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Russia trying to market nuclear power to Uganda (or to anybody, really)

Uganda says Russia to help it develop nuclear energy, KAMPALA (Reuters) 18 Sept 19, – Uganda said on Wednesday it had signed an Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) with Russia to help the East African country build capacity to exploit nuclear technology for energy, medical and other peaceful purposes.The government of President Yoweri Museveni has previously said it is eager to use the country’s uranium deposits to boost energy production capacity.

In May last year Uganda also signed a memorandum of understanding with China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) to help Uganda build capacity in the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes.

In an emailed statement, Uganda’s energy ministry said the IGA with Russia was signed in Vienna on Tuesday between Energy Minister Irene Muloni and Nikolai Spasskiy, the deputy director general of Russian state corporation ROSATOM……….

Reporting by Elias Biryabarema in Kampala; Editing by Matthew Lewis https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uganda-russia/uganda-says-russia-to-help-it-develop-nuclear-energy-idUSKBN1W328N

 

September 19, 2019 Posted by | AFRICA, marketing, Russia | Leave a comment

Opposition in Suffolk to Sizewell nuclear plan, which hugely threatens wildlife

ITV 15th Sept 2019, RSPB hosts new festival in response to EDF’s plans to build nuclear reactor
at the edges of a nature reserve. A thousand people attended a festival
today organised by the RSPB in response to EDF’s plans to build a nuclear
reactor in Suffolk. Sizewell C will be built on the boundary of the
Minsmere Nature Reserve which is home to more than five and a half thousand
species of wildlife.

The RSPB manages the site and opposes the energy
giants plans. They say building the reactor so close to the nature reserve
could threaten the thousands of different species of wildlife that call
Minsmere home. EDF say that the environmental impact of the new site would
be kept to a minimum, and argue that new jobs for local people will be
provided.

Among the visitors supporting the festival today (Sunday,
September 15) was television presenter, Bill Turnbull, who lives nearby. He
said: There’s no infrastructure or communications for it here. What is
here, is Minsmere – where the RSPB have been trying really hard to get all
these birds to come back. And we are going to risk it all just simply
because it’s a convenient place to build a power station.” The public
consultation into EDF’s proposal for Sizewell C will end on September 27.

https://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2019-09-15/rspb-hosts-new-festival-in-response-to-edf-s-plans-to-build-nuclear-reactor-at-the-edges-of-a-nature-reserve/

September 17, 2019 Posted by | environment, opposition to nuclear, UK | Leave a comment

Study: Germany needs clean energy surge to replace coal, nuclear

September 17, 2019 Posted by | Germany, renewable | Leave a comment

Why Russia’s first atomic submarines were a nuclear nightmare

  Russia’s First Atomic Submarines: A Nuclear Nightmare for 1 Reason , by Sebastien Roblin   National Interest, September 14, 2019, They were not exactly top of the line–think massive safety issues. Mix that with nuclear power…
Key point: The power of the November class’s reactors was bought at the price of safety and reliability.

The United States launched the first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, in 1954, revolutionizing undersea warfare. The Nautilus’s reactor allowed it operate underwater for months at a time, compared to the hours or days afforded conventional submarines. The following year, the Soviet Union began building its own nuclear submarine, the Project 627—known as the November class by NATO. The result was a boat with a few advantages compared to its American competition, but that also exhibited a disturbing tendency to catastrophic accidents that would prove characteristic of the burgeoning Soviet submarine fleet during the Cold War.

……  the power of the November class’s reactors was bought at the price of safety and reliability. A lack of radiation shielding resulted in frequent crew illness, and many of the boat suffered multiple reactor malfunctions over their lifetimes. This lack of reliability may explain why the Soviet Union dispatched conventional Foxtrot submarines instead of the November-class vessels during the Cuban Missile Crisis…..

