Nuclear Hypocrisy , 09 December 2012   By Elias Akleh“…….The American nuclear hypocrisy was lately demonstrated when the US National Nuclear Security Administration had detonated plutonium in a deep shaft in Nevada National Security Site on Wednesday 12/5/2012, allegedly to test the safety and effectiveness of the American nuclear weapons. The test, known as Pollux, was conducted jointly by the Nevada National Security Site, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories. International inspectors were not allowed to witness the test since the US had prevented access to its test sites since late 1990s.

Let us not forget that the US is the only country that used nuclear bombs against civilians in 1945. The US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima incinerating at least 140 thousand civilians in seconds. Three days later the US dropped another nuclear bomb on Nagazaki incinerating further 70 thousand civilians. Hundreds of thousands others died later due to radiation. http://mwcnews.net/focus/editorial/23374-eliasakleh-nuclear-hypocrisy.html

December 10, 2012 Posted by | - plutonium, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Despite the hype, the nuclear industry is nervous about its future

fearNuclear industry faces up to reality of ‘interesting times’ The flag-UKEngineer, 7 December 2012 | ByStuart Nathan  ”………Part of the problem is that the nuclear landscape is so complicated, especially in the UK, with its history as a nuclear
pioneer and the legagcy of experiment that has left behind. John Clarke of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, again reflecting the mood of realism, put it in a way which pretty much everyone would understand. ‘It’s like telling children to put their toys away before getting out new ones. Clearing up the mess is a key enabler to new build.’

…… .it’s relatively easy to put toys away. Nuclear is different. ‘At Sellafield, we’re dealing with structures which were put up in the 1940s in great haste to support military programmes, where the only concern was “is it safe for today”,’ he said. ‘They were neverdesigned to have waste taken out of them, and the waste is poorly categorised — we often don’t really know what it is.’

The situation isn’t much better even at industrial-scale power stations, said Peter Walkden, commercial director of Magnox. ‘It was never going to be easy to decommission a 50 year old plant that was never designed to be decommissioned, under a regime that was designed for operation,’ he said. Decommissioning a Magnox plant takes the best part of a century — three years to defuel, then ten years of preparation for care and maintenance while radioactivity subsides (the stage that current decommissioning projects are in), followed by 85 years of care and maintenance, then about ten years to clear the site.

A bit more than just putting the toys away, and something that can’t be done before building new plants’. ….”

December 8, 2012 Posted by | decommission reactor, Reference, UK | Leave a comment

Depleted uranium’s radioactive dust – the forgotten pollutant

The problem is, when DU armor piercing projectiles penetrate their targets, they become incendiary spewing radioactive dust

The Toxic Legacy of Depleted Uranium Weapons 11-26-2012, EcoWatch, By Paul E McGinniss “………  how many of us know about the current manufacturing and active use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons? DU (Uranium 238) is a radioactive waste by-product of the uranium enrichment process. It results from making fuel for nuclear reactors and the manufacturing of nuclear weapons.

In a frightening adaptation of the “Cradle to Cradle” philosophy in manufacturing, which seeks to use waste in the manufacturing process to create other “useful” products, militaries around the world have come up with the “brilliant” idea of taking DU and making “conventional” weapons with it.

According to BanDepletedUranium.org, approximately 20 countries are thought to have DU weapons in their arsenals. Nations known to have produced these weapons include UK, U.S., France, Russia, China and Pakistan.
DU is well liked by armed forces Continue reading →

November 28, 2012 Posted by | depleted uranium, Reference, Uranium, wastes | Leave a comment

A warning on Mixed-Oxide Fuel (MOX) nuclear fuel plan

MOX stands for “Mixed-Oxide Fuel.” It is a nuclear power reactor fuel made from plutonium mixed with uranium. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) wants to make experimental MOX fuel using plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons.

Use of MOX fuel fails as a means of getting rid of plutonium. Instead, the plutonium just becomes part of the lethal soup of ingredients termed “high-level nuclear waste”

What is MOX? http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/basicmoxinfo.htm The giant French nuclear firm Cogema, Duke Power and Virginia Power have formed a consortium to create and use plutonium MOX fuel in civilian atomic reactors in North and South Carolina and Virginia.