In fact, the frequent, catastrophic disasters onboard the Project 627 boats seem almost like gruesome public service announcements for everything that could conceivably go wrong with nuclear submarines. Many of the accidents reflected not only technological flaws, but the weak safety culture of the Soviet Navy.  …….
As the Soviet Union was succeeded by an economically destitute Russia, many decommissioned nuclear submarines were left to rust with their nuclear fuel onboard, leading to safety concerns from abroad. International donors fronted $200 million to scrap the hulks in 2003. Flimsy pontoons were welded onto K-159 to enable its towing to a scrapping site, but on August 30 a sea squall ripped away one of the pontoons, causing the boat to begin foundering around midnight. The Russian Navy failed to react until hours later, by which the time submarine had sunk, taking eight hundred kilograms of spent nuclear fuel and nine of the ten seamen manning the pontoons with it. Plans to raise K-159 have foundered to this day due to lack of funding.
This is just an accounting of major accidents on the November-class boats—more occurred on Echo- and Hotel-class submarines equipped with the same nuclear reactors. Submarine operations are, of course, inherently risky; the U.S. Navy also lost two submarines during the 1960s, though it hasn’t lost any since.
The November-class submarines may not have been particularly silent hunters, but they nonetheless marked a breakthrough in providing the Soviet submarine fleet global reach while operating submerged. They also provided painful lessons, paid in human lives lost or irreparably injured, in the risks inherent to exploiting nuclear power, and in the high price to be paid for technical errors and lax safety procedures. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russias-first-atomic-submarines-nuclear-nightmare-1-reason-80456

September 16, 2019 Posted by | Russia, weapons and war | 1 Comment

An emigrant’s memory of Chernobyl

Chernobyl’s dark history: Australian returns home 33 years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster, News 7  Steve Pennells  15 September 2019

Chernobyl – just the word is enough to evoke visions of a nuclear holocaust.

But for thousands of Australians, the nightmare was all too real. They are the children of Chernobyl – scarred by their experiences – and now, more than 30 years on, determined to confront the past.

Inna Mitelman grew up in Belarus, in the shadow of Chernobyl. 33 years later, she’s happily settled in Melbourne with two children of her own. Her parents, Irina and Ilia, live close by.

“I remember it as a very beautiful place to grow up,” Inna tells Sunday Night’s Steve Pennells. “The people were lovely. I had a very beautiful childhood, I can tell you that much.”

For Inna, it was an idyllic existence, with her best friend Natasha living in the apartment right next door.

“We were pretty much inseparable,” Inna explains. “Our parents were very close friends, they were like family. We used to come into each other’s houses without knocking. My house was her house, her house was my house.”

Chernobyl was 100 kilometres away – but on the 26th of April 1986, that was much too close.

The explosion in Reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant would be the worst nuclear accident in history. A safety test gone wrong ruptured the reactor core and caused a fire that released vast clouds of radioactive contamination. But the Soviet authorities supressed the true scale of the disaster – and only after 36 hours was the order given to evacuate the nearby city of Pripyat, home to the power plant workers and their families.

Inna Mitelman was only 11 years old when the refugees from Pripyat arrived on her doorstep, but the memory is still vivid.

“The first thing I remember is seeing new kids in our yard in the morning when we walked out to go to school,” Inna recalls. “There were wrapped up in blankets.”

As the fire continued to rage in the reactor, badly injured power plant workers and fireman were brought to the Pripyat hospital.

Today, the hospital at Pripyat stands abandoned, like the rest of this once-thriving city. But 33 years ago, the reactor was spewing out 400 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs combined.

Sergii Mirnyi soon learnt the truth. He was the commander of a radiation reconnaissance unit. It was his job to seek out the worst of the hot zones……..

“I’ve got thyroid nodules which were discovered when I was pregnant with my second child,” Inna reveals. “The surgeon said I’ve got [a] 50 per cent chance of developing thyroid cancer, so let’s just get it out now.”

Now, Inna wants to return to her homeland, to understand a tragic event from her past that still haunts her.

“I’m terrified,” Inna admits. “There’s a reason why we haven’t been back. But you need to do this to confront it and deal with it and move on. Because the worst thing that ever happened to me [was] probably my best friend dying when I was 11, and I think having to deal with that freaks me out as well.”

“We first found out that something was wrong with her when she became cross-eyed. They found a brain tumour, they operated, but she died the next morning.”

“This was my best friend. This was the person that I grew up with. Her death, it destroyed me.”

Natasha’s family moved out after the death of their daughter. But Inna is determined to find them.

Inside the exclusion zone

2,500 square kilometres of contaminated territory – including Pripyat – are now abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Pripyat was a brand new city, right next to the nuclear power plant. It was a jewel in the Soviet crown, with a thriving population of 50,000 people. It was emptied in the course of a single day, with residents forced to leave with only what they could carry…….

For many new mothers here in Belarus, there’s a profound fear that the effects of Chernobyl might be passed on to a second generation.

At the local Children’s Hospital, chief doctor Irina Kalmanovich has been treating Chernobyl survivors for more than 30 years. She has no doubt she is still seeing children suffering from the disaster – and unlike other doctors in this repressive regime, she’s willing to risk saying it.

“It’s my opinion. It can be [a] result of Chernobyl because we have many patients even in our hospital, children with tumour, different parts of body, we have tumour of brain, leukaemia, so we have many patients.”……. https://7news.com.au/sunday-night/chernobyls-dark-history-australian-returns-home-33-years-after-the-worlds-worst-nuclear-disaster-c-454567

September 16, 2019 Posted by | Belarus, PERSONAL STORIES | Leave a comment

Russia’s Floating Nuclear Power Plant Arrives At Far East Base Pevek

Russia’s Floating Nuclear Power Plant Arrives At Far East Base,  https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-s-floating-nuclear-power-plant-arrives-at-far-east-base/30164346.html    Russia’s first floating nuclear power plant has reached its final destination in the country’s remote Far East after a three-week, 5,000-kilometer journey.

Russia’s state nuclear energy company Rosatom announced on September 14 the arrival in the Arctic port town of Pevek of the nuclear power plant, which Greenpeace has dubbed a “floating Chernobyl.”

The massive plant — a 140-meter towed platform that carries two 35-megawatt nuclear reactors set sail from Murmansk, in northwestern Russia, on August 23 and traveled along the Northern Sea Route to its destination off the coast of Chukotka.

Rosatom said small surrounding communities, along with mining facilities and offshore oil and natural gas platforms, would make use of the electricity.

The nuclear plant has been named the Akademik Lomonosov after the 18th-century Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov.

September 16, 2019 Posted by | Russia, technology | Leave a comment

Russia’s nuclear torpedoes at the bottom of the sea

A Dead Russian Submarine Armed with Nuclear Torpedoes was Never Recovered, National Interest, Robert Farley, September 15, 2019

Key point: She rests at a depth of 15,000 feet —too deep to make recovery practical. 

The Bay of Biscay is one of the world’s great submarine graveyards. In late World War II, British and American aircraft sank nearly seventy German U-boats in the Bay, which joined a handful of Allied and German subs sunk in the region during World War I. On April 12, 1970, a Soviet submarine found the same resting place. Unlike the others, however, K-8 was propelled by two nuclear reactors, and carried four torpedoes tipped by nuclear warheads.

The Novembers (627):

The November (Type 627) class was the Soviet Union’s first effort at developing nuclear attack submarines…….
 The Novembers were too loud to plausibly find their way into close enough proximity to a NATO port to ever actually fire a nuclear torpedo in wartime conditions…….
On April 8, K-8 suffered two fires, resulting in a shutdown of both nuclear reactors. The boat surfaced, and Captain Vsevolod Borisovich Bessonov ordered the crew to abandon ship. Eight crew members, trapped in compartments that were either flooded or burned out, died in the initial incident. Fortunately, a Soviet repair vessel arrived, and took K-8 under tow. However, bad weather made the recover operation a difficult prospect. Much of K-8’s crew reboarded the submarine, and for three days fought a life-and-death struggle to save the boat. Although details remain scarce, there apparently was no opportunity to safely remove the four nuclear torpedoes from K-8, and transfer them to the repair ship.
Unfortunately, the loss of power onboard and the difficult weather conditions were too much for the crew to overcome. On April 12, K-8 sank with some forty crew members aboard, coming to rest at a rough depth of 15,000 feet. The depth made any effort at recovering the submarine, and the nuclear torpedoes, impractical……
R
The loss of K-8 (along with the several accidents that afflicted her sisters) undoubtedly helped the Soviet Navy learn important lessons about distant operations, if only at extraordinary costs in human lives. And her nuclear torpedoes remain at the bottom, an enduring monument to most dangerous missions of the Cold War. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/dead-russian-submarine-armed-nuclear-torpedoes-was-never-recovered-80416

September 16, 2019 Posted by | oceans, Russia, wastes, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Kate Brown’s “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future” illuminates the truth about radioactive legacy of nuclear industry

[in 1992] Baverstock and his colleagues published a letter on their findings in the scientific journal Nature, in which they concluded, “the consequences to the human thyroid, especially in fetuses and young children, of the carcinogenic effects of radioactive fallout is much greater than previously thought.”

Now, after more than 30 years, U.N.-sponsored researchers have backed away from the 1992 UNSCEAR study by concluding that “studies of clean-up workers/liquidators suggest dose-related increases of thyroid cancer and hematological malignancies in adults,” as well as “increases in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. If confirmed, these would have significant public health and radiation protection implications.” 