If their effort is successful, plutonium would be trucked from nuclear weapons depots in the west to the Savannah River Plant on the South Carolina/Georgia border, where new plutonium processing plants would be built. This new MOX fuel would then be trucked to commercial reactors in the Southeast, in order to turn this plutonium into high-level radioactive waste.

The MOX program is dangerous and unnecessary. More than 200 environmental and other organizations across the world have signed an International NIX MOX statement and have pledged to work to stop this program in the U.S. and similar programs in Russia, France and England.

What is MOX? Continue reading →

November 27, 2012 Posted by | - plutonium, Reference, technology, USA | Leave a comment

Angst in USA over who’s to host all that nuclear waste

Spent fuel is currently stored at the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants, including Plant Vogtle in Burke County. The nationwide inventory of 75,000 tons could expand to 150,000 tons by 2050, not including spent fuel from new reactors.

 

SRS role in future of spent nuclear fuel disposal unclear
http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/metro/2012-11-26/srs-role-future-spent-nuclear-fuel-disposal-unclear?v=1353950504 By Rob Pavey, Nov. 26, 2012   The U.S. Energy Department is looking for businesses to design a demonstration project for large-scale and long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel. In a notice posted last week by the Office of Nuclear Energy, the department said its intention is simply to identify resources, and that no formal project has been announced or funded.

The announcement, however, could indicate the government – which is preparing a new spent fuel strategy for Congress – is leaning toward consolidated storage options that could affect South Carolina, said Tom Clements with the Alliance of Nuclear Accountability.

“This solicitation is being put out in advance of DOE delivering the spent fuel strategy report to Congress, which will likely affirm consolidated spent fuel storage,” he said. “Thus, DOE has set the stage for a fight in states that may be targeted for spent fuel dumps,
like South Carolina and Savannah River Site.” Continue reading →

November 27, 2012 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Kudankulam nuclear waste now a political issue in India

 “The people of Karnataka and the ruling BJP will not allow dumping of spent fuel from Kudankulam nuclear power plant in deep mines of KGF, as proposed by the Centre.”

BJP opposes nuclear waste dump at KGF The Pioneer, 25 NOVEMBER 2012     KESTUR VASUKI | BANGALORE The submission by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) to the Supreme Court to bury the spent fuel from Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu at the now defunct Kolar Gold Fields (KGF), has become a major political issue. Continue reading →

November 26, 2012 Posted by | India, wastes | Leave a comment

Underhand planning by Indian Government to dump nuclear wastes in Kolar Gold Mnes

Kolar should not become nuclear dumpyard: Activists
http://www.newstrackindia.com/newsdetails/2012/11/23/379–Kolar-should-not-become-nuclear-dumpyard-Activists-,   Chennai, Nov 23 (IANS) People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) Friday said dumping spent nuclear fuel in Kolar gold mines could lead to disastrous health consequences.

“When all the national roads transport deadly nuclear cargo to Kolar (Kolar gold mines), millions and millions of our people in Karnataka, Andhra (Pradesh) and Tamil Nadu will be exposed to all kinds of threats and dangers. Nuclear waste management is much more expensive and dangerous than nuclear power plants and even most developed
countries such as the United States and Germany are not able to handle the waste effectively,” PMANE said in a statement.

“The Indian government should not go against the anti?nuclear trend of the world to promote the interests of the United States, Russia and France and expose the people of our country to nuclear dangers in Kudankulam, or Kolar or anywhere else,” the statement said. According to the PMANE, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) had not shared any basic information on storing the spent fuel of Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KNPP) at Kolar in Karnataka.

“The ad?hoc nature of the DAE’s decision?making and the short shrift given to science and public opinion are so glaring and, in fact, very disturbing,” PMANE said.

November 25, 2012 Posted by | India, secrets,lies and civil liberties, wastes | Leave a comment

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