The United States’ involvement with the Chernobyl aftermath was shaped largely, and shamefully, by the desire to avoid potential legal liabilities associated with the 166 U.S. open-air nuclear weapons tests in Nevada and the Marshall Islands. At the time of the Chernobyl accident, compensation radiation claims for injuries and deaths from bomb testing were looked upon by the nuclear weapons program as a dagger aimed at the heart of U.S. national security.

September 14, 2019 Posted by | investigative journalism, politics, secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine, USA | Leave a comment

“The Guardian” co-opted by UK security services?

Getting Julian Assange   The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator during the early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.

It seems likely this was innuendo being fed to The Observer by an intelligence-linked individual to promote disinformation to undermine Assange.

In 2018, however, The Guardian’s attempted vilification of Assange was significantly stepped up. A new string of articles began on 18 May 2018 with one alleging Assange’s “long-standing relationship with RT”, the Russian state broadcaster. The series, which has been closely documented elsewhere, lasted for several months, consistently alleging with little or the most minimal circumstantial evidence that Assange had ties to Russia or the Kremlin.

How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper.   https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-09-11-how-the-uk-security-services-neutralised-the-countrys-leading-liberal-newspaper/ By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis• 11 September 2019, The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the ‘security state’, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.

The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.

Snowden’s bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of mass surveillance operated by both agencies.

According to minutes of meetings of the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence. Continue reading →

September 14, 2019 Posted by | media, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Fears of nuclear closures in France, as welding faults found in more nuclear reactors

France flags welding fault at five or more EDF nuclear reactors, PARIS (Reuters) 13 Sept 19, – At least five nuclear reactors operated by French utility EDF might have problems with weldings on their steam generators, a fault which has raised fears of closures, France’s nuclear regulator was quoted as saying.

State-controlled EDF, whose shares were down 0.9% on Thursday, had said on Tuesday it had identified issues with weldings of some existing reactors, sparking a stock price fall of nearly 7%.

France has the world’s second-largest fleet of nuclear reactors behind the United States, but a spate of technical problems, coupled with hitches at reactors under construction, has tarnished EDF’s image as a leader in nuclear technology.

EDF has exported to China, Finland, South Africa and South Korea, with Britain also set to use its equipment.

“At least five nuclear reactors are affected by this problem,” Le Figaro newspaper quoted Bernard Doroszczuk, head of the ASN regulator, as saying.

“EDF has advised that in around a week it will give an exact number of facilities affected,” Doroszczuk added.

A spokesman for EDF said that there was no plan to shut down the reactors involved for the time being, but the situation could change and it would be for ASN to decide.

The spokesman added that EDF could also decide to halt the affected reactors…….. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-safety/france-flags-welding-fault-at-five-or-more-edf-nuclear-reactors-idUSKCN1VX0N7

September 14, 2019 Posted by | France, safety | Leave a comment

UK continues to pour tax-payers’ money into (non-existent) Small Modular Nuclear Reactors


Nuclear Energy Insider 11th Sept 2019 Rolls-Royce group wins funding as UK SMR race gathers pace. The UK SMR Consortium has received financial backing from the UK government to advance
its small modular reactor programme, as part of the Industrial Strategy
Challenge Fund.

The consortium, led by Rolls-Royce, comprises Assystem, SNC
Lavalin/Atkins, Wood, Arup, Laing O’Rourke, BAM Nuttall, Siemens,
National Nuclear Laboratory, and Nuclear AMRC. “The £18 million [US$22.3
million] government funding for phase 1 of the programme (from the ISCF
Wave 3 bid we were recommended from by government) is being matched by
industry funding in the consortium,” Ben Todd, Rolls-Royce Communications
Business Manager – Nuclear, told Nuclear Energy Insider.

“It’s a really big boost to the project, however we have a conservative outlook and
realise there remains a significant amount of work still to do and many
hurdles to overcome. Phase 2 will be a further circa £500 million [US$618
million] total (matched from government, industry and possibly equity
providers) to take through to the completion of the GDA process.”

https://analysis.nuclearenergyinsider.com/rolls-royce-group-wins-funding-uk-smr-race-gathers-pace

September 14, 2019 Posted by | politics, UK | Leave a comment

UK forest to be chopped down for Sizewell C nuclear project, though project approval not yet complete

East Anglian Daily Times 11th Sept 2019, Coronation Wood will now be chopped down to make way for Sizewell C – even though the proposed new twin reactor nuclear power station has not beengiven the go-ahead yet.

The application from EDF Energy, part of major
changes to the Sizewell B estate needed for Sizewell C’s construction,
generated a huge number of objections. However, it was approved by East
Suffolk Council’s (ESC) strategic planning committee by nine votes to
eight. Theberton and Eastbridge Parish Council, supported by a number of
other parish and town councils, will now ask the Secretary of State for
Housing, Communities and Local Government to “call in” the application and
consider it for a planning inquiry.

Paul Collins, of Theberton & Eastbridge
Action Group on Sizewell, said: “We strongly oppose ESC’s decision to
approve this application when the DCO request for Sizewell C has neither
been submitted nor approved. If Sizewell C does not go ahead – and there
are many reasons why it might not, including uncertain financing and major
environmental obstacles – the AONB will have been needlessly damaged.”

https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/sizewell-c-coronation-wood-and-visiting-centre-plan-decision-1-6265010

September 14, 2019 Posted by | environment, UK | Leave a comment

France’s loyalty to the nuclear industry is now fading

France’s nuclear love affair shows signs of souring,  https://finance-commerce.com/2019/09/frances-nuclear-love-affair-shows-signs-of-souring/  By: Bloomberg News September 11, 2019

Electricite de France SA’s announcement that some of its nuclear reactors at home may contain substandard components is the latest setback in the country’s 40-year love affair with atomic energy.

France launched its nuclear program in the 1970s to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels as unprofitable coal mines progressively closed and Western economies were roiled by two consecutive oil shocks. EDF commissioned 58 reactors between 1978 and 2002, which has seen the country get more of its power from nuclear than any other nation. It also means it’s got an aging energy infrastructure, with its oldest plants embarking on large modernization programs to extend their lifecycle.

“The French nuclear fleet is now aging, meaning that some plants will have to be halted in the next 15 years,” said Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega, director of the Center for Energy at the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales. “Some say that nuclear energy is very risky. Renewable energies come with tens of thousands of jobs, but France has been lagging behind.”

After commissioning its 58th reactor in 2002, EDF started building a new type of atomic plant in 2007. Its flagship Flamanville project in Western France was initially due be completed in 2012, though it’s been beset by construction problems.

EDF has also faced setbacks at its existing fleet of French reactors. In 2016, its main supplier Framatome disclosed anomalies in manufacturing records for large equipment, leading to prolonged halts at almost a third of the utility’s reactors. Tuesday’s announcement’s by EDF that some of its reactors may contain substandard components made by Framatome, now 75.5%-owned by EDF, is reigniting fears of prolonged shutdowns.

Given France gets three quarters of its energy generation from nuclear energy, the financial impact of disruption could be severe.

“There should be a significant uplift in French and Central European power prices based on likely future French nuclear outages, which could potentially mean EDF having to buy French generation output that it is short at a premium price,” Barclays Bank analysts Peter Crampton and Dominic Nash wrote in a note.

The stakes are high for the French nuclear industry, which employs about 220,000 people. President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to reduce nuclear output to 50% of France’s power mix in 2035 by shutting down 14 aging reactors to make room for renewables.

Even as the price of electricity stemming from wind and solar has sunk below that of new nuclear builds, the French president has asked EDF to prove by mid-2021 that it can build more competitively-priced nuclear plants, to provide large volumes of carbon-free power as a 100% renewable electricity system seems likely to remain out of reach for at least several decades.

It comes as state-controlled EDF struggles to fund the billions of euros needed each year to maintain its nuclear plants and build new ones within existing cash flows. It’s considering spinning off a minority stake in an entity that would include its power-distribution, renewables and energy-services businesses to raise funds.

September 12, 2019 Posted by | France, politics | Leave a comment

Unacceptable risk to consumers: “regulated asset base” system to fund UK’s new nuclear reactors

How can we pay for new nuclear power stations?  https://www.ft.com/content/4b81682e-cf19-11e9-99a4-b5ded7a7fe3f, Funding methods that work in the water industry cannot be applied to the sector, NICK BUTLER 9 Sept 19, 

We are coming to a crucial moment of decision on the future of nuclear power in the UK, with implications for the industry across Europe and beyond. The basic issue is whether nuclear power can be provided at a cost that does not damage industrial competitiveness or impose an unacceptable burden on consumers. Without a positive answer to that question, nuclear will not be able to play a role in the transition to a lower-carbon economy.

Despite a long standing commitment to build 16GW of new nuclear capacity, only one new plant is under construction — Hinkley Point C in Somerset — which will, when eventually brought on stream, impose a long-term burden on UK consumers. The price agreed in 2013 — £92.50 per MW hour — looked extremely expensive then, but the real burden will come from the agreed index-linking of the price for 35 years. That already gives a price of over £100, a number way above those for competing sources of power such as wind, solar and natural gas.
The latest attempt to reduce this headline price slipped out in a consultation paper from the department for business, energy and industrial strategy in the dying hours of former UK prime minister Theresa May’s administration. The suggestion is that future nuclear power projects should be funded through the “regulated asset base” system. Put simply, the Rab would fund new projects from the moment construction begins through a levy on consumers. This would reduce the borrowing costs for the companies building the projects and thus in turn bring down the level of future bills. £92.50 might come down to £80.

This method of funding is a serious option for long-term projects with high upfront capital costs and has been used effectively in the water industry and elsewhere. As a mechanism for funding new nuclear, however, it is far from convincing. Water projects, such as reservoirs and pipeline systems, require large-scale capital investment. But the technology is proven and the construction risks are low. In new nuclear, however, the construction risks are high and to place them on the shoulders of consumers is unfair.

Of course, the dream of any company is to pass the burden of risk in any project to someone else while collecting a guaranteed stream of income once the project is up and running. In this case, however, the unfairness of such an outcome makes the model unsustainable. Consumers cannot be encouraged by the example of one of the few new nuclear stations being built in Europe — Flamanville on the northern coast of France.

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https://www.ft.com/content/4b81682e-cf19-11e9-99a4-b5ded7a7fe3f

Flamanville began construction in 2007 and was due to come on stream in 2012. When I was working in government a decade ago, I was told that Flamanville would set the example for all new nuclear stations to be built in the UK. Today, Flamanville is still under construction. Earlier this year further faults were found by the French regulator and the commissioning of the station has been put back. The operator EDF has so far been unable to name the date when it will come on stream but has talked of a further delay of perhaps another three years. The cost of the plant was originally set at €3.3bn. Now the estimate is €10.9bn.

Under the Rab funding system, consumers would have been paying a surcharge on their bills since 2007 with nothing to show for it. They would have no leverage over the company building the plant and no scope for compensation. They would also of course have to pay in addition the cost of buying the power they need from someone else. Such an allocation of risk is unfair and unacceptable, and it is hard to think that ministers in a UK government, highly attuned to public opinion when it comes to energy prices, will impose such a system.

What are the implications of this? If the private sector will not fund new nuclear, and if no fair system of allocating costs and risks can be found, the 16GW of capacity required under current energy policies will not be built. That will be true not just in the UK but across most of Europe and perhaps even France, a country committed to nuclear power in the past and where a decision on new nuclear facilities is due to be taken in the early 2020s. Over time, nuclear power will become a source of power only in countries, such as China, where the state can provide full funding for new developments, as well as subsidies to conceal the costs to business and other consumers.
Nuclear’s future in Europe, Japan and the US is limited by these unanswered challenges. Of course there are alternatives. Wind and solar are becoming cheaper, and there is huge scope for energy efficiency. But until large grid-level storage capacity is available, economically viable renewables will always need some back-up — which means gas or, in many countries, coal. If Rab pricing systems are not the answer, is there another way through this dilemma? Next week, I will look at one possible option. The writer is an energy commentator for the FT and chair of The Policy Institute at King’s College London

September 10, 2019 Posted by | business and costs, politics, UK | Leave a comment

Radioactive pollution of beaches and abandoned boats, following Russian nuclear explosion

Russian Nuclear Blast Debris Is Still Emitting Radiation, Reports Say, Moscow Times, Sep. 4, 2019 Journalists in northern Russia have measured high levels of radiation near two abandoned boats that were brought ashore following last month’s mysterious accident during a test at a military site that has raised international concerns and safety fears……

Background radiation levels near the two pontoons towed ashore in the White Sea were several times above the norm, journalists based in the Arkhangelsk region reported in a video published Monday.

“This beach should be decontaminated,” Bruno Chareyron, a research director at the French radiation-monitoring NGO CRIIRAD, told the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) news outlet.

“The authorities should collect the radioactive debris [and] monitor the contamination of the water, sand sediments, fauna and flora,” Chareyron was quoted as saying. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/09/04/russian-nuclear-blast-components-still-emit-radiation-reports-say-a67131

September 9, 2019 Posted by | environment, Russia | Leave a comment

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